LoL’s Behavioral System Update Goes Live On Patch 10.15

Riot’s series of updates to combat toxicity or the ‘game-disruptive behavior’ in League of Legends starts this month. The first phase will kick off with patch 10.15, which focuses on limiting the amount of intentional feeding, leavers, and AFK players who plague solo queues.

League of Legends lead gameplay designer Mark “Scruffy” Yetter shared the dev team’s plans for the first phase. Riot Games plans to make a stricter system in classifying behaviors. Scruffy says that it’s 25% more aggressive than the current system. But they don’t want to punish honest players, so some penalties may remain the same.

“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 says in a Twitter post.

With the successor of patch 10.14 coming off to a promising start, here are the detection and penalty systems for leavers, AFK, and players who intentional feeds:

Intentional Feeding

Detection – The system will be stricter in detecting ‘inting’ behaviors to avoid punishing players for an actual bad game. A 25% more aggressive system requires a 0-75 game instead of the previous system’s 0-100 game.

Penalties – Penalties for intentional feeding remain the same for now. Players caught inting are given an immediate 14-day ban. The suspension can become more severe if the system detects them inting repeatedly.

Leavers and AFK

Detection – Riot Games improved the detection system for intentional idling, especially in situations where players are moving from one game to another to avoid the AFK detection systems.

Penalties – When players leave or AFKs without reconnecting to the game, the game labels it as an automatic loss even if the team won the game.

Penalties – Riot Games assigns stricter leaver punishments for players. It will take fewer AFKs to begin receiving queue time penalties. Players who often leaves the game then receives increasing queue time penalties.

The new system goes live on patch 10.15, along with updates for the Flex Queue. The next set of updates for combating toxicity includes detecting more complex cases and introducing more varieties of penalties.