We all know that the best MOBAs can get heated and make us say and do things we shouldn’t, but a recent Riot Games report has given us an idea of just how bad the problem is by quantifying the number of reports and penalties issued in League of Legends.
In 2021, there were over 240 million reports per month across all of Riot’s games, the company says in a blog post. That’s almost three billion reports a year if you tally it up. “An astounding number of games are played and players report other players for a spectrum of reasons ranging from legitimate concerns to normal results like playing well or poorly,” Riot says.
League of Legends alone sees 700,000 penalties given out by Riot per month, all picked up and decided via text detection, AFK detection, and inting detection. It’s no secret that videogames as a whole is trying to stomp out player toxicity, and that’s what Riot is doing by investing more into these systems that monitor player behaviour.
“Leaverbuster, our AFK detection system monitors every game to make sure players who quit early and impact their teams are punished for it,” Riot says. Toxic players can’t continue taking on the chin either. “We use tiers so players who AFK more receive harsher penalties. And for ranked games where your teammates go AFK, we provide early surrender and LP mitigation so you aren’t punished for your teammates’ tilt.”
Similarly, feeding is a huge problem in every MOBA out there and one of the biggest game-ruining acts that can be committed. But how does Riot tackle this? “This can be a bit more difficult to track,” it says. “So we use a learning model that tracks seven different data points across all champions to confidently detect when someone is intentionally feeding and not just playing poorly. As we continue to update it, false positives have become extremely rare for the system.”
With ever-advancing systems in place to report and punish players who ruin the experience for others, we hope to one day tell our grandchildren about the time Teemo kept diving under enemy towers with a nostalgic tear in our eye, rather than having to still live the nightmare fuel.