It’s been 10+ years of Riot Games’ LeaveBuster punishing people for leaving games. Should players be punished for leaving games and leaving the remaining 4 to fight an uphill battle that can waste 40 minutes of their time? Of course they should! But how does LeaveBuster determine who left, and who disconnected through their own weak will?
Every few months or so, there are several Reddit posts pleading for the LeaveBuster to be reworked to consider players who disconnect from their ranked games. The problem is, the LeaveBuster is a pretty straight forward mechanism that just punishes people who afk out of games. The LeaveBuster doesn’t take into account things like unintentional disconnections, bad internet connections, dropped clients, and the list goes on and on… All these factors contribute to poor quality games.
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The problem is then passed further down the line; how does the LeaveBuster detect those players who unplugged their ethernet connection, or turned off their WiFi, and those who genuinely disconnected through no fault of their own. Unfortunately, that’s for Riot to figure out but it’s on us, the players, to ask for it. Many people aren’t aware that Riot has a support form to contact them about the LeaveBuster. However, many are also unaware that this form is often ignored and those who are told to re-submit their report may become discouraged from doing so. In the past, players submitted appeal after appeal to Riot’s support team, but they often will not respond or take action. If you wish to make your voice heard on this matter, we encourage you to fill out this form and keep submitting it until something is done.
It’s very possible you’re reading this because you’ve been caught by the LeaveBuster after simply disconnecting from your games, if that is the case then we strongly recommend you diagnose the problem before receiving an even harsher punishment. It’s likely a simple fault with your Internet Service Provider or router. If you’ve replaced your router and restarted it multiple times, then it may be time to consider switching your broadband provider to ensure you get low ping and a stable connection.
Valorant, Riot’s sister FPS game also has a LeaveBuster and AntiCheat software. Players have also complained about wrongly being punished for disconnecting from the Valorant matches. However, this does appear to have been fixed somewhat by now.
We’ve all been in League games where someone disconnected shortly after the initial remake grace period and wondered if it was intentional or not. Even if you do end up winning and getting a massive rush of dopamine from a well fought and deserved win, we always hold resentment to the one who disconnected.
We would probably end up typing “gg” in all chat and even the enemies chat if they were being nice. Players who disconnect intentionally are a hindrance to the competitive aspect of the game and we want Riot to do something about it.
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If you were the one who disconnected and was inevitably punished, the first thing you need to do is gather some information. If you didn’t record your game, chances are you’ll never have evidence strong enough to convince a support rep that you did not intentionally leave a game. The best thing you can do is write down the date, time, champion played, amount of players and their roles when the disconnect happened. The next step would be to go into your support tab on the League of Legends website and submit a ticket. Whilst this may seem a bit extreme to do over a single game, the difference between Master, Grand Master, and Challenger can be several LP.
Before heading into a ranked game, we’d always recommend testing out your internet connection in a practice or normal game to make sure you don’t get caught out and punished wrongly by the LeaveBuster. Even Riot can’t control what your ISP or router does when they receive your commands to disconnect, but they can at least have some degree of control over the LeaveBuster.
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