League of legends is famous for its “Toxic” behavior community. However, Riot Games are trying their best everyday to improve their player base behavior as strict as possible.
According to Riot Games Dev News, Riot Games will improve how report feedback works and introduce reporting in Champ Select. In the moderate-term, they will test more responsive detection of deliberate inting/pseudo afking. They are still considering steps after that but the plan is to keep working on this longer-term.
Who Are Those Players?
- This is about players deliberately ruining the game for others, making it very difficult or impossible for their team to win.
- It’s not about people who are genuinely trying and having bad game or series of games even. Sometimes someone gets absolutely crushed in lane and dies over and over again. That’s very different to a player deciding the game’s over and then spending their time trolling others instead of trying to win.
- The sort of behavior Riot are looking at here involves things like deliberately dying while pretending to try, running around taking CS from others but then deliberately avoiding team fights/objectives etc. It’s not as easy to detect as straight AFKing or constant inning, it still ruins games though.
- It happens at all levels of play, though tends to be more common with players who’ve been playing for a while and generally understand how to avoid getting banned by Riot’s existing AFK and obvious inting detection.
- Streamers often get targeted for this sort of trolling due to their higher profile. It’s not an issue unique to streamers, though.
How Riot Games Are Going to Fix This?
- First off, Riot will prioritize work in more than they have recently. Riot Games are working right now to figure out which people they can pull off other projects to work on this instead.
- Second, solutions here need to be really targeted at these specific issues. Other behavior-influencing work is valuable too, whether that’s things like Honor, other social/recognition systems, features with a social impact like Clash, etc. They’re not a replacement for taking action on this sort of game-ruining behavior that needs to be addressed regardless.
Right Now – Improving Report Feedback
Riot Games just started trialing improvements to how their report and notification systems work. For now, those are live on NA and KR only. One component of that is changes to how punishment notifications are generated. Previously, you’d only be notified that a user you’d reported had been punished if that punishment was triggered immediately after the game you were reporting them for and the punishment was for the specific category you’d reported them in.
The actual punishment system, however, looks at a player’s games over time and aggregates reports from different categories together. As a result, notifications were substantially lower than the actual punishments. The revised notification system, by contrast, will notify you if a user was punished regardless of category of the report and will do so if the player gets punished after any of their next dozen games or so.
Short Term – Champ Select Reporting and Muting
Disruptive behavior in Champ Select is a problem that players have very few ways to deal with. Riot Games just launched the Champ Select Reporting and Muting Test in NA and KR servers. These reports will be used to establish a data foundation for champ select behavior. Then, once Riot Games have got enough data to identify different types of behavior accurately, they will deploy a punishment system.
Moderate Term – Rapid Detection and False Positive Trade-Off
After above changes, Riot Games’ development team wants to go back and reexamine their previous stance on rapid, automated detection of players who are trying to lose a game. They have been very cautious about it historically due to the risk of falsely identifying, and therefore punishing, a player who isn’t actually trolling. Avoiding unjust temp bans is important to offer a good player experience.
Long Term – To be Determinded
Beyond above terms, Riot are still assessing which approaches to investigate next. They plan on doing more work than just what’s listed above.
Credit: Quick LOL Thoughts: Game-ruining Behavior
Read More: Champ Select Reporting and Muting Test