A while back, Riot said they were going to start locking ranked queue for egregious trolls and griefers. The griefers and inters would have to play norms games to re-unlock ranked queue.
Did Riot end up dropping this? I can't find any updates on it, but they said in the post (which was in May) that they would be rolling this system out in the coming months. It is September now.
External link →We haven't dropped this at all and we've actually still been working on implementing it. Currently it's planned for sometime in the next patch or two and the way it will work is pretty straightforward.
If you catch a suspension from the game or get to the point where you're getting more severe chat restrictions, you'll receive a ranked queue ban until you re-earn the ability to queue into ranked again. So hypothetically if you leave too many games to the point where you finally catch a 24 hour queue suspension, when that suspension is up you'll be required to play 5 normal games before you can step foot into ranked again. For right now we're keeping it at 5 games regardless of severity or history, but we could adjust that in the future after we've observed how it works on live. The important thing to mention is that if you're hitting this point you've possibly caught a few infractions, and have already encountered a few queue delays or honor impacts before you hit this point. (Or did something so severe you got fast-tracked to it) TL;DR: If someone is catching this, they're earning it.
We're eager to see how this works and will likely follow up on it's impact.
Please don't f**k up normal queues with these changes.
We're going to be watching normal queues closely. If it turns out all we're doing is shuffling toxicity around, we'll reevaluate the feature (maybe turn it off, maybe take another stab at it)
But if you've been following our dev blogs, you'll know that we currently believe that the toxicity you meet in game is normally not "toxic people being toxic," it's "people who are normally not toxic being toxic sometimes." The theory goes that putting people who are struggling with the stress of the ranked ladder in a lower stakes queue will allow them to take a breather. Or, if they hate norms that much, then at least encourage them to think twice before repeating their behaviour.
Will this only work with chat-based restrictions? If you don't implement a way to catch people actively trolling, people will only find new creative ways to not try in ranked.
What happens if the person just trolls in the 5 normal games, considering they would care even less about the result?
This will work with a wide variety of transgressions. Feeding, leaving, and text can all get you a Rank Restriction
will it require winning normal games at all? whats to stop people who get queue banned to just grief the 5 normal games ruining it for everyone else on their teams till theyre allowed back?
Hopefully the same things that got them caught in the first place.
If we need to, we can add a win requirement later. But the hope is to place people in a lower stakes queue where it's okay to reconnect with league being a game we play for fun. Requiring players to win puts the same incentive "you must win" on the remedial games as ranked games have.
Will this move be coupled with a crackdown on Smurf accounts? Because I'd imagine without it, people will just account hop instead of playing out games.
One of the hopes we have here is actually to prevent a certain specific brand of account hopping.
Many of our punishments are time based. This means that people with multiple accounts can often swap accounts and play until the punishment on their main has expired.
With game based ranked restrictions, those people will eventually need to come back to their main and play those normal games. There's no way to use an alt account to circumvent the punishment entirely. Obviously it only works for players who play ranked, but if we see improvement here we can try new features in the space later.
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