Riot Games is looking to lessen toxicity around the surrender vote—and make them run more smoothly—with a suite of major changes in League of Legends Patch 13.16, including hiding voter names, delaying repetitive vote calls from individual players, and automatic resolutions for split votes.
The surrender vote changes, unveiled by League product lead Chris “Auberaun” Roberts on Aug. 10, will also include UI tweaks for the vote boxes.
Right now, surrendering in League lobbies, and especially in ranked queues, is supposed to be a viable way to walk away from lopsided games early. However, the feature has slowly become a way for trolls to annoy allies.
Riot is well aware of the issues and is now prioritizing anything that will make the feature more valuable again. The League devs did already ship minor tweaks to 15-minute voting in Patch 13.7 in April, but these August changes are the first step in a more concerted effort across the rest of the year.
“The intention is to make surrending more of a team action,” Roberts explained, “rather than one person spamming “FF” every three minutes.”
All League Patch 13.16 Surrender changes
- Name of the player that started a surrender vote is no longer revealed.
- After starting a surrender vote, the player that started the surrender vote will not be able to begin another vote for six minutes. The team cooldown on calling for a surrender vote remains unchanged at three minutes and takes priority over individual cooldowns.
- Surrender vote will automatically resolve when a vote can no longer pass and will no longer remain open waiting for players to vote.
- Surrender box text has been updated to reflect the type of surrender vote being called; Surrender, AFK Surrender, or Remake.
While many quickly celebrated Riot’s plan, others warned the changes may not work exactly how the League devs are imagining. While surrender votes can be “relatively toxic” if used incorrectly, concerned players explained, making the votes harder to pass and easier to ignore may actually make things worse, and may even lead to more hostage situations than before.
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Either way, the Surrender Vote changes are still being tested on League’s PBE realm, so there’s no guarantee they’ll make it to live servers.
If they do, they will be bundled up in Patch 13.16 next Wednesday.
