We Need to Combat Rage Quitters More Aggressively
I don't care nearly as much about the state of the game balance, whether my team is great or not, or anything else as much as having to play 4 v 5s or 5 v 4s or worse. Rage quitting or open mid trolls are usually people who give up if the scores are not positive in the first 5-10 minutes of the game. They believe that it is virtually impossible to turn around the game and leave the rest of the team to suffer and both sides are affected. There are plenty of games where the early game is poor and mid to late game the team can turn it around, but leaving annihilates the opportunity for a comeback. The team with the rage quitter almost always loses and the opposing team gets to play without any effort. There is minimal skill involved in winning 5 v 4s, all it does is create a horrible gaming experience for everyone.
Ideas: Players who leave games in ranked will be ranked banned for an increasing amount of time starting from one day, increasing to a week, then banned from the ranked queue for the entire season, following this again in the next season will result in either permanent ban from the game or ranked queue. This time increase can be escalated for repeated leaves or modified but its just an idea. This will not only be a huge reason to stay in your game, but permabanning people from the ranked queue will start weeding out the smurf accounts and chronic leavers. The ranked ban idea can be applied to normal queues as well.
Leaving games not only has a leaver buster penalty, but it will cost you IP/LP, you will lose 4 times the amount of IP/LP you would have gained from a win, resulting in demotions if you go into negative LP, in other words you lose IP/LP for each player you screwed over. Just giving someone a time out from playing League of Legends is not going to stop them because they will just hop onto another smurf account while their timers are going on or do something else, having a material loss instead of just time will heavily discourage people from leaving more than just being on leaver buster.
Combating Open Mid Trolls: This one I am a bit stumped on what could help with this new problem. If there is a huge penalty to leaving the game and people are forced to stay in the game, they will then play the open mid/feed game to speed up the defeat screen. I know that Riot does track movements of players in game, but I am not sure how exactly can it see if you are either being super passive and trying to catch up or if you are just running around the map doing nothing. I'm open to suggestions on what could be done about it, but the first step is that there should be a category to report open mid trolling, because while it is an afk category, it is not specific enough to the problem.
"But what if I lose power/dc/have a emergency/have to leave the game legitimately?" These events are rare but possible, but if you are constantly leaving the game, legitimately or not, you are still ruining the gaming experience for everyone else and if you get in trouble once, it shouldn't be too much of an issue unless its constantly happening.
If you have any suggestions about other ways to combat rage quitters, feel free to chime in