How to deal with leavers

[Sand]

I'll try to make this as short as possible...

Background
I'm a new player since a few weeks back. Me and my girlfriend play several nights a week and I really love the game! But even though I haven't played for long I've noticed a quite obvious problem that surely affects my fresh view of the game.

The problem
The game suffers a lot from people leaving the game early. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that on average 2-3 people leave the game early, thus making the game a lot harder to play for the remaining players. I even think that it adds a not so pleasant "random feature" to the game where you always know that someone will leave the game but you don't know what role you will have to play without.

(When I say "leaving the game" I refer to players quitting a game/match before the end)

The solution
As I said, I'm fairly new to the game and I'm sure that this problem has been discussed several times before. But I want to contribute with my thoughts as a new player and hope to add something to the discussion. I see a few alternatives to deal with people leaving the games.

1 - Punish the leavers harder
As I understand, you get a time out if you leave a game that makes you wait before joining a new game, please correct me if I'm wrong. And just by looking at the amount of people leaving the game early it's quite easy to say that they are not bothered by the punishment/time out they receive after leaving. The simple solution to this is – make the punishment harder.

2 - Reward people for staying
This could be a controversial suggestion... Punishment isn't always the best solution to make people do what you want – but rewards often are. At the end of the game, why not reward the remaining players with a few silver coins, thus making it more appealing to stay? The downside with this is the risk that people will farm silver by queuing and just stay idle to get the "stay award" at the end of the game.

3 - Make leavers play with leavers
This is a solution that several game companies have adopted. If a player has a certain leave percentage, lets say above 20%, he or she is marked as a "leaver" and is forced to queue and play with other "leavers" until the percentage drops below 20%. It's a well known and well-tried solution but requires quite some implementation.

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Those are my thoughts. Please feel free to discuss and fill me out on previous discussions on the topic!

[kyuss420]

I like the 3rd option XD as for 2nd, you already get silver coins for staying until the end, most people leave when dead etc. becuase they dont care for silver coins, personally I have over 100k silver coins and nothing but scrolls to spend them on (so chances are I get a role i like).

Your 1st option is a good idea, but if someone disconnects then they are overly punished, I think I have seen suggestions about stacking the penalty for each ''leave'' in a 24hr period. So 1st leave is a 5min timeout, 2nd is a 10min timeout, 3rd is a 15 min timeout etc etc

Also BMG have stated they will be working on a leaver buster system after the unity port is live, so they have plans in the pipeline. Also they increased the penalty for leaving a ranked match to -30 ELO for the leaver just a few months ago