Caveat: I mostly play QP and am a high-gold, low plat. player … so take this with comment with appropriate critique. That being said, I do game development as a ‘job’ and often have to brain storm ideas for solving problems.
What I’ve read/seen here are many complaints about how leavers drastically effect a person’s enjoyment of competitive, leading to frustration, stress, anxiety, etc. Basically turning the gaming experience from something to ‘enjoy’ to something that turns people off the game. My suggestion is a way to temper this to hopefully alleviate some of the negative feelings when you’re in game impacted by a leaver.
First, the devs should consult data and try to figure out the average amount of time it takes a person who involuntarily left to come back. Lets say this is 45 seconds for our discussion.
Second, the devs should add a toggle on the bottom of each role queue that asks the player “Willing to backfill?” It should default to ‘no’ and only if people are willing to backfill should it consider them (I’m uncertain if this should only be available to players who have selected that queue to play or if a person could queue for dps, but also select that they would be willing to backfill tank, for example).
Third, if a person leaves a competitive match for any reason, a timer starts. After 45 seconds (*from above), if the person hasn’t returned, the game pulls a person from the backfill list who isn’t in another match. This means a team that loses a player knows that they will only ever be down ~45-60 seconds before getting a replacement.
Fourth, the person who backfills can NEVER lose SR. They can still gain SR if they somehow pull off the ‘win’, but if the backfill and their team loses, the floor of their SR +/- is zero. So backfill is a ‘no risk’ proposition for players, BUT they lose their position in the queue for a full match.
Fifth, alternatively (or inclusive) to the above, you could institute a minor penalty + bonus above what you already have. Specifically, I’m thinking 0.05% of the leaving player’s current SR is immediately transferred to the backfill player. Obviously if the same player returns in the 45 sec, this would not occur/result in no change. So if a 3000 SR player quits out and leaves, 15 of their SR would be lost immediately and given to the person who backfills for them. If a 1000 SR player leaves, then 5 SR would transfer. This could also be just a flat ‘5 SR’ or something … you want it enough to be a token show of appreciation for backfill, but not enough to really mess with the ranking of players (i.e. a player should not be able to get to masters just by being someone who volunteers to backfill ).
Anyway, that is my ‘clever suggestion’ for today…