The penalty for replacing players is a little backwards. I think I understand why it was instituted, but in practice you penalize "innocent" players for the action (or inaction) of another. E.g., If KingKiller quits the game and is replaced by a new player, then KingKiller's former teammates are A) forced to scramble to find a new player mid-War and B) have a worse Vault because of it through a card penalty. The penalty for KingKiller's decision are not reflected on him whatsoever, but on others through no fault of their own. One could say that the fault lies with the Master for picking a fickle player, and therefore the penalty is fairly meted against the Master's team but this fails to account for what happens when a Master quits the War/game.
Teams are penalized because:
1. It discourages Generals to bid on "high risk" players that have a high probability of either quitting the event, or getting banned from it. Some of these high risk players were recruited in this War, which led to of course teams having to find replacements. That could have easily been avoided by not bidding on them in the first place.
2. If teams are not penalized, it removes the social pressure that stops some people from quitting on a whim. If you quitting makes no difference, you are more likely to quit, compared to a situation where you quitting would hurt 7 other players. Of course there are also the selfish people who quit no matter what because they only care about themselves, but no rule will ever stop them.
I fully support a ban on participation from the next War for players who quit/drop out (with rare exception, like death in the family/kidnapping/malaria.)
We will have a new PvP warning system very soon that does something like this, only difference being that the reason why you quit, is irrelevant. Like willng3 said, people can easily lie and say whatever they like. I've heard a million reasons for quitting an event that were something like "omg something bad happened in real life", but I've yet to hear one reason that was "I just didn't feel like it". Either the members of this community are the unluckiest people in the world (getting hit by cars, eaten by bears, etc), or someone is not telling the truth.
It's all about time management and choices. If I was handing out $1000 bills to everyone who came online, we would have zero "real life issues".