http://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051-warlight-features/suggestions/2859036-remove-inactive-players-from-the-ladder

I set up this uservoice to get support for an idea that came up a couple of months ago, when Zaeban disappeared and left himself on the ladder.

Currently, there are only two ways for a person to leave the ladder. First, they click the button themselves. Second, Fizzer manually removing them for some reason. The first option clearly fails when someone suddenly stops playing, regardless of the reason they stop playing. Requiring Fizzer to constantly search ladder games (especially when he isn't playing on the ladder) to see who is getting booted a lot doesn't work and seems like an unnecessary burden on him. At any given time, there are several players who have consistently been autobooted from a large number of games and occupy the lowest segments of the ladder. Anyone that they beat before quitting/leaving will take a significant rating hit for three months. Anyone who plays against them in the future is stuck with a six day way for an obvious win. They can't skip these games, and if they have maxed out games already, they must simply wait. For those players who are ranked very low, but still actively play, they may end up playing these auto-boot players several times a month.

In addition, sometimes a very strong player falls victim to this situation (zaeban, recently Samurai), and the ladder scores of many competitive people can suffer. Anyone who was beat by these players (a large number of people) will see greatly reduced ratings because of it. Anyone who beat these players will not receive the rating points that they earned either. In addition, a large number of people will have a high ranking player in their best wins list, that they did not want or earn.

The suggestion proposed above is to have the system auto-remove all players from all ladders when they have been inactive for 6 days. In six days, they will hit the maximum amount of time to be autobooted from every single game. Removing them from the ladder is not an exploit, since they are not removed from any current games and will still incur the losses. They will, however, not continue receiving future games which also carry a very high chance of ending in an autoboot.

Note that players will not be removed from the ladder simply for being booted from a ladder game. Instead, they must be inactive on Warlight for the full six days.

From a quick check, it appears that making this change would remove roughly nine players from the regular 1v1 ladder. I didn't check the seasonal ladder or 2v2, but there are probably more that would be removed from there. It's probably not an issue for just 2v2, as either player can remove the team from future games, so one player disappearing becomes a non-issue.

After doing some more checking, it appears that the seasonal ladder is actually far worse, probably because people are automatically enrolled in future seasons, and Fizzer is apparently not removing them manually when they repeatedly autoboot.

I found two people who have been inactive from Warlight entirely for more than 120 days, and one guy (Gunnar the lover) who has been inactive for more than 157 days, but is still on the regular 1v1 ladder. Thanks mostly to repeated autoboots, he also now has a 61% boot rate.

Well thought out, Duke. A good mod for everyone.

I agree. This will happen in the next site update. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks Fizzer, that'll be a big help to everyone.