Obviously you cannot stop griefing.  Someone can hurl their Demigod into the enemy towers all game and you can't stop them.

But adding an afk autokick after 5 minutes is simple and easy and makes it harder for an afk griefer to ply his trade.  (Having to put effort into his griefing rather than the far easier "set it and forget it")  It doesn't hurt legitimate players. 

It should be added.

Obviously if the house is on fire, unexpected call from the boss, etc. people might need to go afk or leave, this is fine.

But if your boyfriend/girlfriend is coming over in 20 minutes and you think you have time to play one game you are being an asshole.  Multiply the time you wasted by the number of players and see how much inconvenience you caused. 

Last night, I had the best/worst example of this, ever.

First, partner said "afk" and was gone for about three to five minutes.

But then came the really cool part. Partner came back. But only to say, and I quote here word for word:

"Going to bed. AFK and GL ;)"

And he left.

If someone goes to bed mid-match, my guess is that idle-kick may be of use there...

Vote2Kick would be very useful for AKFers.  But I'm concerened about abuse, I've already heard people saying that it would be great to kick bad/new players, man, there goes the new player base if that happens.

Explain to me why you would vote-kick a new player to be get an AI.

It would be better to -kickafk.

Then their hero vanishes, their items drop, and you get all their gold.

But that would make too much sense.

I don't know Sly, ask the people that are writting "I'll vote-kick bad players".  I would only kick cronic AFKers.

Just as long as they implement a better one than WOW has. Only half the people even care (the other half probably AFKs themself too) and of the people that do care most are too lazy to vote. In the end AFK'ers ended up staying AFK but still getting credit for the match anyway.

If you go AFK for some urgency you either still have plenty of time to write a simple message saying "I'll be back within 2 minutes" or if your house is on fire or something  you couldn't care less if you get idle kicked anyway. For all other cases if you sit next to a crystal for 1 min without having said something you should get vote-kicked with a 10 second timer to respond.

No, I'll ask you because you're the one that brought it up.  If you want me to ask such players, it'll be your job to navigate me to such people, because I've never played with anyone dumb enough to think that kicking a new player and playing with an AI is going to help their chances of winning any.

And then I'll tell you this: if someone DOES vote-kick a newbie thinking it'll help, they probably won't do it again because most people agree that the AI that will replace them will likely be at least as bad.  So your point is moot.

I was in that game, he just parked at the crystal and left us to ourselves.  Definitely a bummer, no clue why he even joined in the first place.

I just came out of a game where one guy quit and the other guy went AFK, dumb and mute on me. Sigh....

Females may trump bideo games; but if im already in a game my wife can wait 20 mins until i win or lose and then we can go on with life.

If we all made sure there would be absolutely 100% no way for us to get interrupted before we started a game, there would be all of 2 people on Demigod at any given time. Obviously, if you know you have prior engagements in 25 minutes, don't bother join a game, but it's unreasonable to assume that everyone can camp out in Mom's basement for all eternity, refusing to answer the phone or door. Even gamers have lives.