Phenomena such as “toxic” gameplay, “toxic players”, and various forms of game disruption seem to be increasingly common in League of Legends. Although this issue also appears in the game, Riot Games has been criticized the most for lacking a strong enough penalty system to curb the aforementioned bad behaviors. And when the publisher doesn’t act strictly, with many players in the game, it’s understandable that “game disruption is rampant everywhere”.
Due to being heavily criticized by the community, Riot Games has recently taken new steps to enhance their penalty system. First, they allow players to report and block chat from other players right from the champion selection screen to prevent unnecessary arguments early on.
Most recently, Riot announced it will increase penalties for two of the most frustrating behaviors for players: excessive feeding and AFK/leaving the game.
Specifically, for the act of “feeding excessively”, Riot Games will base their decision on a player’s KDA across several matches to determine whether to impose a penalty. Previously, if you achieved a score range of 0-100, the system would identify you as a game disruptor, but in patch 10.15, this threshold will be adjusted to 0-75. Naturally, Riot Games does not want to ban accounts for just a few bad games, however, if you continuously feed at such a level, a ban is justified. The penalty for excessive feeding will be a 14-day account lock.
Regarding penalties for AFK behavior, Riot Games will upgrade the detection of this behavior to a higher level, penalizing those who intentionally let their champions run around without impacting the game. The first level of penalty is when a player leaves the game without reconnecting; they will automatically lose that match. At a higher level of penalty, the more AFK instances, the longer the matchmaking time will be. Riot has not provided specific details yet, but it is predicted that an additional 5 minutes will be added to the matchmaking time for each AFK instance.
Hopefully, with these strong measures from Riot Games, the problem of game disruption and unfair matches will be minimized as much as possible.