According to Riot Games, the systems implemented in VALORANT have “more than halved” the AFK rate compared to last year.
The AFK rate remained at a similar level throughout 2020. But AFKs quickly dropped after Riot built an advanced AFK detection system in early 2021 and imposed penalties for repeaters of the behavior.
Riot defines “AFK” as “someone who leaves or does not participate during an ongoing game” and says that “all competitive team-based multiplayer games” “to some extent” face this issue.
To resolve AFKs and improve the enjoyment of the game, Riot has found a way to detect players who have been disconnected from the game or who have been completely inactive for an extended period of time. But while that covered most AFK, including internet outages and rage quitting, it left some room for improvement.
The system failed to cover “more malicious AFKs”, i.e. those who were intentionally AFK but remained active in the game so as not to disconnect. To address this issue, Riot tuned the systems to look for specific behaviors and metrics that could be tied to AFKs.
“We can't go into specific details about these systems (as explaining how we detect AFKs would make it easier for bad actors to bypass these rules)," Riot said. “But what we can say is that our focus is on making the detection process massively scalable.”
Riot also wanted to make sure that penalties for going AFK are fair and forgiving for players who rarely go AFK. To achieve this goal, Riot has created an AFK “rating” for players who exhibit the current behavior for the system that monitors “AFK behavior” in all games played.
“The more a player stays AFK, the lower their rating and the harsher their penalty for a future violation,” Riot said.
If a player rarely or never AFKs, their AFK rating will be “good” meaning they will not be severely penalized for accidentally disconnecting or switching to AFK from a game. However, if a player quits rage every game, they can receive any penalty from a warning to a ban.
Riot is committed to improving the AFK detection system in 2022.