Patch notes: Mothman246's genius idea to disable pausing in ranked mode while a player is disconnected implemented.

(The next day, a new Reddit thread)

So we were winning a match sooo convincingly and the other team disconnected one player and then paused the game. It has been three hours now and I am still waiting by the PC in the hopes that this person will come back. Why didn't Valve think this through?

Jokes aside, the amount of pause time is limited to allow a player with a temporary connection or computer issue time to reconnect to the game without causing undue disruption to the match for the other nine players, and balance that with the possibility and likelihood that some players can abuse the ability to pause the game.

Since the magnitude of grief that pause abuse will cause is proportional to the amount of time a person can force the game to remain paused, it seems quite reasonable to limit the amount of pause time to the amount of time it takes a reasonably modern computer to reboot and reload into the match or perform a router reset and reconnect to the game as necessary.

It can suck when the player who plays on an unstable connection is on your team, but it would suck a lot more for the general playing population if players who play in unstable conditions or on potato PCs were not gradually removed from the matchmaking pool by the abandon system. Allowing people with genuine computer problems much larger amounts of time to get their shit together would prevent them from receiving abandons and therefore keep them in the matchmaking pool. So while you might gain on that one particular match, you'll lose in the long run because you can't play a game properly because so many disconnects, pauses, and connections from 2000 ping people on the other side of the world who never get abandons to discourage them from playing on inappropriate servers.

Just my 2 cents worth.