Should summoners be penalized for leaving a game in champion select?

Good afternoon league of legends community,

A warning before we start: this thread is quite lengthy so if you wish to engage in a critical discussion about what it entails, please be prepared to give up no less than 15 minutes of your time. I hope you all enjoy!

The title of this thread captures what I want to discuss almost perfectly but, for simplicity's sake, I have left out a couple of things that I think are, in fact, important to the discussion. The first being that I am only concerned with the penalties levied onto summoners who are in champion select for a ranked game (whether it be solo queue, 5v5, or 3v3). As I'm sure most of you could deduce from this, I am not against the time penalty issued to summoners who leave a game in champion select, ranked or normal (you will see why shortly).

What it is that I am concerned about are the other penalties taxed to summoners for the ability to leave a ranked game in champion select. Namely, loss of LP (when a summoner is not in their series for promotion) and a lost game (when a summoner is in their series for promotion). Now, for these penalties to be justified, there must be some benefit to their attribution. If these penalties do no good towards the league of legends community at all or that the good they do produce is overshadowed by the harm of using them, then we'd be apt to remove these penalties.

Now, for clarity, I will name the three different penalties accordingly. The penalty present in both normal and ranked matches will be called the timeout penalty. The two penalties present in only ranked matches will be named the -LP penalty and the loss penalty, respectively. Lets move on to why I think the last two penalties should be reconsidered. The first step in reaching that, however, is to praise the the timeout penalty.

The timeout penalty works wonders for the league of legends community. For one, it stops summoners from repeatedly leaving games at champion select. This one effect is a huge benefit for the community, it allows summoner's to enter games with haste and does as best as it can at limiting the number a picks and bans phases a summoner has to sit through before playing. Less time waiting to play, is, at least relatively, more time playing. We don't wait to play games because it's fun, we wait to play games because playing them is fun. If we could remove as much wait time as possible we would be optimizing the amount of fun we have! Of course, some can say that the pick and ban phase is itself a mini-game and a player does derive fun from analyzing team compositions, counter-picking, deliberating on what champions to ban, and deciding what champion, over all, to play. I agree to all of this, but if the real fun lied within the picks and bans phase, why wouldn't we have a simulator that gives us just that and not play the actual game at all? The truth is that while the picks and bans phase is fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as fun as playing the actual game. In short, the timeout penalty grants the league of legends community more fun because it reduces the amount of (less fun) champion selects a summoner has to go through to get to a (more fun) game. To show that it affords the community a larger amount of benefit than harm is a simple task.

Let us assume that there is no timeout penalty and the queue is a normal one. Suppose we have 11 summoners looking for a match, 10 of which are willing to follow pick order and choose a role that is open to them depending on their pick number while the other summoner is ignorant of this practice and will only play the role he wants to play (lets call it "support"). The odd summoner time and time again gets paired with 9 of the normal summoners who understand that pick order primarily governs role availability and it turns out he is never first pick and that someone always chooses to play support before him. Time and again the odd summoner is faced with this circumstance and each time he decides to leave the champion select. It is because of this odd summoner that 10 normal summoners must continuously wait for a match, hoping that the system will leave out the odd summoner so that they may get into an actual game. Of course, without a penalty such as the timeout penalty there is no way to prevent the odd summoner from getting into each game and therefore denying the rest of them from actually playing. The importance of the timeout penalty described in the preceding paragraph is illustrated in this example. Simply put, without the timeout penalty the league of legends community would not be as happy. In my case, it causes more benefit for the group of normal summoners than harm for the odd summoner.

Now that we've established why the timeout penalty ought to remain intact, it is time to investigate the remaining two. Do the -LP and loss penalties grant the league of legends community more benefit than harm? As we saw before the timeout penalty does in fact give the community a ton of happiness by reducing the amount of time summoners must wait to get into a game. But this penalty holds across all matchmaking queues and therefore does the job for everything it could possibly do it for. What is to be gained by the -LP penalty and the loss penalty?

