The AI is inherently uncontrollable.  That's why it will never be the solution.

It definitely is.  When you're outnumbered they can easily spread the field and keep more flags than you.  At least if you got the leaver's gold you'd have a chance to beat them in fights.

Exactly, right now a 2v2 becomes a 3v1 with your AI only helping the other team, and something needs to be done about this before punishing the quitter.

Hooray! Please go ahead and delete now!

However, in some ways it's too good.  For example it seems like it tries to interrupt your casts, which is actually very skillful.  The problem with that though is that the UB and TB have the only two interrupts in the game that make sense as interrupts.  Everyone just spams pounce, bite, penitence etc. the instant they get in range, and interrupt almost purely by accident.  That's fine, because it works, but it's not fine that the computer triest to outplay you when it needs to follow the old KISS rule to win.  For that particular issue they either need to dumb the computer down a bit or they need to improve the interrupt system in this game so that it's advantageous to use the interrupts 'correctly.'

Then there's the more infamous and inexplicable issues where it just wanders into tower fire and depends way too heavily on teleports to save itself, and of course there's more.  They're all problems which highlight AI deficiencies and a conceptual deficiency with putting the AI into human games in the first place, the quitters are the scapegoats for a handful of mechanics which are going to need several more iterations before they work correctly.

I know this is just going to sound like trolling, but I really think you guys can't see the forest for the trees here and jumping on the punitive bandwagon smacks of fanboyism.  This game ain't chess, and the best chess player in the world can't beat a tandy running a good AI.  All of you know full well that the problem is that the AI sucks and all feeders, even human ones, are too detrimental to the game.  In the end it's probably not going to work out like you intend.  Players don't want to play when they're not having fun, and there's a good chance that so many people will quit anyway that having the a scarlet quitter tag won't mean anything, or perhaps it will matter but quitting will still be fairly prevelant and it might divide an already measly community of players.

You guys act like there's so many games running that you can be particularly exclusive, but the truth (or at least what I misperceive as the truth) is that you're going to have to compromise to play and seems just as likely that the community will dwindle as grow (granted I haven't looked at the sales records as of late, if they're still being posted).

Frogboy, I would like to humbly request you remove AI's with the next patch as well from the online play please.

Quitters do not help a community grow. A lot of us would rather not play at all than to play with quitters.

So is the noob that the AI replaced.  AI should give little to no gold / exp when it is subbed into a game.

The problem you're most likely to see isn't dodging people by rating, but by DG.  A player who's taking shortcuts to the top of the ladder who runs into a comp his DG is weak against is going to quit every time he's face with a rough combo, and will just keep re-queueing until he gets a better matchup.  It may even be the exact same people he plays, just shuffled differently in his favor.

Dead Ghost, that would be a wash anyway.  If you make it so that every leave counts as a rage quit it'll simply mean that nearly everyone will have a certain number of blemishes on their record, and the perception of that record will change accordingly.  Sitting at zero won't be feasible for the majority of people, so logically having a small number of them won't preclude getting into games.

With your voting system it means some lucky people will have virtually none, whereas some unlucky people will tally up a fair amount over time and those ones will arbitrarily have a harder time getting games.  The human vote approach just isn't reliable.

At the end of each match you could pop up a window that allows you to vote on each players sportsmanship with a simple 1-10 rating.

As long as you show the amount of votes the person got, and their average score, people can determine more then if they are a rage quiter.  You could tell if a player is a jerk and a noob as well.

Then how do you make the difference between the ones that rage quitted and the ones that were unlucky to disconnect because of various reasons, not related to losing the game and quitting in rage?

For example i look at myself: in pantheon stats i'm listed with Total Disconnects: 9. But not even once of those were because of rage quitting. Most of them were due to very high lag or crashing.

I think i understand what you are saying, that rage quitters will allways have a much higher nr of disconnects than normal users, in an automated system. Maybe you're right, but who is gonna tell if someone's nr of disconnects is normal or higher, indicating he's probably a rage quitter? Only experienced hosts will be able to tell, most users will just kick the player with the higher nr of disconnects in the lobby list. It's similar with what's happening now with "high" ping players, players that have under 300 ping (around 200-250), green, and they are kicked from the lobby because the host thinks they will lag the game, which is not true in this game. I don't know, i just have a bad feeling about this...

How about deleting immediatly?