@Riot systems designers: let's rethink the surrender system

Long post ahead. tl;dr at the bottom.

Alright so before I begin, I realize that this would probably be a huge undertaking, it would take hundreds of hours of work and involve like sixty different systems, etc. I'm not saying this would be easy to implement, I'm just saying that it would probably be worth it.

And to be honest I don't even know if "systems designers" are even a thing at Riot. It just sounded right tho. I heard this idea several months ago in a comment somewhere (forget where, sorry original thinker-upper) and haven't seen any posts about it since. Also, with the dev post about the large mid-year update coming in, I thought now might be a good time to suggest this and get my Inception on.

Okay, intro's over. Moving on.

My suggestion relates to the surrender system we currently have in place. Waiting until 20 minutes and having public voting, specifically. First suggestion:

Make surrender votes hidden in each player's game menu, and toggle-able at will.

Hiding the vote:

• Decreases loss of morale from the surrender option even showing up.
• Decreases toxicity by disallowing that guy from spamming surrender votes on cooldown.
• There wouldn't even be a cooldown surrender anymore, if the toggle is set up. When people want to surrender, it'll happen. No more not-surrendering-because-you-think-there's-a-chance, followed by an immediate ace in a teamfight and then slowly watching them march to your nexus, unable to even give up anymore. Daylight's burnin', man.
• Encourages independent thinking. If I think our game is worth playing out, I'll surrender; if our mid does too, he'll do the same. There's no more pressure from anyone else, and each person can anonymously choose to surrender if they want to, when they want to.

People still have the option to politely ask their teammates to surrender, of course, which is effectively the same as what we have now. So nothing is lost, only gained.

If this were put in just like this, it might be a little shocking to all-of-a-sudden have the camera pan over to your exploding nexus. There should probably be a quality-of-life display telling the team that a surrender vote has been reached, giving people 5-10 seconds to toggle their toggle. Just in case someone thought they should surrender at 10 minutes and forgot to take it off when things got better, or someone's not really sure they want to surrender, etc. After all, we want players to feel empowered, not cheated.

(YEAH OKAY GEEZ I KNOW THIS BASICALLY BRINGS BACK THE SURRENDER VOTE. But the difference is, now the vote would only pop up once enough people have already voted to surrender, instead of just one person. This would make it more of a "Are you guys, like, completely sure?" warning instead of an "omg im tilted" alert.)

Now, here's where things get a little less surefire. Second suggestion:

Make surrendering available any time.

Sometimes, games are decided well before 20 minutes. Sometimes, things go terribly and your team is down 10 kills in as many minutes.

Look, I'm an optimist, I really am. But come on, there are just times when it's not worth playing a game out, and people would like to end their suffering and move on (especially in normals). I understand the compulsion to always want to fight it out and hope for a big comeback (especially in ranked). And you know what, that's completely fine. If people want to fight it out to the bitter end, more power to them.

But the thing is, until their nexus explodes, they always have the option to play it out. People who want to surrender, don't. If an entire 5-man team wants to surrender before 20 minutes, they have to open mid and pray to God that that freaking Nasus comes mid to help end instead of breaking his Q button up top. Nobody likes that guy, and nobody likes not having control over their game. Help us, help ourselves, Riot.

Suggestion #2 is much more feasible an idea due to suggestion #1. It would be pretty obnoxious if people could start visibly spamming surrender at minute two after a bad invade, or something. And I mean if we're looking to rework the system for #1, why not go all the way?

Bonus awesomeness: No more "open mid". If a team wants to surrender, they can; if there's one feeder who says "open mid" in all chat, the other team won't have to guess if he's baiting them or not anymore, because if his team truly wanted to give up at any time, they very easily could.

Super maaaaaybe bonus: These could also be incorporated into that whole "not everybody connected" problem. I won't pretend to know best how to link early surrenders with connection issues, but there have been essays upon essays written on this, so I won't reinvent the wheel. All I know is, from a totally ignorant outsider's perspective, it seems like there could be a diamond in the rough here. shrug

There, that's the gist of it. I legitimately cannot think of any reason why this would make the game worse, other than maybe taking away potential "open mid" mindgames. And to that, all I have to say is...dude come on, really? I mean sure we all know /all chat mindgames are relatively unexplored in today's meta, but dude come on.

Thoughts?

tl;dr--Make surrender votes invisible and toggle-able in each player's game menu. And, given this, allow us to surrender any time. Decrease toxicity while increasing player options let's goooooooo.