I dodged one game (during picks and bans, normal) and got a 15 minute penalty. Can someone speak to the reasoning for this change?
When I started playing LoL, there wasn't even a penalty for dodging. People that liked dodging defended their reasons for doing so. Everyone else was pretty pissed.
More than 5 years later, Riot's been inching up the penalties the entire time. My guess is they don't want to scare to many people off of their free game or hand out sever punishments when there goal is getting a large player-base, but at the same time dodging is a huge killjoy and pain in the ass for the other 9 people.
As for a 15 minute penalty?
There's 9 people you just booted out of a game. They didn't even get a vote on that. Assuming everyone gets a fast re-queue after the dodge and you only wasted 1 minute and 40 seconds of their time, you wasted a collective 15 minutes of other people's time.
The context for my dodge is a friend came online that I was wanting to play with. We had both thought it'd be a quick 5 minute wait.
Again - you probably wasted 15 minutes of other people's time.
We've all been their, but respect other people's time. With a solid block, you're also not exactly forced to stare at the timer. You can plan around that time and do other things.
What i'd like to see changed is the ability to add a 'friend dodge', which lets you dodge one game without penalty. You get only one a day, but if you don't use it for a week, you get up to a max of 2 (think ARAM with rerolls, only time based to prevent abuse). Thoughts?
Not great.
There are 9 people per game.
9.
If each person has a 10% chance to dodge a game, 100*.9^10 = 34.87. As in, with only a 1/10 desire for an average player to dodge a game with this, there is only a 35% chance a game will start.
Pretty sad.
Ultimately this is a matter of what time is worth and who's time is valuable - yours is simply not worth more than 9 other people's time. If Riot has to take a side, favoring the super-majority of 9 people is the best possible move. Incentivising the 1 is not.
