/dev: Improving Inting and Griefing Detection
League’s better when you’ve got teammates—and enemies—who play their best. Whether that’s helpful comms and pings, grouping for objectives, or spam missing-pinging a crazy outplay.
Alternatively, League is at its worst when someone’s griefing, inting, or running it down for fun. And it’s not just about the LP lost, it’s also about your time being wasted. It honestly just sucks.
We’ve already taken a few steps: Vanguard auto-detecting cheaters, updates to Honor, and LP refunds when cheaters ruin your game. But we know there’s more we can do. So, we’re rolling out improvements to our griefing detection system with the goal of more reliably detecting and punishing people who want to ruin your games and waste your time.
Today we’re going to break down what we hope the new system will achieve, how things we’ve already shipped have been going, and what we’re focusing on next. Generally, this is the foundation for a better experience—one where those of you who make League better get the recognition you deserve, and the ones who don’t? They don’t get to keep ruining it for everyone else.
Let’s get into it.
25.09 - Improved Detection
Next patch we’re rolling out significant improvements to our griefing detection system. Like cheaters, griefers have evolved over time, and we haven’t evolved our systems quickly enough to keep up with them. This has been a pain point in League for a while, and, honestly, it’s on us for not keeping up. These improvements are the first step of many for us to prevent griefers from ruining your games and wasting your time.
We won’t share exactly what the system looks for—because we don’t want to reveal the special sauce—but we’ve expanded the automatic detection systems around things like trolling and griefing (and no, running around in your base doesn’t make you any less AFK).
The updated system looks at things that may not necessarily make you lose a game, but they do make playing the game a miserable experience. Even if you end up winning, it doesn’t feel like a win if you just had a disco Nunu following your jungler around all game.
We’ve been running tests on live games for a few patches to ensure that our detection rates are high and our false positives are low. Based on the data we’ve seen, we’re estimating that about 10x more players per day will receive legitimate bans for game-ruining behavior than are currently actioned on for our current gameplay detections—we want to caveat something here though, we won’t be going back and retroactively penalizing players “caught” while running these tests, because we were fine-tuning the system to weed out false positives.
Once we’ve got a few patches of data, we’ll be sure to follow up with the real results and next steps.
Additionally, when you receive report feedback for this kind of behavior, it will include the name of the offender like cheating feedback notifications currently do. We’ve heard from you all is that it feels better when you know that the systems are working based on your reports, and that’s a feedback loop we’d like to keep healthy, so we’re gonna start with providing the name and see how it goes before we determine if we’ll stay with that exact method permanently.
25.04 - Honor System Revamp
In Patch 25.04 we overhauled Honor so it dynamically updates up and down to reflect your recent behavior, not just the number of games you’ve played. This updated Honor level will stick around and won’t reset each Season. New players will still start at Honor Level 3, which, as a benchmark, we consider to be the average, good-Honored players.
In the previous Dev Update, we mentioned that we’d be tying two of the ten Hextech Chests per Act to Honor. We also want to tie other rewards to it as well, similar to the bonus Battle Pass XP and communication privileges that are already part of today’s Honor system.
Our goal with these changes is to respect players who actively and consistently engage in pro-social behavior and achieve Honor Levels 4 and 5.
For more details on the full change list, Honor privileges, and more, make sure to check out the announcement and our Honor Support page.
25.06 - Vanguard LP Refunds
In patch 25.06 we increased Vanguard’s functionality to refund LP to all players who’ve lost a game in which a cheater and/or botter was detected. If this applies to you, then you’ll receive a notification telling you when the match was, how much LP you’ll get back, and your updated rank if applicable.
At the time of writing, these changes have been live for one patch, but in that time we’ve refunded over 700,000 wrongfully lost LP to over 30,000 unique players, and banned around 24,000 accounts accused of cheating.
Longer Term Work
We know that there’s still a lot of work to do to make League a truly positive environment for all of you. We can always do better, and we’re committed to continually improving all of the systems that can help us get there. So here’s are some of the things we’re tackling next:
True Skill 2: We want every game of League to be played between ten equally-matched players. Smurfing and boosting are two ways that players try to work around our skill evaluation systems to make winning easier for themselves, whether by playing an alt account in lower Ranked queues or by playing someone else’s account in lower Ranked queues. One of the ways we think we can meaningfully address smurfing and boosting is through True Skill 2’s skill evaluation system, which we hope will get people to their correct skill level faster (We’re currently running tests in un-Ranked queues). This would mean fewer people spending time stomping on people they’re way better than. There are several other potential benefits that we see for True Skill 2. While we won't roll it out in Ranked in the near future at least without significant testing, there are benefits that this brings from its potential future usage in non-Ranked queues that can help with flagging this type of behavior in Ranked.
Honor Rewards: Honor in League isn’t just about punishing disruptive players, it’s also about showing appreciation for those of you who make League great. While we’ve done things like Honor Skins in the past, we’re going to experiment with more ways to say THANK YOU beyond the two Hextech Chests per Act.
The work here is never done. As we update our systems we know some players will be determined to find loopholes so they can continue to disrupt your games. It’s on us to be one step ahead of them, keeping the game fun for everyone.
We’ll be sure to keep you all updated on all of this progress in Dev Updates and blogs. And let us know if there are any spaces you feel like we could improve or explore.
As always, thanks for playing, see you on the Rift, and keep those reports coming so we can keep everyone’s game fun and safe.
