An Active Players Plea To RIOT: AFKs Should be Kept Away

Seeing as there doesn't seem to be a clear board for this topic, and it does have to do with gameplay and balance between teams, I'll post it here.

I'm 110% certain that everyone who has ever played league for more than a day has run into an AFK, in fact most of us are probably in the high double-digits or even in the low triple-digits. Be it ranked or unranked, AFKs are running more rampant than ever lately and show up in seemingly every game we play, on one team or the other (if not both). AFKs leave a sense of impending doom upon the team left with a disadvantage, leading to a much less enjoyable experience, and often one that negatively affects our opinions of the game and the other team.

AFKs happen for a myriad of reasons, including server problems, local internet bandwidth, and many more arguably understandable reasons. However there are also those who AFK simply because they find out they're bad at their current champion, are having a bad match, or are just straight up assholes. Nobody wants to play with those people. Ever. They just negatively impact the League experience as a whole. Unfortunately it's often impossible to tell, as another player, if someones reason for being AFK is reasonable or not. Even more unfortunately, the result is still the same: the disadvantaged team gets a sense of impending defeat that ruins the usually great experience of playing League.

Therefore, what should you do to get rid of the AFK problem? That's a tricky answer, and one I'm sure RIOT has looked for many times before. There's the Tribunal, which can punish AFK players individually and with a margin of error (and also with very little-to-no effect on them at all), but as we can all see the Tribunal isn't working to deter or reduce the number of AFKs we encounter on a nearly every game basis. So obviously we need something broader and more effective, and that's where my idea comes in. Punish all AFKs equally.

"But what about those with bad internet?" is what I'm sure many of you want to yell at me right now, and I have an answer for you although it may not be what you want to hear. My answer is "that may not be your fault, but that sucks for you". Now I'm sure a lot of you are absolutely outraged about how I could even consider holding someone accountable for what could be beyond their control, but hear me out. When you go AFK for any reason, be it bad internet, ragequitting, or any other possible reason, you're ruining the game for the the other 4 people on your team, and likely also anybody on the other team who wanted a fun and fair game too. That's 9 people. Now I'm not talking about those of us who don't connect right away and finally pop on around the time Minions show up in lanes, I'm talking about those who leave for 10 minutes at a time or even entire games.

**Now here's the actual idea I'd like to suggest to RIOT for eliminating the AFK menace:**
Have the server track who gets disconnected, for how long, and how many times. While it's doing that have it keep track of those instances separately for when the system is undergoing maintenance or is otherwise unstable. Then use that data to auto-punish those who excessively AFK.

For example, if someone was AFK for an entire match twice in a day, give them a one-day ban. If it happens a few more times, make it a three-day ban, and so on. Nobody enjoys playing with an AFK anyway.

But if someone is AFK for 10 minutes during a match several times in a day just don't let them join any games for an hour. If it continues, make it 3 hours, and so on. It should be making sense now.

If someone disconnects a large number of times in a match, say 4, (even if it's only for a minute each time) then give them the same punishment as someone who was AFK for part of the match (Which is exactly what I said in the above sentence).

And because the server would be tracking times of instability and marking them down separately, people can't whine about it being the "stupid RIOT servers", which I find absolutely BS by the way as I've had issues maybe once or twice with RIOT servers in all my time playing.

While that would be my master plan for fixing the AFK issue, there's also another much less severe (but also much less effective) thing RIOT could try.

When someone on your team is AFK, and only while they're AFK, your team all gets a small buff to make up for the missing person! This really just evens out the game again and gets rid of some of that feeling of impending defeat people always feel.

This would be more of a band-aid than the major surgery we need. It would make having an AFK a bit more bearable, but wouldn't stop AFKs from happening at all.

I would love to hear from RIOT if they have any plans for combating the ever-growing surge AFK players we are all having to deal with.