Riot announces stronger punishments for inting, queue dodging, and going AFK in LoL

As part of their updates to deal with toxic behavior and gameplay disadvantage when dealing with AFKs or dodges before games, Riot Games’ Behavioral Systems Team has revealed a big update where they will implement changes to their penalties tier system.

While they highlighted these changes had been delayed due to many adjustments within the game's back-end, they hope everything announced will help reduce the frequency of disruptive behavior, and mitigate harm caused by it.

Intentional Feeding, or inting

Starting with one of the most criticized topics, the Riot team spoke about plans for a reporting confidence solution that took into account the quality of reports, while also detect behaviors like jungle griefing, under-the-radar intent to lose or feeding behaviors, intentional lane taxing and griefing, and other behaviors their automated systems are less likely to identify.

“Since the system is still new, we're being very cautious with actioning on these behaviors until we're sure the system won't evolve in an unforeseen way and penalize innocent players en masse. We're excited to continue monitoring results and in the future move forward with similar features for other prevalent disruptive behaviors.”

Queue Dodging

To prevent more frequent occurrences of Dodge within ranked matches, Riot will add a penalty tier but leaving the current tiers unchanged, so they can avoid overly punishing players who had an unintentional disconnect, an emergency, or someone intentionally trying to ruin the game.

• 1st dodge in 24 hours: 6 min lockout (15 for ARAM) and -3 LP in ranked
• 2nd dodge in 24 hours: 30 min lockout and -10 LP in ranked
• 3rd dodge in 24 hours: 12 hour lockout and -10 LP in ranked

(Picture: Riot Games)

In this way, they will attempt to reduce the overall time-to-game for other players, and prevent creating a jarring experience where players are forced in and out of queue, and in higher elos, stop being a last resort 'break in case of emergency 'switch.

“We're partnering with Compet to address growing issues with dodging and match quality. The first approach is to immediately address the escalation of these behaviors via stronger penalties. The second is a longer-term effort to address the underlying reasons for dodging in the first place.”

AFKs

(Picture: Riot Games)

As with dodging cases, from now on there will be more severe punishments for all those who abuse being AFK within a game, increasing game suspensions from a few minutes to a maximum of two weeks.

• 1st Tier: 5 min lockout and auto-loss
• 2nd Tier: 30 min lockout and auto-loss
• 3rd Tier: 14 day lockout and auto-loss

Likewise, the amount of LP lost after being AFK in each game will have a new Tiers system, which will escalate depending on your number of penalized games, so if you leave AFK, your level will go up, and if you play a complete game, it will decrease.

• Tier 1: -2 LP
• Tier 2: -3 LP
• Tier 3: -5 LP
• Tier 4: -6 LP
• Tier 5: -8 LP

“We’ve been assessing penalties for players repeatedly AFKing or leaving games. Again, we don’t want to overly punish players who have rare disconnects out of their control, but we've learned that repeat AFKs/leaves are relatively rare and tied pretty directly to game-ruining behavior.”

• Read more: 12 LDL players receive lifetime bans following match-fixing scandal

Finally, they confirmed that for the second half of 2021 there will be even more updates to level the balance of players with bad behavior within the Rift, with in-game reporting options to allow players immediate response to bad behavior. further refinement of penalties for extreme offenders of all kinds, and improvement on AFK, Intentional Feeding, and Verbal Abuse detection.