Originally Posted by Zileas

A lot of people have had some concerns about leavers in mid-skill games lately.

We agree it is an issue. Here are some POSITIVE ways we are going to be dealing with this problem over the next few months. I'm not going to detail negative reinforcement (bans, suspensions, etc) just yet because we think we can eliminate most of the bad behavior with just these methods.

1) Influence points. Once you need influence points for runes and to unlock extra champions, you will want to earn them. Leaving a game gives you zero influence points, while losing gives you quite a few (about 60-65% of winning once we re-tune the system). This gives a HUGE incentive to finish games you feel you are losing, and not quit out.

2) Team Forfeit. We are a bit away from having this, but when we do it, forfeits will give you less IP than a loss, but still a decent number. This gives you an out in a really un-fun game and will reduce leaving.

3) Reconnect after crash or total network meltdown. Working on it!

4) Bonuses when people leave your team. Guinsoo is working on this right now. You can ask him about it on IRC if you want, but basically the gist of it is:
a) Your towers get tougher if you lose players.
b) You gain passive gold and kill-granted XP are higher if you lose players.
c) You get to mock the other team if you then beat them after losing players.
d) special bonuses TBD.

4) Other bonuses. We will be adding bonuses to incent other positive behavior later -- such as achieving more results in the game = more IP, or delaying a loss as a losing team = more IP, etc. We need to work out the specifics.

Why we ARENT doing gold split/item selloff like DOTA where you cannibalize the assets of the leaver:
1) The person can reconnect
2) This creates huge incentive to get a newb to quit the game, and helps fuel some of the hate put on new players in DOTA. We would like to learn from this issue.

Originally Posted by messymike

it would be too easy to abuse these kind of systems.... and fyi... you've always been able to mock the other team....

Originally Posted by LordRandomness

I still see difficulties with leaving as a strategy when you can't reach your tower and it's under attack. Why not give everyone else a boost to its defense? Also, leaving while on a 70 second respawn timer and the nexus is being pushed. Again, why not? (Particularly if you reconnect afterwards)

EDIT: Had an idea. If someone leaves, their teammates get bonus XP and gold. If they reconnect, the XP and gold they earned is funneled back to the reconnected leaver. This simultaneously encourages people to reconnect and stops them from reconnecting and being useless. (They'd have to be a level or two behind or people would just spend entire games DCed, but...)