**An interesting side-argument.**When a summoner enters a champion select and is not participating in a series for promotion he is faced with two options: he may stay in the champion select or he may leave it. If he chooses the latter then he will be unable to join another game for a period of time (the timeout penalty) and he will be taxed a number of LP depending on how many times he has left champion select in the last 24 hours. What is it exactly that the loss of LP does that benefits the league of legends community? Does it promote more time playing and less time waiting as the timeout penalty does? Maybe. It could very well be the case that summoner's on average will be less willing to leave a champion select if it would result in the loss of LP. If so, does that lead to a happier community? If it does, than whats stopping us from using that penalty in a normal draft as well as a ranked draft? The only difference here is that there is no chance to gain LP in a normal draft. Why not encourage less people to abandon a game in champion select for a normal draft by penalizing them with a loss of LP, what exactly is the difference? My contention is that there is no difference. If a penalty that taxes summoners LP for leaving a champion select deters summoners from acting in such a way and this is good for the community why don't we use it across all game modes? In short, if this penalty does benefit the community why limit its scope? Some may say that summoners are happy to lose LP for leaving a ranked game but wouldn't be happy with losing LP for leaving a normal game. I implore these people to give me a response detailing why.

The -LP penalty isn't a benefit to the community, but a hindrance. There are a large number of scenarios where a summoner may want to leave champion select but may be deterred by the guarantee of a loss of LP and this in turn might harm his teammates. Suppose we have the loving Dad who is also an avid league of legends player. He enters a ranked queue, finds a match, and, upon entering champion select, his wife tells him that she has to leave the house to pick up a few things and that he must take care of their child during this time. The dad is left in a horrible situation here. He needs to take care of his child and he will but will he do that while playing league of legends? Suppose the only thing that stops him from leaving the champion select is the guarantee of losing LP for it. He believes he could stick it out and has a decent chance at winning the game. He tells his team what he is about to do and they begin to panic as anyone who takes ranked games seriously would. They know that taking care of a child is no meager task and certainly isn't one that can be adequately done whilst playing a game of league of legends. All of his teammates want him to leave but he is adamant that he can do well and sticks around. These summoners on his team may have chosen to leave if they would not lose LP for it and maybe even a couple of them are in their series and don't want to be given a loss. Is it fair to these summoner's that the only way to rid themselves of the loving dad is to lose LP or even lose a match in a series? Is it fair that the enemy team be granted a surefire victory because of the loving dad's under-performance? In this case it seems that removing the -LP and loss penalties would give the community great benefit. It would allow the summoner's to leave without penalizing their ranked scores each time they were paired with someone like the loving dad and therefore allow the loving dad to not participate in the match and take adequate care of his child.

The same situation can be drawn up for the loss penalty and is perhaps more understandable. The point being made is that losing LP and losing a match in a series for leaving a ranked champion select doesn't do much in the way of benefiting the league of legends community. It puts another constraint on someone who is deliberating leaving a game and this will usually lead to bad and unfair outcomes. The loss penalty is even more drastic and perhaps more harmful to the community. Suppose someone is in their series and gets into a champion select with four other summoners who are in their series. The first summoner has an emergency and needs to step away from the computer after locking in a champion and he tells his teammates this. They are all deterred from quitting the game because it guarantees a loss for them in their series, so no one leaves. The game proceeds as a four on five and the enemy team easily enough comes up with a win. Is this result fair? Shouldn't we avoid this scenario if we could? The loss penalty hinders the community just as much as the -LP penalty if not more. It seems apparent to me that these two penalties grant the community more harm the good as they make it harder for the average summoner to leave a ranked queue in sticky situations and leads to unfairness in match outcomes.

It is my contention that the timeout penalty is the only penalty enacted that grants the community a net benefit through its existence and that we'd be wise to remove the other two penalties as they cause more harm than good. The timeout penalty allow summoners to enter a match speedily. The -LP and loss penalties constrain summoner's from getting out of bad situations and promote unfairness within the community. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read this. I look forward to any response and hope that I have convinced some of you to feel the same way as i do. Lets get rid of the -LP and loss penalties!