Riot reveal new plans for LoL dodge penalty rework after player backlash

After mass community backlash, dodge penalties in League of Legends will not be changed, with Riot “refocusing on reducing game ruining behavior and matchmaking improvements” instead.

A strategic dodge in League of Legends can be the difference between losing 3LP, and 18LP. Sometimes, your team has an awful draft, or the flaming has already started before you’ve loaded onto Summoner’s Rift.

Riot were looking at cracking down on the dodge penalty system in upcoming patches, ramping up penalties for all players. However, changes were quickly shunned by the community though, prompting Riot to shelve them ⁠— for now.

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Lead gameplay designer Mark ‘Scruffy’ Yetter said the devs still have a long way to go in implementing a reworked dodge penalty system. They want to make sure players aren’t penalized for client bugs, and having to avoid toxic games.

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“We’re backing away from dodge penalty increases,” he said in an April 9 tweet. “Hearing your feedback about the reasons that make you want to dodge convinced us that we can get more value [by] hitting those issues first.

“The team is refocusing on reducing game ruining behavior and matchmaking improvements.”

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What game-ruining behavior and matchmaking improvements specifically mean is unclear. Riot has recently implemented changes to autofill and duo parity for ranked queues to make team balancing more even, so an extension of these changes is on the cards.

The dodge system will still be getting minor changes along the way. The League devs discovered a “misconfiguration in the dodge timers” players could abuse to dodge more games without getting increased penalties. This will be patched out in the coming weeks.

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However, the increased “repeated dodge timeout” and LP penalties for dodges will not be coming any time soon.

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While Riot are still intending on reducing the frequency of dodges ⁠— as Scruffy said in an April 3 blog post ⁠— the devs are making sure the players are heard.

So, you can keep dodging and take the -3LP for now, without having to worry about any extra punishment. Just be careful in the future.