Quick LoL Thoughts: Game-Ruining Behavior Part 2

Hi folks,

Update here on how our efforts to address game-ruining behavior is going. As mentioned previously, we’ll be talking about this work on a monthly basis.

Previous discussion in case you missed it.

Updates on Previously Mentioned Work

The report notification changes have been performing as hoped, with visibility at peak times into how the system is working roughly doubling in most regions and quadrupling in Korea. Visibility into penalties being applied won’t solve issues all by itself but is an important pairing with better detection and penalties. Example of that for NA in this graph:

Reporting in champ select is tentatively on track for patch 10.14 (might end up in 10.15). Muting in champ select is currently scheduled to appear at the same time as reporting.

New Work and Learnings

We’ve been running post-game surveys about in game behavior, building up a picture of how common different behaviors are and which behaviors players find the most frustrating.

Example of what the resulting summarized data looks like:

Results so far match the feedback we’ve been getting on social media from players, giving us confidence that the issues already under discussion are representative of wider player feeling as well. Intentional feeding/afking and other in game sabotaging behavior are clear outliers. As a result, we've decided to dedicate more resources toward addressing specifically those issues.

We’ve also been combing through our existing int/afk detection and penalties with the following conclusions:

• We rely too much on behavior in a single game very clearly crossing the line of what’s unacceptable. That means players can skirt the line repeatedly in many games without being penalized. We need to put a lot more focus on cross-game behavior as a result.
• Our penalties for AFKing rely too much on queue penalties (like when a player dodges in champ select). We should be using other more significant penalties more often (e.g. temp bans) for players repeatedly afking/quitting.
• Our detection algorithms are too basic, over-relying on things like raw number of deaths per game and player reports. We should also be taking context into account a lot more when it comes to how we interpret certain actions. If a player DCs immediately after a failed surrender vote for example we should be confident they’re deliberately quitting even if their stats or other recent behavior don’t look out of line. Or, if a player says they’re going to AFK or feed, then does so, we should be much more confident in penalizing them quickly even if they don’t have a history of such actions (it’s very clear it’s deliberate).

Next Steps

We intend to ship a number of experiments and tweaks (like champ select reporting and muting) throughout this year. The next batch of these changes are in early stages of development right now, but we hope to share more details of our plans in a /dev post next month.

We look forward to talking more then!