League of Legends players have been busy the past few months grinding ranked games, learning new champions like Viego, and participating in limited time events during Season 11. Despite the variety of content, however, many members of the community are still finding matches ruined one way or another by toxicity from teammates. As League continues to grow in popularity, many players and streamers have spoken out about this problem which finally led Riot Games to implement sweeping changes last year.
As part of the initial update, efforts were first focused on detecting and mitigating toxic behavior in ranked games. To that end, instances of intentional feeding or griefing became much easier to pinpoint than before along with implementing reduced LP loss for affected players. Since these early goals have been met with success, the behavioral systems team is now detailing upcoming steps to curb other related issues: queue dodging and going AFK.
Everyone has inevitably run into the case of getting into a solo queue match only to be sent back to the queue several minutes later by someone dodging. For many years, League already had a two-step system to punish players who dodged by closed their clients during champ select by locking them out of queuing for 6 then 30 minutes and issuing a slight LP penalty. The new adjustment keeps the current steps but adds another third level that increases the lockout period to 12 hours. After twenty-four hours have passed without any dodging, the current tier will reset back to level one.
Similarly, there has been an increasing trend of players AFKing in-game during recent seasons that hasn't been affected by the current penalty system. As a result, the three-level escalation has changed to cap at a 14 day lockout if players are detected along with an auto-loss. Fortunately, reformed players can decrease the tier back down to 0 by repeatedly playing matches without going AFK. Furthermore, Riot also mentioned a separate tier system which automatically subtracts between 2-8 LP that rises or falls depending on recent toxic behavior is currently live as part of the update.
Since queue dodges and AFKing can rarely happen because of personal issues or even natural disasters like earthquakes, these changes still ensure that players who unintentionally cause disruptions aren't heavily penalized in the long run. At the same time, the new systems will restrict most repeated cases of toxicity and abuse in-game until further updates can target specific niches like being held hostage during champ select.
While the upcoming changes may have positive results in the long run, it could still force toxicity in situations where the penalized player forces someone else to dodge or ultimately lose a game and waste more time. However, this is still a drastic improvement which the League of Legends community has wanted for quite some time and players can expect even more adjustments once Riot Games gives another report in July about these ongoing efforts.
League of Legends is available on PC.
Source: League of Legends