League of Legends plans to punish players who go AFK

Riot Games has issued a stark warning to its players and confirmed new punishments are coming to League of Legends if you're caught AFK (away from keyboard). The developer has confirmed it's clamping down on those who go AFK and attempt to cheat the system with "intent to lose" in competitive matches.

There's nothing more frustrating than playing with someone who goes AFK, which let's be honest, has probably happened to all of us at some point or another. Developers have always acknowledged problems with intentional griefers, however, the latest update could be the biggest step yet toward combating it once and for all.

Cody "Codebear" Germain revealed the changes in a Behavioural Systems update. League of Legends' internal systems are getting a major tweak when it comes to AFK. Notably, the surrender system will be upgraded to take AFK into account and there will be an option to surrender earlier if there's an AFK player on your team. Codebear explained plans to “Update the surrender system to account for AFK players on your team". The post continued, "When an AFK is detected, [the game] will refresh the surrender cooldown and alert your whole team, allowing you to surrender again immediately". 

The post continued, "In some test regions, players hit our AFK punishment thresholds faster, meaning a steady increase in penalty application. In other test regions, we saw a steady decline in both AFK detection and penalties after an initial immediate burst that occurred when we tightened our thresholds. This signals a reduction in repeat offenses, which is a trend we would like to see continued". 

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Finally, your LP will be preserved if you're on a team with someone who is AFK. Although the new system will detect an inactive teammate, it won’t give you a free pass. "We’re going to be rolling out a new system that reduces the LP you lose from a defeat where an AFK or leaver was detected on your team", said Germain. "This doesn’t mean that every game with an AFK player is a free mulligan – we’re going to take into account how the game was going before the player AFKed, and how often it’s been happening". 

The post closed with a potential launch of the new "LP Mitigation" system. Developers want the updates shipped by Patch 10.24 ,and with LoL currently being on Patch 10.17 with a two-week release - we could see them arrive in late November.

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