[2021] The solution to afk's in Ranked.

Original Post — Direct link

I'm seeing a lot of posts from people saying that they don't care about the punishment, they just want loss mitigation in the case of an AFK. This is a very delicate issue that's not so black and white as most of you think.

Let's take this scenario : You get into a game, all 5 players are feeding and every lane is hard losing. One of you gets fed up and bored and decides to leave so they can watch some TV or do anything else. Does that mean you deserve to lose less in that game? Absolutely NOT. This is the case in MOST intentional afk cases. Someone feels like the game is doomed or over and decides they would rather do something else. Regardless of whether they're right or not about how winnable the game is, this is mainly the thought process. No one would intentionally leave in a winning game. I once hid in a bathroom so I can finish a game because I was getting interrupted IRL. People would do anything to finish a winning game. I'm not blaming the victims of afk's but you can't expect Riot to reward your team for losing just because someone left.

Let's take another scenario, our whole team was stomped and it was mainly my fault. I decide to do the right thing and disconnect so my team loses less. I mean I'm not losing much since the punishment is still the same (since y'all don't care about the punishment)

However there's a way around this: Punish these people with what they value the most (their ranks). We can have loss mitigation but on top of that you need to make the afk lose double. Double LP in diamond + or 2 marks per loss in Emerald and lower in case they Afk. This will ensure that no one "takes the hit" and it will force the afk to stick around even in a doomed game.

You can't just say "I want loss mitigation and I don't care about the punishment". These 2 are codependent. If they added loss mitigation without changing the punishment, then it's easily exploitable and it will affect competitive integrity.

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almost 3 years ago - /u/riotBoourns - Direct link

Originally posted by Saijaxcaiilrynx

In case of an AFK that never connected from the very beginning, I feel like it's better to just implement remakes. No reason to not have remakes, the champ select and loading screen are pretty fast in this game. You barely waste 4 minutes on champ select and loading so it's not a big waste and you can go into another game immediately.

Yes, this is why we are working on remakes. You also correctly identified one of the big challenges with AFK compensation. It's hard to do without being abusable. In fact to prevent abuse we would likely have to do something like penalize the AFK player 4x for the loss otherwise it would be a net positive for the team. If players think they can get an advantage getting loss compensation by having an AFK they will be incentivized to try to force someone to leave if there's even the smell of a losing game. This is why remake on League PC is so tightly constrained.

almost 3 years ago - /u/riotBoourns - Direct link

Originally posted by Lucifer_lord_of_cats

The only thing I'd ask is would there be some way to appeal in the event of your internet dropping out rather than it being intentional? Previously I've had someone unplug the router right at the end of the game so there was no way for me to get back in. How would this be dealt with?

Unfortunately this is really tricky, because you can always physically disable your connection if you want to AFK intentionally and we can't tell the difference. Also, no matter the reason you are still ruining the game for 4-9 other players regardless of intent. So we do want to hold everyone accountable whether it's intentional or not. That's why we make the early AFK penalties pretty forgiving and ramp them up if you have a history of AFK.

almost 3 years ago - /u/riotBoourns - Direct link

Originally posted by RefanRes

Sorry, how would giving the afk person a loss and effectively not giving the the remaining players a win or loss be net positive? If you look at it only numerically maybe but that ignores the player experience.

They've had their time wasted by someone who trolls a game then goes afk. There isn't an advantage to an individual. They still lost around 20 mins of their time.

If chat logs show players tried to force someone to afk then they'll be detected. If players hard inted a game on purpose then they should also have a loss mark and no afk protection if that is detected that they did int.

The game would be better off overall with loss prevention. Worrying about people trying to force people to afk would surely be more manageable and have less cases than afks currently.

Does Riot have the adequate tools to properly detect issues in chat? Does it have the tools to detect afks? Does it have tools to detect inting? If so then a game marked with any of those issues could have retrospective marks returned based on what is detected.

Even if Riot actually cant detect these issues they suggest they can. Is it right to not do something because its potentially abused in very occasional cases when overall it has the impact of minimising the negative psychological impact on player experience?

Unfortunately past experience has shown that if there is a way to game the system players will usually find it. I can't blame you for considering it part of the game, so we have to design with that in mind. :D With what you suggest, it is still abusable because one person gets a loss and 4 people get forgiven when they probably would have lost if they played it out. Say the unspoken agreement is that the worst player KDA goes AFK, so 20% of the time you are losing that might be you, but 80% of the time you get a loss forgiven. You benefit 4 games to 1! Other games have had similar abuse problems and mitigation is not as simple as examining chat logs. We've seen in other games that players will invent code words or other methods to try to circumvent detection.

almost 3 years ago - /u/riotBoourns - Direct link

Originally posted by MP7ForEmi

Right now the situation is atrocious because of the miserable combination of no protection/compensation and no punishment at all for the offender in most cases. Most of the afks I see continue moving in base, often still flaming the team, so the system doesn't auto detect them. And reports seem futile. It's ruining the game :(

Thanks for taking time to reply, hopefully you're able to make any sort of improvements soon.

We have more advanced AFK detection running in the background, but our initial testing showed that we were getting too many false positives (detecting players who were not actually AFK). We are tuning it again and if successful we will use it to start detecting more AFK players.

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