Also, for those of you pointing out how my mercy rule based on kills is not perfect: I never said it was. It was just an idea off the top of my head to get the ball rolling in the right direction to come up with a solution, that's why I added "...or something" to my original post, to indicate that I was not suggesting this is the ONLY way to fix the problem.

I'm sure Riot has plenty of people that know the game better than I do that can come up with a more innovative solution.

Furthermore, for those of you saying "You knew when you joined the queue there was a chance it would be a crappy game..."

You are entirely missing my point. This is happening all too often now, where more often than not I get a ****ty team, and am forced to play a game that I know is doomed pretty much from the start. And apparently I am not the only one.

I think Riot has made an awesome game here, I can't stress that enough. I love this game. But the players I am having to deal with constantly are causing this game to no longer be fun. Let me reiterate the common scenarios:

1. Teammates not getting along- engaging in a *****fest prior to minions spawning; will not cooperate with team
2. Someone AFK/DCs - usually right from the start, you are down a man 4 against 5
3. Troll - someone intentionally feeds

These 3 scenarios, among others, are becoming more common than a decent game where you have a decent group of people trying to play a fair game and getting along.

Now, instead of just quit, I am trying to come up with a solution that will allow me and others who are experience the same thing to be able to continue to enjoy the game.

The fact that people are saying "You knew it might suck..." when talking about a game just goes to show that this is headed down the wrong path. I shouldn't have to ENDURE a game I play for FUN. If that's the case, the game is NO LONGER FUN and not worth playing.

For instance, I stopped playing WoW because the PvP got so bad, because the community became a bunch of ****s and nobody cared about having fun in the game anymore. It was all about the rewards. It it's not fun, it's not worth my time to play.

I don't even really like the surrender mechanic in the first place, though I understand the need for it. While LoL is a game, it is a competitive game by very nature of it's design. It's bad form and poor sportsmanship to walk off the field before the match is decided. At any level of play. Especially when you still have team mates willing and wanting to try.

I play competitive Soul Calibur, I would never walk away from an unfinished losing match. It's insulting to my opponent, it would be insulting to any spectators provided there are any, and it's far more embarrassing than taking my beating and moving on with some trace of dignity intact and hopefully gaining some insight into why I lost.

There are still things to be learned in a losing game and it's scrubby to just blame it on your team mates from the onset. That's a losing mindset, one unwilling to try and already making excuses as to why not.

I had a blast losing 4v5 just last night, expecting to lose from the moment our friend started having issues with his game client. While initially we planned to surrender at 20 unless by some circumstance we did phenomenal we never actually gave up at any point of the game. Though by 20 minutes it was clear we could not compensate for the handicap we could at least force the other team to really come earn their win. That isn't to say I enjoy losing but the shift in my expectations for the game allowed me to enjoy what probably would have otherwise had me in a bad mood.

Playing the game in and of itself can be fun and the only thing I've seen that really sours this for people is the unwarranted expectation of winning out. And trolls, but **** 'em, you can't let them ruin your fun or they win by default. It gets to me at times too, and then later I realize that I'm not looking at the mistakes I'm making or trying to correct them because I'm too busy being pissed off over a game and it only adds to the problem at hand.

League of Legends is a game, and I believe we're all here to play it, right? So why not just play? It's what at least half of the other people in your match are here to do. If you don't like losing, then don't play this competitive game where it's very possible you will lose. It's that simple.

Also, I'd listen to ADGarner. Great advice.

I've taken an entire day to think about it, and ADGarner, you do make some very good points. The metagame is roughly where it needs to be, and any changes that would mess it up should be avoided. We don't want to encourage players to break the Summoners Code because of a new system, and people shouldn't have to wait in a queue and get ready for a fun game, just to watch the other team surrender in the first three minutes just because they got first blood, and it broke the other teams heart. I see where you're coming from with your concern about the mercy rule system "protecting players from games that are going poorly." The goal with it, as I see it, is instead to protect players from games that are going poorly and dragging out for an obscene amount of time. While I can't devise a solution to properly differentiate the two, I've been thinking all day about ways to address the original issue, while attempting to sidestep many of the problems you have described.

All of the methods we have described so far have been aimed at forcing teammates with wildly different viewpoints on surrendering to all agree one way or the other. In some cases, that can happen, but not in many because in many cases, players decisions are based on their philosophy of play rather than what's actually going on on the field (This goes both ways; there are just as many, perhaps more, people guilty of throwing up surrender votes after the first few teamfights as there are people who just vote No as a rule.)

Instead of forcing players to agree on something through threats of IP loss or disconnects, wouldn't it be better to address the issue at its source? All Riot would have to do is make surrender votes a hidden tracked statistic (like non-ranked Elo), and modify the matchmaking system to queue people with similar voting patterns together more often. I know it sounds stupid, but think about it for a second. It would keep people from disagreeing as often about when to surrender by putting people who vote similarly all on the same team. People wouldn't get angry as frequently over the team surrendering too early or too late, because oftentimes the rest of their team is in the same boat they are.

