/dev: Honor and Behavioral Systems Update

Bringing back honor opponents, multiple honors, and our future plans.

Hey everyone, we’re Riot Revenancer and Riot Heronic from the Behavioral Systems team here to talk to you about... you guessed it, Honor and Behavioral Systems.

This year we’ve shipped a few improvements to League’s behavioral system to help reward players for good behavior. And while we’re happy with how the changes have landed so far, we have more work we want to do in this space. So, let’s talk about some of the things you can expect for the rest of this year.

Updating Honor

When we updated in 2017 we did it with the purpose of rewarding good behavior in a way that reinforced valuable teamwork—with a real emphasis on teamwork. In the current system you can honor a single member of your team, and... that’s it.

This has led to it not being a way to honor players who behave well—instead it’s often used as a way to acknowledge teammates who play well in the game. And while that’s great, we want the honor system to reflect good behavior, not how many games you’ve played and how well you’ve played in them.

Additionally, the current rewards for the honor system don’t exactly feel honorable, and not getting the seasonal rewards for bad behavior isn’t driving the kind of impact we want to see.

So we’re making changes to the system that let players identify and reward others who are truly honorable, not just cracked at the game. We have long-term plans for the system overall, but the first part you’ll see this September is the ability to honor more than one player per game as well as the ability to honor enemies.

We’ll be back to share more updates on the system as they’re ready.

Griefing Detection Improvements

Something else we’ve been working on is addressing disruptive gameplay that has historically been difficult for us to prevent: griefing or “soft inting.” League is a complex, high stakes game where success is heavily dependent on the actions of a team of (in most cases) strangers. To us that's the perfect recipe for fun and competition, but unfortunately, it's also the perfect recipe for folks trying to hurt each other or reacting poorly through gameplay.

Before we talk about what we’re doing, we should start with being clear about what the term means. We define griefing as “taking deliberate actions with the intent of reducing the team or a teammate’s likelihood of success.”

Intent is key here, everyone has a bad game, and trying an off-meta pick like Bard mid isn’t griefing when it’s a strategy you’ve been having success with—but picking Yuumi mid because you don’t care is.

Other forms of more obvious disruptive behavior have been easier for us to address, like chat abuse, AFKing, or straight intentional feeding. Our system hasn’t really had a good way of differentiating between someone having a bad game and someone legitimately trying to throw by just trying hard enough. But we’re working on changing that.

The first way we’re doing that is by making obvious changes to our straightforward detection systems. This should catch obvious things like selling your items after 20 minutes and buying only Faerie Charms or wasting your ult at nothing on cooldown.

Second, we’re making improvements to our use of compound data to look at all behavior in totality. So, rather than always taking action on the first wasted ultimate, we’ll look at other factors—other suspicious behaviors in this game and others, report rate, statements of intent in chat, etc.

We currently sit at around 70% detection accuracy, and speaking bluntly, we think that’s unacceptable. But by making the changes above, we can reach higher levels of accuracy that would allow us to catch more soft inting (our absolute minimum, for reference, is 95% accuracy).

This won’t be a perfect system—an automated system won’t ever be able to catch every behavior that a human might be able to identify through added context. But we’re committed to continuing to expand this effort to the best of our ability, and a strength of this approach is that we can do so piece by piece as we add handling for additional griefing scenarios.

Right now we’re in the middle of testing—ensuring everything is working correctly and that the system is accurately finding disruptive behavior without affecting innocent players. We’re going to take our time with this process to ensure that we get it right, but you can expect to see more updates in the near future as we start taking action.

You’ve seen some of our work in the Disruptive Behavior Repair space earlier this year, and we wanted to share some numbers to-date.

Since going live, Repair has redressed and given the following transgressions and awards:

Future Updates

We have more work planned to make League a safer and more enjoyable place. We’ll be back with more updates to Honor and our work with griefing later!