League of Legends product lead for competitive gameplay Cody “Codebear” Germain updated fans on behavioral improvements and upcoming features in today’s dev blog post.
Riot recently started a “two-patch experiment,” adding a Champion Select muting and reporting feature. The company’s next goal is to target intentional feeding and AFKing, aiming to reduce its frequency and mitigate the harm to affected players.
BEHAVIORAL SYSTEMS JULY UPDATE
Sharing our next areas of focus for behavioral systems improvements.https://t.co/xYjPkFoYVb pic.twitter.com/RhJYiUY9gF— moobeat (@moobeat) July 3, 2020
“We’re developing enhanced automated detection methodology specifically for intentional feeding and idle/AFK behaviors to confidently verify when these behaviors have occurred,” Codebear said. “We’re designing improvements to the actions that occur when we identify AFK behaviors.”
Riot is designing an enhanced automated methodology to better detect when the disruptive behavior took place. This should make it easier to automatically ban the culprit without unjustly punishing a player who’s having a bad game.
The company is also trying to improve actions taken when an intentional feeder or AFK player is directly trying to lose the game for their team. This includes “enhanced penalty actions” for the griefer and fewer repercussions for their teammates.
An updated Summoner Code is also on the way, which will “clearly call out” situations that are disruptive and “clearly indicate the consequences for those actions.”
Earlier this year Voyboy called out Riot Games for lack of action. Voyboy called out Riot Games yesterday for its lack of action toward these issues, saying that the ranked scene is now in its worst state ever in terms of player base attitude.
Voyboy pointed out that many players aren’t scared to be toxic because Riot isn’t vigilant about punishing players who intentionally feed, troll, or verbally abuse their teammates. Almost every person who’s played League has more than one experience with toxicity and it’s likely that the toxic person wasn’t banned.
“There’s no point in reporting people because Riot won’t ban them,” Voyboy said. “No one is scared of getting in trouble [and] no one is scared of being barred from solo queue. Riot has really made it clear—through their lack of vocalization on the growing problems that the player base has been experiencing—that they don’t really care. If they did care, they would have done something by now.”
The 25-year-old also mentioned that unless you type an offensive word that gets flagged by an automated filter, you likely won’t get in trouble for your actions. This is tough for higher Elo players because they usually end up playing against the same people, which eventually means they’ll get griefed again.
