I’m thinking we should get rid of the “skirmish” mode. Very few people use it and it only serves to divide the community.
Instead, Pantheon would become the focus of ranked games and help build a larger base of players for it. But in order to do that, we have to deal with the problem of hyper-competitive people who quit games on start if they don’t get the person they want to play with.
I don't like the phrase "Pantheon would become the focus of ranked games". In my opinion, Custom is the focus of ranked games at this time. I see this as the case for two main reasons. First, there is no artifical barrier between lightside and darkside. I think the light side/dark side seperation is a fun idea, and creates some unusual matchups. However, I don't really think it should be the basis of someone's individual ranking. Second, Pantheon is random. Your team composition is random both in players and in Demigods. Again, I don't feel this is intrinsically bad, but I don't consider it "Ranked" play.
The problem with this is that a good player can not win with a bad team. This is simply the nature of Demigod. It is a team oriented game. I can't put words in anyone's mouth, but I feel that it was designed to be played as a team game. Should Pantheon become the focus of ranked games, the team play aspect is lost. You can no longer chose your demigod based on what would work well with your team mates. In most cases, random people do not play well as a team for various reasons.
I consider myself a competitive player. I like to win. I like to improve my gameplay. I enjoy being on a team and improving my team gameplay. Losing because I was outplayed is an opportunity for learning. Losing because my team mates played poorly is something completely different (and for me, terribly frustrating). I can't learn from this, and I often can't make them play better. I enjoy helping others get better, but I want to do this in an unranked environment.
Also, sometimes I like to mess around with silly builds like my "all gloves all the time" regulus build, or fool around with extreme custom game options (high gold, high towers, etc). I think there's room for both types of play in Demigod. Due to this, I think that there should be two ladders. One that is exclusively for Pantheon and one that is exclusively for Custom. Would this be hard to implement, I have no idea. I would also like to see the option to play unranked Custom matches for fun (perhaps this could come at the same time as mods).
I feel that what people want when it comes to ranking and experience and such is balance and fairness. They want to know that their rank is a true representation of their skill. They want to know that the rank shown for an opponent is a true representation of their opponent's skill as well. When the random number generator is seen as having a significant influence in the outcome for a match (random players, random DG teaming), I don't feel anyone gets what they want. This is also, I feel, why there is so much friction within the community.
So I was thinking that on pantheon games, once someone disconnected more than 3 times and it’s greater than 10% of the games in the first 5 minutes that those games would count as a loss for that player. Same for custom games too.
What do you think?
This sounds pretty good to me! I'd suggest simply giving everyone X free disconnects a month (no matter how long the game's gone on), but I'm sure it would get abused. 
One final note: If you eliminate Skirmish, please ensure that the next Pantheon event starts up right away. Else those that enjoy this format of play won't have to wait an entire weekend to play again.
-- Tukulis
Edit: Quotes fixed.
