penalty for not showing up for a game?

[f__c]

Hello team

some games in Arena mode take longer to start, because the player pool isn't so big. This following problem has happened to me many times and I have seen it happen to other people too.
You queue into an arena game. You still need 3 more players, so you decide to browse the internet. Now, especially on the phone, you sometimes get the game starting chime, but i often do not get it, even in super quiet environment. (there was no way I did not hear it, or had sound off.) So you do your thing and occasionally check on the game, until one of those checks becomes a realization, that the game has ended and you have -35 ELO points, because other players had chosen to expel you, rather than decided to abandon the game collectively (the way I do), which would be the noble solution, but you can't expect players to be noble.
The game progression is 0%, yet, your current implementation treats me as a traitor who left the game to deny a win to someone else. Give the players a win, yes, give me a loss, fine, but why are you punishing me with additional penalties, when it is clearly unintentional and a result of poor implementation of Arena, when you no longer have to confirm your participation, once you've queued.
Suggestion:
-Fix your game implementation on mobile phones, so that the chime sounds with reliability.
-Improve queuing in Arena, so that when the player count is reached, all players still need to confirm they are playing.
-OR remove the game leaving penalty, when the game is at 0% progress.

Thank you.

[stmod]

I am a strong advocate of this, and I propose to go even further and to apply also to desktop versions.
Reduce the waiting time for the 1st turn (so people do not waste their time) maybe asking each player to hit a confirmation button like in the non arena mode, but, also, reduce the Karma penalty for not showing to 5 points or so.
You still penalise the odd players consciously decide to decline to play against specific players (which I think is your goal at that stage of the game), but you do not penalise the mass that genuinely miss the starting of the game because they cannot wait just on your page for 10 min or so and might miss the chme.

[Mathew5000]

Ideally, since it's Arena, the server would not show you the names of the other players, it would just say "the game has filled, please confirm before start". But it's still problematic, because what happens when all players hit "confirm" except one. Maybe that one player is just away from keyboard for a few minutes, but maybe that one player fell asleep and will be out for hours. Now what are the other players supposed to do, the ones who already confirmed that yes they are ready to begin. How can they know how long they should wait for the other player?

[teallite]

Ideally, since it's Arena, the server would not show you the names of the other players, it would just say "the game has filled, please confirm before start". But it's still problematic, because what happens when all players hit "confirm" except one. Maybe that one player is just away from keyboard for a few minutes, but maybe that one player fell asleep and will be out for hours. Now what are the other players supposed to do, the ones who already confirmed that yes they are ready to begin. How can they know how long they should wait for the other player?

They shouldn't wait. There should be a timer like in normal real-time games. If everyone doesn't accept a game, say, in 3 or 5 minutes, then it's over. Unresponsive players may be excluded from search (with a notification, of course) until they return. The rest may return into search mode for a new match.