This would (hopefully) avoid a metagame shift because technically the people are still voting the same way they always did. This way, they just agree more often. While it would be true that people who choose to surrender would, on average, win games slightly less frequently than the people who don't (because people who surrender would pull off successful surrenders more often at first, denying them the occasional comeback win), this would just re-adjust the Elo of said players until they are playing matches at a level where the victor would be ambiguous for longer, meaning that they agree to surrender only after playing the game for much longer (Note: Building teams with the intent to "spook" the other team into surrendering when they stand a good chance of winning would seem like a good strategy, but most likely would flop because, barring very unskilled players, most people can realize that if an enemy buys early game dead end items they probably won't scale well late game, giving them incentive to keep playing). Since the actual surrendering system isn't being modified, speculation wouldn't be forced and feeding wouldn't be encouraged because the stakes are exactly the same as they were before. Likewise, since the surrender system isn't being changed, players will still have to wait their twenty minutes before voting would be available.

I admit this system does have a few issues, some of which I've tried to come up with solutions for. They are as follows:

1. It might cause an abrupt increase in surrender frequency in the first few days, tapering off over time as people's Elos readjust, but always persisting to a minor degree.

2. It might cause an increase in time spent waiting to join a queue (because the system has to find people with comparable Elos and comparable voting patterns).
This one would diminish over time, though, as more players join the League and the system has a larger pool to choose from.

3.The math might get a bit complicated (because now the system has to consider two variables instead of one).
An efficient method of dealing with this would be to represent a players condition as a vector <a,b> with "a" being the players Elo, and "b" being a coefficient representing the players voting preference. The system could determine which players belong on the same team by matching players whose vectors have the highest dot products. This would mean that the matchmaking system would put more emphasis on teams that agree at lower Elo (where teams are more likely to break into an argument about surrendering or not), and less emphasis on it at higher Elos, where players are far more concerned about not waiting as long in queue. Dot products are really simple to program, and since it requires less code than other approaches, should have the least potential of messing up.

4. Riot could be doing other cool things for us with their time.
Well, there's no getting around that. But I imagine that sooner or later they're going to tinker with the matchmaking system anyway (or rather, the way Elo is stored or distributed), to combat Elo inflation. While they're at it, they could possibly use this suggestion as part of the new changes.

I'm sure there might be a few more problems, but it's a work in progress. Thank you for your input, it helped me greatly.

Do I still get that 1v1?

Edit: They call me the word mason because I build such big walls of text.

turn arounds aren't 1 in 1000. I've had 3 or 5 just this week, in the 1300-1500 elo, with ragers and whiners. It was stressful as hell, but you just gotta want to win. you gotta be a rabid animal fighting hard to survive. If you're not playing ranked foaming at the mouth for that win, you shouldn't bother.

When you play your best champ and dominate a lane. It rolls all over the map as you get ganked and 2v1 and win the ganks. Other lanes gain a slight advantage exp wise and much more, very common situation with good riven players as she is a incredible 2v1 champion. This often happens when you know the game is in a obvious score split and you have early game champs or something similar in strength.

I do prefer when a game plays out and good team fights happen. However there are many braindeads in lol and they just quit when they don't notice one person is about to hard carry a whole team (Like nasus)
Then you have the deadlock games where you have a afk map farming tryndamere (Jungle and 2 lanes) then suddenly tryndamere finds a poor support or ap carry and cuts them in half and then the game turns into a stomp instead of a deadlock - next team fight wins

Not all games have the same probability of turning around. Of course you can come back from ten or fifteen kills. It's much harder to come back from thirty or forty. Were your turn-arounds from 30 or 40 kills?

I can agree with your point, when the winning team is dragging out a fight intentionally to farm up complete builds so they can savor in their dominance. I've been in many situations where victory is close at hand and two or more of my teammates will go back to lane for farm. In fact I've lost games because of it actually. It's equally unsporting to pad your stats at the expense of the losing team.

The difficult part is in determining the intent. Some players seem to really believe that backing off to buff up is necessary in some games. The only game I've disconnected from was due to a sudden need to leave and the party not heeding my desire to push when we were winning. The tank/initiator was always the last one to the scene because he kept going over to farm, and so we'd lose the fights without him. Granted I shouldn't have pushed without my tank but time was limited and victory was already attainable. The laning phase was over and he needed to be with his team, not in the empty lane farming minions.

After about the 30 minute mark for me personally I really don't enjoy dragging out a decided match, winning or losing. It's usually the winning side to blame though because they won't seal the deal.

Aww man, I totally feel your pain, I hate that, Riot should make it so that when the team tries to surrender it should be the majority that wins, not 4yes v. 1no, it should win when it is 3yes v. 2no

If you're backed up to your inhibitors and the enemy just isn't pushing despite a huge advantage, then maybe I could see surrendering. I have surrendered in those situations, but it doesn't come up that often for me that the enemy won't just go for the win and we get to all die in a blaze of glory at our Nexus. Most of my surrenders are because of disconnected players.

I can sort of understand not wanting to take the hit to stats, though. We tend to die a lot when we start losing, which is painful to the overall kda ratio. Occasionally snatching victory from the jaws of defeat doesn't do a whole lot for the stats screen. Only a few extra wins for a whole mess of extra deaths, probably.

I like the thrill of a spectacular comeback, but I can understand the appeal in good stats and the bit of time it saves to just surrender sometimes. It definitely sucks if you're getting an inordinate number of bad games, though. I guess I just haven't seen that many time waster games to consider it a big issue.