PSA: Cheaters may be stealing your event tokens
If you are farming tokens in TFT and repeatedly see the same people quitting the game before the surrender option is available, they may be cheating. When you surrender, you are dropped to the spot below the lowest player who has not yet been eliminated, locking your placement (and token reward). When you simply quit without surrendering (assuming you haven't been eliminated), your placement is not locked and you may reconnect to the game. The message to other players is the same regardless of whether you surrender or just exit. You can tell if another player has legitimately surrendered if that player's Little Legend icon drops below a Little Legend with fewer hit points.
Players who exit without surrendering are not allowed to start a new game. They have to either wait for the game to end or reconnect to the existing game and finish it in one of three ways:
- Win
- Lose all HP
- Explicitly Surrender
However, some players have managed to start new games without completely leaving their prior games. This means they are gaining tokens in two ongoing games at the same time. If you are in the old game and the player's false presence prevents you from getting 6th, 4th, or 2nd place, those extra tokens that you would've earned are instead going to the cheater.
https://lolchess.gg/ has more extensive TFT Match History stats than the client. You can see how long a player survived in a given game. If that player repeatedly starts a new game but continues to survive for several minutes in the previous game, report him for cheating here: https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/requests/new Riot can check their official metrics and verify.
#TL;DR Some players are starting new games without surrendering their previous ones. If they bump you down a token reward tier in Game A while already playing Game B, they just stole your tokens.
Obviously this only really concerns token farmers at low MMR. There's no way people who are playing TFT to win are going to lose to an early AFK.