Disconnections and how accountable teams should be for them.

MidgetTiger·Jul 22, 2019·2 votes·4,101 views

Disconnections (dc's) are in every elo and can range from intentional to completely out of your control. I recently played a ranked game were my team was stomping the other team, however, at about 10 minutes in, our adc dc'd and never reconnected. Here we had a choice. We could forfeit and take the auto-loss or try to ride out our lead and 1) hope our adc reconnects or 2) pray to God we can somehow pull off a 4v5 because we are ahead. Sadly, our adc never reconnected and this game went on for 40minutes. We ended up losing because we just didn't have the numbers to win. My question is this:

Should a team and its individual players' LP be held accountable for a member's disconnection?

Obviously, my answer is no. The other four players on the team cannot control whether their fifth player dc's or not, so why should they have to pretty much inevitably lose LP because of it? Is it too game-breaking to have another /remake timer that activates when a dc occurs? It's too costly and feelsbadman if you have to forfeit because of a dc. If LP must be lost, maybe there should be a mechanic that takes dc's into account, so that: if a team has a dc and they choose not to forfeit, and they lose, they lose less LP than usual.

Having dc's in your ranked games just doesn't feel good, and is yet another thing that is actually game-breaking because it is something that is completely out of the other players' control.

-MT

6 Comments

rujitraJul 22, 20195 votes

The problem with this is the way LP works is because it is a "currency" - it is not "created" or "destroyed", but it is merely transferred - one team wins, and the other team loses about the same amount.

MidgetTigerJul 22, 20192 votes

Could the amount transferred be altered so that what is transferred is lessened? Also, if a person forcefully tries to create a remake, and it goes through, don't they lose LP? What happens to that LP lost if the remake goes through?

rujitraJul 22, 20192 votes

The LP they lose from a remake is one person's worth of LP - about 20. You're asking for 4 persons worth of LP, about 80, to be just negated.

I understand it's frustrating, but it's also frustrating if you tell a team "you win less LP from this game just because an enemy disconnected". Further, this would likely lead to an increase in people trying to get teammates who they perceive to be playing poorly to disconnect - "bro u suck and fed ur lane dc so we don't lose as much LP". While that sort of behavior can just be punished, there's really no reason to increase it if you can avoid it, in addition to the "feels bad" for the winning team I mentioned prior.

HotarµJul 22, 20194 votes

Should a team and its individual players' LP be held accountable for a member's disconnection?

To be honest, I think the majority of people would agree with you. If someone disconnects, other people shouldn't be punished for it.

However, the problem lies in that any system like this could be easily abused. Realistically speaking it's just not possible to introduce a system like this that would work without fail.

MidgetTigerJul 22, 20191 votes

Yeah, I see your point. It's unfortunate that mechanics that could be implemented to help can easily begin to be exploited. Could the person that intentionally leaves be punished more? Like they lose more LP than the others? If the others lose LP at all.

HotarµJul 22, 20192 votes

Yeah, I see your point. It's unfortunate that mechanics that could be implemented to help can easily begin to be exploited.

Yeah, it sucks. There's a lot of useful stuff that could be added if we didn't have to worry about people abusing it.

Could the person that intentionally leaves be punished more? Like they lose more LP than the others? If the others lose LP at all.

The problem with that is that there's not really a way to accurately determine how someone disconnected.

For example, yeah, you could probably determine if someone just closed their League client, but you wouldn't be able to tell what happened if they disconnected in other ways. Did someone's power go out or did they turn off their modem? Did their game crash or did they snap the computer monitor over their knee in a fit of rage? It's just a lot of little things that Riot wouldn't really be able to accurately detect.