The Ranked Problem (and possible solution?)

Ranked play sucks. Period, full stop, it sucks. The majority of players are somewhere between low plat and iron. Excluding the bottom of iron because those players are clueless, most ranked games shake out the following way: whichever team can punish 1 (yes, just 1) opposing player hard enough so they tilt first wins the game. It's much more common for games to end by 20 mins than it is to have a solid match mostly because by 15-20 minutes someone has tilted beyond help, and it is far easier to throw a game than it is to carry one.

This brings us to the main point: Riot needs to do SOMETHING about ranked. Drop a few slurs? 5 game chat restriction. Leave the game? A few warnings then a slap on the wrist. Die 3 times by 5 minutes and then spend the rest of the game trolling (afk farming, abandoning your role, going every time you see an enemy, etc)? Nothing but crickets. For some reason, Riot assumes players are rational and that the thought of winning should outweigh a player's desire to intentionally harm themselves. That makes sense, if players were rational. But I'm sure you're reading the term "rational player" with a huge smirk on your face, because we all know the truth.

Riot, this needs to be addressed. It's unrealistic to assume that every ranked experience should be a win as long as everyone does their job, but I know that most players have far more losses due to 1 or 2 bad teammates than they do from a close game where everyone on both sides plays well. And don't give me that BS excuse about "well, if you're not the problem then STATISTICALLY you're more likely to face the bad player than to have them on your team". I'm gonna need you to Google what happens to the reliability of probability using small sample sizes. So what can be done? One possibility is that Riot should implement (and use liberally) a ranked timeout. It's pretty easy to look at the post game stats to tell if a bad performance was due to a team being outmatched or a player not trying. A player going 3/15/2 isn't necessarily inting, but if the final game score is 20-30 in a loss, it's pretty clear that this 3/15/2 player was a major problem for the team and likely the reason they lost. Take the same 3/15/2 player in a loss where the team score was 7-50, and all of the sudden they aren't the only problem. In a perfect world, people would know to not immediately requeue, but that goes back to the rational player argument above. Using something simple like a timeout only prevents this player from joining another ranked game, and it can be as little as 10 minutes to start. It is in no way indicative of being banned, you can think of it as a "tilt reset". I shouldn't have to dodge and lose LP because in the lobby someone starts screaming about how they are "muting everyone and afk farming all game". Let these people play normals and be toxic over there. Ranked is for players trying to test their skills, and ranking a player based on how well they babysit someone with the mentality of a toddler is not a good way to test League skill. Please feel free to throw some thoughts below, and yes I am coming off of a game where 3 people played poorly and 2 clearly weren't trying to win.