While I do think there are things riot could do to improve this situation, such as handling LP losses for rage quitters better, and only punishing those in queue with the rage quitter (as opposed to granting the entire team a loss).
There are a couple things to think about:
- A repeat offence must happen. As you don't always know whether or not somebody simply had an urgent life issue, if their power cut out, etc.
- Riot is already doing a fairly good job of punishing repeat offenders. Just remember to report people who are obviously toxic afk's.
- And while getting an AFK is an equal chance for both teams, I'd just like to also point out that at least in my matches it's rather rare to get an AFK. (Yes I do know that anecdotal evidence is not the most reliable, it'd be cool to get some statistics from riot on the actual AFK #'s)
- It is possible to win a 4v5 in some situations, it's rare but I and many others have done it before so it's not a reason to give up.
- Blaming riot without presenting possible solutions doesn't make them anymore likely to take you serious.
- Riot knows these players don't belong on league, that's why they ban repeat offenders.
I know I'm not of a high MMR, but as somebody who does have experience with both being a developer, and talking to other developers, I understand that riot is already investigating what they can do. They do investigate players, they do investigate reports for repeat offenders. A player won't always get punished for doing something once for the simple reason that it's very difficult to prove whether or not they had an actual issue, not all AFKers are toxic.
It's very difficult to just "tell" if somebody is an AFKer when they sign up. They may get to level 30 without every afking, they may get through 2000 matches without an afk. The thing is I bet most of us have AFKed at least once, whether it was for some sort of problem or because for some reason we were tilted off the face of the earth. Banning one time offenders is not a good business strategy unless it's something incredibly more serious involving high toxicity. I know I myself have been reported by my team when a blizzard took out my power in the middle of a match.
Anyways that's just my two cents, and I hope we can have a civil discussion about how to better punish repeat offenders and be more forgiving to the teams of the AFKers.
I think some things that would potentially work, but may not for reasons I have not seen are:
-Only punishing the AFKer and their partner(s) if they have any.
-Like you said, not punishing the team just because they got an AFKer, but to go beyond that I think it's important to only refund LP if the offender is a repeat offender, this way we avoid the problem of a teammate saying "This match was bad, and I fed, I'm going to AFK so the rest of you don't take an LP hit."
-Offering better rewards to those who haven't AFKd all year.
-Offering small rewards/incentives to those who were repeat AFKers but have reformed over some timespan. (taking them away if they offend again.)
Obviously there are problems with the things I mentioned, obviously it's not perfect. But unless we have a real discussion about this it's unlikely that anything of use will be done.
Thanks for maybe listening!
[slayer-jinx-catface]
