Riot Games' fight against League of Legends players who have badly affected the community continues.
Behavior systems makers BarackProbama and TimTamMonster discussed AFK behavior on a dev blog today, outlining a new "queue locking" system to reduce dropouts across all MOBA modes.
The current penalty system imposes turn delays for offending players and puts them on hold for the next few matches. According to Riot, the new queue lock system deploys "mega delays" and prevents players from queuing for days.
According to the blog post, “For most people, Queue Delays work well, but around 9% of our players worldwide exhibit consistent AFK behavior and their penalties don't seem to give them up.” “When a player experiences Queue Lock, a window will be displayed explaining their penalty and they will not be able to start games in MOBA queues.”
Penalty ranks one through three do not have queue locks, only queue delays lasting longer than five games. The fourth phase is when queue lockups begin and prevent players from entering a match for a whole day. Tiers five, six, and seven then increase the queue lock time to three, seven, and 14 days, respectively. And when the queue lock timer expires, violators still have to go through the maximum queue delay of 15 minutes for five games.
Riot is also making some changes to how players are evaluated in the revamped system. The current system currently makes it difficult for those in the higher penalty tiers to lower their sentences. A “more sophisticated model” should assess multiple factors and be more effective at rewarding good behavior. The developers also want to target gameplay reasons (such as inability to deal with annoying behavior in the game and connection issues) as to why a player might be AFK.
It's unclear exactly when the queue lock system will be made available globally, but Riot will begin testing the changes in a few regions first.
