I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but the article does say:

> (The reward or penalty is sometimes adjusted when lopsided battles occur, for example, rewarding an extra 2 points to an underdog team. For purposes of this analysis, we'll ignore those adjustments.)

The disconnection penalty does sound interesting, though. You could even argue that the network errors are a kind of balancing away from the trend that this article describes, by forcing ranks downward - although I doubt that was deliberate on the part of the developers :-)