How to fix Low Priority
I know many people don't think there's an issue with Low Priority, and if you are one of them, I only ask you to have an open mind and accept that maybe LP can be improved, and I'll try to explain why.
This is the tl;dr:
I'll start by saying that I think virtually everybody agrees that intentional feeding is the worst thing you can do in a Dota 2 game. There is always chance of winning against very bad odds, even against Mega Creeps, even playing 4v5, or even 3v5. It's extremely rewarding to come back from one of such games; "never give up, never surrender", right? So why on Earth would anyone feed? Feeding only makes the chance of a comeback even worst, but it's possible to win a game even with an intentional feeder.
We need to punish intentional feeders as harshly as possible.
I hope you'll indulge my analogy with real life situations. I'm going to use rape as an example, but do not jump to the conclusion that I indulge rape (I don't indulge intentional feeding either), or that I find rape and intentional feeding comparable at all. My point is entirely different.
We want to punish rapists; we want them out of our society, we want them incarcerated. If rape happens at all; we want it to happen to other rapists.
Let's suppose there's a woman, who is--let's say--flexible with the truth--Tawana. Tawana has accused many men of rape, falsely. And now Tawana has falsely accused you of rape, and you go to jail for 10 years because of that. Wouldn't you want the option to appeal that decision? In fact, wouldn't you want the option to accuse Tawana for false rape accusation?
If we really want rape to be properly punished, we want accusations of rape to be taken seriously, and in order for that to happen, we want false accusations of rape to be punished, harshly, possibly even more harshly that instances of rape. We don't want rape, but rape is going to happen, and when it does, we want it properly punished, and in order for that to happen, we want false accusations of rape to never happen, or at the very least we want people to know that if they are ever caught falsely accusing somebody of rape, things are going to be very, very, very bad for them.
We don't want people to use reports like candy, just because they got pissed, they didn't like the teammate, or because their teammate sucked. We want reports to be taken seriously, and we don't want reports to be happening more on Mondays than on Sundays, like it currently happens. If somebody intentionally feeds we want that person to always get punished, regardless of the day of the week.
We don't want people that use reports in bad ways to be able to report in the future. So, wouldn't it be reasonable to punish a person that did a bad report with say, two months without the ability to report anybody?
If a person gets reported for intentionally feeding, shouldn't we take this report seriously? Why do we need more than one report of this serious bad behavior? We should send that person to LP immediately. This person should be able to challenge the bad report. Whomever is lying (either the reporter or the reportee) gets their ability to report revoked for a period of time. And since we already know that person lies, their ability to challenge reports should be taken away too.
Another thing we want to avoid in our society is sexual harassment. Now imagine that in our society the penalty for rape is 10 years in prison, and the penalty for sexual harassment is also 10 years in prison. Does that seem fair?
You might be tempted to say: well, I'm not a rapist, nor a sexual harasser, so why do I care about their penalties?
I'm going to ask you to exercise your empathy, and put yourself in the shoes of a creep, a man that sexually harasses women routinely--Bill. Bill has sexually harassed many women, and finally has been prosecuted for a hypothetical law that requires 10 women to report you, and you are sent to jail for 10 years, without appeal. Bill doesn't think this is fair, but serves his sentence. Being the creep that he is, he continues to sexually harass women, and goes back to jail again, for 10 years. In jail he meets Scott, who is a rapist, and is serving also a 10 years sentence; Bill doesn't find it fair that Scott received the same penalty. After completing his second sentence he is out again. Bill knows it's only a matter of time before going back to jail, and a thought occurs to him; "if I'm going back to jail for sexually harassing women, why not rape them?" Can you really blame his logic?
This is the reason you want the punishment to fit the crime, even if you are not planning to commit any crime; you don't want criminals to escalate their crimes, just because the punishments are comparable, and the rewards are not.
In addition, you don't want to be sent to jail for 10 years if you are wrongly accused of sexual harassment, you want the sentence to be reasonable, specially if you didn't commit the alleged crime at all.
Personally, I think the penalties should be something like:
Moreover, one of the reasons we send people to jail is for them to stop committing crimes, that's why even in prison crimes are punished, and good behavior is rewarded. Prison is not a place where every bad behavior is allowed. So a rapist should go out of prison after 10 years, only if he stops raping.
You should be able to report crimes in prison. It is likely you will find rapists in prison, why should you be punished if you happen to be the victim of one?
If you consider one year of prison like two matches of Dota 2, if one of your prison mates engages in rape he should get a penalty, not you. If you have the bad luck of having an intentional feeder on your team in an LP match, which is very likely, you are probably going to lose the game, which is like increasing your prison sentence by two years for something you didn't do. Is that fair?
It's actually really simple: we want to stop bad behavior from happening in our community. In order to do that we want people that engage in bad behavior to stay in LP indefinitely, and the people that stop their bad behavior, to leave LP. Also, the people that engage in good behavior to not be sent to LP.
So the current LP rules would be something like: if 10 persons accuse you of sexual harassment, you go to jail for 10 years, just as if you raped them. It doesn't matter that you didn't actually harass anybody, ten women hate you, and nobody is going to check their story. Once you are in jail, you get raped, multiple times, so you get 4 more years on your sentence. And no, you don't get to report those prison rapes, and no, the rapists doesn't get any penalty. Yeah, that seems fair.
Oh, also, if you miss work two days in a week, you get 10 years in prison too (yeah, this is a stretch, but no analogy is perfect).
Do you still think there's no issues with the LP system?
Here's my summary of the issues:
My proposed changes solve all those issues.