League of Legends lead gameplay designer Mark “Scruffy” Yetter shared the first phase of Riot’s disruptive behavior reduction today, which will kick off in Patch 10.15.
The developers are putting their efforts into limiting the amount of intentional feeding, leavers, and AFK players who plague solo queue. Riot will begin by making its system stricter in how it classifies behavior as intentionally feeding, amping up detection to be 25 percent more aggressive.
Gameplay Thougts posted. The TLDR:
-We're launching phase 1 of Int/AFK reductions with tighter detection systems and more penalties (this is the quick pass, lots of future work coming)-Flex Queue play with no rank restrictions finally coming in 10.15!https://t.co/fTk2riWKHZ
— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) July 10, 2020
“We still don’t want to punish players for a bad game but we think there is room between our current thresholds and where a player having a bad game would be,” Scruffy said.
The penalty for intentionally feeding, however, will remain a 14-day ban that becomes more severe if the behavior is repeated.
Riot is also targeting AFKs by improving detection when players are idle but moving occasionally to avoid punishment. The penalties will become harsher, giving an AFK player an automatic loss even if their team wins the game. Queue time penalties will also require less AFK games before going into effect.
Scruffy also outlined future plans for improving the detection system. There are players who can avoid detection by “treading the line,” ruining games without dramatically intentionally feeding. And the penalty system will be revamped by taking earlier action and ramping up the severity of repeat offenses.
A couple of months ago, prominent League of Legends players and veteran Voyboy called out Riot for lack of action towards toxicity. Voyboy pointed out that many players aren’t scared to be toxic because Riot isn’t vigilant about punishing players who intentionally feed, troll, or verbally abuse their teammates. Almost every person who’s played League has more than one experience with toxicity and it’s likely that the toxic person wasn’t banned.
“There’s no point in reporting people because Riot won’t ban them,” Voyboy said. “No one is scared of getting in trouble [and] no one is scared of being barred from solo queue. Riot has really made it clear—through their lack of vocalization on the growing problems that the player base has been experiencing—that they don’t really care. If they did care, they would have done something by now.”
The 25-year-old also mentioned that unless you type an offensive word that gets flagged by an automated filter, you likely won’t get in trouble for your actions. This is tough for higher Elo players because they usually end up playing against the same people, which eventually means they’ll get griefed again.