We need more punishment for surrendering games early
This current "go next" mentality is difficult to deal with. "We have late game" may be a meme, but sometimes it's a reality. When your team has champions like Vayne, Kassadin, or Nasus that start out weak but scale very well, your team really does "have late game". When the enemy team has champions like Lee Sin, Renekton and Lucian that fall off late game, your team really does "have late game". Even when those aren't happening but your team has a ton of waveclear, it's still very easy to win a game while behind just by clearing waves and waiting for the enemy to make a mistake. If your team has multiple assassins, picks are easy and a way back into the game. If your team has tanks, a front to back teamfight might win you the game. While that might not be really the case in pro play, it's definitely true in Gold and below. In low ranks, any team can win any game even after falling far behind, without needing to rely on the off chance someone goes AFK. This is just because low rank players have a hard time closing out games, so they make mistakes and let the other team back into the game.
But right now everyone has the mentality "oh we gave up first blood we better ff@15".
I have a suggestion that will both fix this problem as well as help stratify players into their proper ranks. Basically it's a change in how LP gains and losses work to be based on the skill discrepancy between the teams.
It's based on this statement of fact: "As skill discrepancy between two teams increases, time it takes for the better team to defeat the worse team decreases." If a team of five Gold players plays two games, one against five Plat players and one against the full roster of Cloud9, the game against the Plat players will take longer than the game against the C9 players.
It would take the difference in total team MMR at the start of a game and plug it into a formula. The formula would be based on the MMR difference between the two teams and the length of the game, and it would print two numbers, X and Y:
Favorite Winner: +X Favorite Loser: -Y Underdog Winner: +Y Underdog Loser: -X
If the favored team wins, the favorite gains X LP and the underdog loses X LP. If the underdog wins, the underdog gains Y LP and the favorite loses Y LP. This happens for each team member, so the total LP gain/loss is 5X or 5Y.
Y, of course, is a larger number than X. Beating a team that is supposed to be better than you should be rewarded more than beating a team that is supposed to be worse than you.
It would also allow for very powerful punishment of leaving games in ranked while forgiving teammates of leavers and not punishing them for having a leaver.
Under the new system, an AFK on the losing team would lose 5X (as underdog) or 5Y (as favorite), while the other four members would lose 0 LP. An AFK on the winning team would gain 0 LP and the other four members would split the 5X or 5Y LP four ways instead, resulting in each player gaining 5X/4 or 5Y/4 LP instead of X or Y LP (in a game where your team would each gain 20 LP, instead the four that stayed get 24 LP and the leaver gets 0).
Results?
AFKs get extremely punished for leaving ranked games. Players unlucky enough to have a leaver in a ranked game lose no rank for having a leaver on their team. Players who win a 4v5 are rewarded more heavily for winning 4v5. Teams gain more LP for beating teams with higher MMR (and lose more LP for losing to teams with lower MMR). Teams are rewarded more for skill (closing out games quickly once taking the advantage) and punished for lack of it (throwing). Players are ranked appropriately more quickly than before. Players are now more invested in trying to win games.
