I understand why you should lose MMR when:
Why do you lose MMR when someone else D/Cs? What is the purpose? What does it prevent?
Lately at least 10-20% of my games have had someone on my end D/Cing, leading to another player immediately giving up. There’s no way to win these (I’ve pulled off a win ONCE ever with AI).
Why is this somehow an indication of skill?
It prevents folks from intentionally d/cing to protect the rest of the group’s MMR from a loss.
Though it really sucks and makes me not want to bother with the game at all, I don’t see a solution otherwise.
I considered this, but then I realized:
They likely won’t do this for the rest of their random team. They might if they were partied, hence why I still agree you have to penalize the whole party, but not the whole team.
Hots could use something that league has.
In league, if you have someone not connect in the first 3 minutes, you can start a remake vote for your team. You have 60 seconds to do that and then you can’t anymore. You have 30 seconds to vote once it starts. If there is only 1 afk, you just need 2 yes votes for the remake to happen, if you have 2-4 afks you only need 1 yes. If the yes option wins, the match ends, you don’t lose anything and don’t even have the lose match in your match history.
The person who was afk will be punished. It will count as a loss for them, they will lose points and will be marked as a leaver. If that person is in a group, their group also receive the punishment from diamond+ so people in groups can’t abuse this. If you stay afk just because someone else is also afk, if the match is remade you will also be punished.
And the most important rule, you can’t start a remake if someone on your team died to the enemy team, to stop people abusing this in case they die early.
I think this is a pretty fair and good feature. I used this only 2 times and it worked well, we didn’t play with an AFK on my team and we got another match.
ps: Don’t think you should be safe if people disconnect later in the game, since people can easily abuse this and it is not fair because the game was already happening for a long time.
Are you willing to not gain MMR when the enemy team DCs? Fair is fair right?
Basically what Joseph said.
At least some form of loss forgiveness (which they have talked about since 2016) would be fair, that means since you missed 20% of your team, you lose 20% less points. And the leaver pays an extra 80% for all of you to the opposing team.
Plus it would only work with randoms, not with anyone who was in your party, or is currently in your friend list.
Darak’s suggestion would be optimal (remaking the match completely), but knowing how little they are likely willing to invest in changing the game engine, at least some basic forgiveness for afk’s would be nice. And as said, to prevent abuse it wouldn’t work within a premade party or with people you’ve friended.
That still doesn’t address the fact you win some games because of DCs on the other team. If you’re willing to take a hit on those wins, then it makes sense. If you only have it work one way, then you just have MMR inflation.
MMR inflation could be avoided if the leaver also pays for the missing points of the opponent. So assuming the average match awards 200 pts, deduct 20% for each teammate (160) and award 20% for 5 opponents (200) = 360 points loss.
To not make leaver penalty feel too draconian or harsh, the standard ordinary penalty on top of these could be 300 instead of 500 (regained 30 at a time just like you regain 50 per game now for 10 matches when you play without leaving)
= 660 points lost for afk:ing. 300 of which are gainable back by playing 10 matches without leaving.
The old leaver penalty was a flat 600 points with zero way to gain it back, this would be a bit more forgiving (but still more unforgiving than the current one where it’s 500 and you can regain them all in 10 matches).
I’m not against loss forgiveness, but using the same logic… why you gain mmr beating a team with dc-ed players? 
Out of my last 280 SL games this season, I managed to win with a AI in team after someone left only once…
And that was because one enemy started to throw.
You shouldn’t lose MMR if you have someone in your team who leaves for 10+ minutes
Because blizzard doesn’t care about this issue. HOTS essentially encourages the entire team to ALT F4 when they have an AFK.
In blizzard’s vision, you will eventually be on the winning side of the AFK issue, thus it evens out in the long run. Blizzard doesn’t care about the playability of individual matches, hence why they never fix rainbow games, never fix AFKers, never introduce surrender button, never trully tackles trolls and throwers, never handle stomps. Cause you will eventually be on both ends of this problem roughly the same amount of time if you play long enough. However, most people have limited time, so this becomes a problem.
This is why HOTS is bleeding players, canceling pro games, cutting developer teams, while LOL is just fine. LOL treats each individual match very seriously, thus why it has better retention levels,and an overall more enjoyable ecosystem.
This is the issue.
All these things kind of work if you play 500+ matches per season.
Most people don’t have the time nor will to play 500+ league games per season.
Exactly. And this is not a problem that’s specific to SL. It applies to UD and QM in the exact same way. The entire pvp section of this game has this issue, and one would argue that UD and QM are far more affected. One may say that unranked modes don’t matter much, but they are the breeding ground for the future ranked players. If unranked isn’t taken seriously, a lot of players will simply quit before they even unlock ranked.
Unranked modes also have MMR, so if someone AFKs this game, you will get worse allies next game.
If everyone’s being inflated the same way, why does it matter?
This isn’t thermodynamics. The world won’t end if we still give the team that didn’t d/c a chance to gain MMR.
With respect to inflation, they need to just divide bronze/silver/gold/plat/diamond/gm into percentiles. The raw number shouldn’t matter regardless, but that’s another topic.
I’ve never played LoL so what does the remake do? If you could explain it to me like I’m 5 I’d appreciate it.
I think this would be agreat solution, butvit could be quite hard to implement it. Maybe, devs should start with smaller steps, like allow players to leave a game without getting leaver status if someone in their team already left and didn’t reconnect in certain amount of time.
If the remake is accepted, the match ends instantly and everyone can move on to queue again and get a match without an AFK on their game.
No one is punished except the afk player.
Hmm. I don’t know if I like that too much personally. I wouldn’t want to spend 10 mins searching for a match I can’t even play because people on the enemy team decided to quit, and the match is canceled.
Just saying, there’s more chance for the enemy to have an afk than an ally.