For League of Legends players fed up with the toxicity running rampant in ranked queues, Riot has a plan.
League game director Andrei “Meddler” van Roon discussed game-ruining behavior in today’s dev blog post, detailing Riot’s plans to quell the frustrating issue. With many players citing trolls in champion select as an issue, the new report feature is “tentatively” on track for Patch 10.14.
“Muting in champ select is currently scheduled to appear at the same time as reporting,” Meddler added.
If devs are unable to get this feature out by Patch 10.14, it’ll get pushed back to 10.15.
Riot also began surveying players at the end of games, building data on which game-ruining behaviors are most common and most frustrating.
The “clear outliers,” according to Meddler, are intentional feeding and AFKing, as well as other game-sabotaging behavior. So Riot will “dedicate more resources” to curb those issues.
Meddler admitted that the developers rely too much on disruptive behavior from a single game, allowing savvy griefers to “skirt the line repeatedly” across multiple matches. A larger emphasis will be placed on cross-game behavior to address this issue.
Since penalties for AFK players typically result in a longer queue time, Riot will add more significant punishments to repeat offenders, such as temporary bans.
And the detection algorithms are “too basic,” Meddler says. So there will be more focus on the context of how actions are interpreted. If a player says in chat that they’re going to AFK or feed and then proceeds to do so, for example, Riot will be “much more confident” in issuing a punishment quickly.
Riot will continue experiments on quelling game-ruining behavior throughout the year.
