Riot announces new League penalties for disruptive behavior: 14-day bans, more

Riot Games have announced the next updates to their League of Legends behavioral systems, which revealed extensive penalties for players who repeatedly AFK in game and queue dodgers, among others.

The League devs outlined their goals of reducing and mitigating the harm caused by repeat “disruptive behavior.” While that includes everything such as intentionally feeding, griefing, taxing lanes, and the like, Riot are ramping up penalties to what they can measure for the time being.

As a result, people who tend to go AFK a lot or are used to queue dodging will see an impactful increase to their ban timer.

In the meantime, Riot said they’re working on systems to help identify other offensives that can’t be perfectly measured on a data sheet, but for now it’s beefing up penalties where they can.

Queue Dodging

Riot’s noticed that players have gotten used to dodging bad lobbies. While the exact reason for dodging a queue can vary, Riot’s also noticed that people will use dodges as a “tool,” and the company isn’t too happy about that.

“A single dodge doubles the overall time-to-game for 9 other players and creates a jarring experience as players are forced in and out of queue. At higher levels of play, we even see some players say it’s better to dodge a champ select with picks they don’t like than it is to play the match out,” Riot said.

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To counteract this, they’re adding a new tier to their existing penalty scheme for people that dodge queues.

Existing Tiers (unchanged)

• 1st dodge in 24 hours: six min lockout (15 for ARAM) and -3 LP in ranked
• 2nd dodge in 24 hours: 30 min lockout and -10 LP in ranked

New Tier

• 3rd dodge in 24 hours: 12 hour lockout and -10 LP in ranked

AFK Penalty increase

Meanwhile, those who leave games early or go AFK will see a drastic change in how long they’re locked out of League’s matchmaking queue.

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Riot finds that regular AFKs are usually tied to game-ruining behavior rather than that errant obstacle that prevents a League player from committing to the full game.

As such they’re scaling the timers for AFK penalties at all three tiers:

• 1st AFK: five min lockout and auto-loss
• 2nd AFK: 30 min lockout and auto-loss
• 3rd AFK: 14 day lockout and auto-loss

This is in addition to the scaling LP loss for every AFK penalty, although that remains unchanged since it was set live a few months ago.

• Tier 1: -2 LP
• Tier 2: -3 LP
• Tier 3: -5 LP
• Tier 4: – 6 LP
• Tier 5: -8 LP

For the rest of 2021, Riot’s going to work on solutions to improve their confidence system to sift out AFK, Intentional Feeding, and Verbal Abuse which will include an in-game reporting option to give a more accurate reference of when an offense took place.

Riot will continue to monitor behaviors in League in hopes of providing a much healthier community for players that how it is now.