Riot reveals changes to AFKs and dodging penalties for LoL patch 11.15

If you are part of the League of Legends community, you will find that it’s pretty common to deal with toxic and AFK players every couple of games.

However, as part of their changes to deal with these kinds of players, Riot Games’ Behavioral Systems Team revealed back in April 2021 some updates to their penalties tier system.

Jordan “BarackProbama” Checkman, Competitive Team Design Lead at Riot, discussed some of the reactions they received after the previously announced adjustments, learning about the expectations and the impact of the new updates based on MMR data. 

“The first and most salient thing we look at are the number of games that don't start. At high levels of ranked play (Diamond I+) for the past few months, ~33% of champ selects end in a dodge. Not cool.”

While this means only a minority of highly ranked players are truly abusing the system, its increase factor is constant if you take into account this behaviour is linked to high ELO players.

To prevent more frequent occurrences of dodging within matches, Riot added a penalty tier to curb those 1% of players who dodge three or more times a day, implementing strong punishments for those who fall into this activity often.

These penalties will be implemented as well in ARAM, following feedback from players and Rioters. Dodging tiers resets will be reduced by one every 12 hours making daily consecutive dodgers face these restrictions sooner and helping legitimate dodgers recover faster.

“One critique some players had when we announced the new penalty tiers above is that they only impact LP, which can be recovered fairly easily. In the future, we plan to evaluate additional punishments that will stick with a dodger for longer than a one-time LP penalty.”

In the future, Riot will be looking to add new punishments to Champ Select reporting, to prevent those planning to ruin the game and an autofill/secondary role parity that will prioritize both teams having the same roles auto-filled, in a way to prevent toxicity like the system implemented in Wild Rift.

• Read more: Riot reveals Prestige Roadmap for the second half of 2021

Don't forget to check out our dedicated League of Legends section with news, guides, esports coverage, and more.