The tribunal failed for multiple reasons. For starters, the only time that people would use the tribunal system is when they werent playing the game. I'll give you a couple guesses as to why someone would quit playing the game and switch to "judging" behavior, but honestly, that's completely irrelevant to the main point anyway. Essentially, the two main issues became that nobody was really using the tribunal, which of course meant that it backed up for MULTIPLE MONTHS worth of work, and as an added bonus to those two reasons (lack of use and overflow of workload) most of those who did use it had no real reason to judge correctly, and were usually only on there to make themselves feel better from that "fucking Teemo from that last game" that made them feel like logging off by punishing everything that had a teemo in the game, or a bad word or the letters "ez" anywhere in the logs.
The issue at hand as far as your other idea is sort of two-fold. One, if you want to be harder on players that troll, you have to commit. trying to solve the issue by stacking punishments that eventually lead up to a perma isn't working. Obviously. The next thing you can do is effectively just make it not worth the effort to troll, by just absolutely bludgeoning the accounts that can be proven as trolling/inting. I'm leaving the afk out of that equation because as I said, connection issues are a legitimate and obnoxious thing. Something slightly different needs to be done to be sure that people who simply get boned by Brighthouse on the regular aren't on the kill list. And again, we come to my second point in the gray area. "How do you prove one is inting/trolling?"
There are several different ways, but of course the most obvious is admission. From there, there's a few ways that you can tell inting players from those just being that bad at the game...I tried exploring one of these through statistics once along with a couple other people, and was beaten senseless by a bunch of people with the combined IQ of an oyster...I will continue to refer to them as the oyster gang. xD
But there is a magic number (tested and proven) where people must be putting forth effort into dying repeatedly as fast as possible. The golden ratio is about 1.4 deaths per minute. This admittedly has to be scrapped by the late game, where one team or the other is literally sitting inside their enemy's base and just killing people on respawn as they try to defend...but if you're dying an average of about 12 times in 5 minutes in the early or mid game, you are putting actual, hard effort into running it immediately into lane and getting killed.
This number was reached by legit running it into the mid lane tower in a custom game as many times as possible for the first 10 minutes of a game. That actual number was a 1.1, but due to a few points made by some of the people NOT part of the oyster club I mentioned earlier (though they still could have been a bit more civil...), there are certain factors that can increase this. So I pushed it up a little more, as to say "ok, 1.1 is bad. Like, new to the game, getting destroyed the moment you get into lane bad...but if you go somehow further than that, you're clearly not even attempting to defend yourself, and are running right at the enemy, multiple times in a row, with no regard for any part of the gamestate."
There was also the fair argument that this can be seen as a hard inting extreme, which is true...but again considering that some of these people don't say anything in chat, and just hard int without putting any hint of their intentions in writing, people sometimes miss the fact that some of these people do slip through the radar by simply staying out of chat...then report everyone in the game, and actually get people chat restricted for calling them on their shit. Not fair...not fun...and certainly not funny.
Anyway, after addressing these points, then came the rush of oysters that saw me give credit to a fair point or two and IMMEDIATELY started saying actually stupid shit such as "oh no, I can totally hit 1.8 deaths/minute and i'm totally not trying to int!"
. . . I hope they realize that 1.8 is quite literally impossible without planting a ward in the enemy base somewhere, taking TP/Ghost, communicating to the enemy team that they're about to TP to that ward so they can instantly kill them on arrival, and building nothing but movespeed items with the meager gold they'd have from doing literally nothing but inting so that they can get back to lane and repeat this as much as they can. Oh, and that's literally only possible if they were inting like that from the VERY beginning, as death timers throw it off later. All of that was also tested in a custom game. >.>
Basically, we found 1.4 is about the hardest someone can int without making it known in writing (or I guess voice chat, if you're THAT scumbag) that they're trying to int, and not too much farther past that, you get to the people that are legit communicating with the enemy exactly when and where they'd be dead faster
I feel it's important to note that all of this was done as a "normal" SR match...none of this should count for ARAM, TT, or URF (or any other custom gamemode) as both TT and HA are smaller, and URF has the yeet cannon...most other custom modes have strange modifiers as well, so this is still only one (most popular) gamemode.
My point with bringing up all of that nonsense again is to reiterate: there's no real way to clean up all of the gray area. Some people are new or plain outmatched (or just honestly...bad, for lack of any better way to put it), some people have connection issues (especially those who have AVG antivirus or Brighthouse for an ISP...) and some of them are doing exactly what you think they are and inting their asses off. It's sometimes difficult to tell which is which, and it's far more difficult for people who aren't physically playing in that game to determine it from nothing but replays. But fair to your point, there ARE improvements that can be made.
Lastly...as Kai said, the simplest form of "soft inting" is to just literally not participate in any fights, ever, until you can steal a kill. Another form is what I'll call "The Nubrac Conundrum" of pretty much leaving your team in a situation where they're forced to completely change everything to play around you, or become pretty much doomed to lose. I'll leave that can of worms alone...but point is, it's pretty much impossible to bust these guys unless they manage to slip up in chat, or unless you're some higher profile figure that probably got reported by a shitload of high ranked streamers.
