Hello everyone and welcome to another summary of the Riot’s /dev blog pos, regarding Competitive Gameplay Changes. This one is quite large so we included only the most important information in this one. Without further ado, let’s begin!
Where Behaviral Systems is Now
In Riot’s latest Behavioral Systems update, Codebear called out dodge and AFK penalties as the main focus areas and promised follow-up information in mid-July, aka the current post. With the recently shared update on dodge penalties and soon-to-be-released post about AFK penalties, this one will be about the Client’s side Detection and Penalties.
Detection and Penalties
“Reduce the frequency of disruptive behavior”
- Further Confidence Based Reporting: Riot’s seen positive results from their intentional feeding confidence methodology, and early testing indicates that similar improvements will be seen by rolling out this out to disruptive behaviors like hate speech, verbal abuse, and AFKs.
- Verbal Abuse Detection and Punishment: With the behind-the-scenes machine models constantly actioning on intentional feeding and AFKs, Riot Codebear stated that they have an opportunity to look at verbal abuse issues and asses what newer text evaluation systems can bring to the table.
Harm Mitigation
“Reduce the impact of disruptive behavior on other players”
- Champion Seelect Reporting Penalties: Finally Riot is looking at what they can do to connect champ select reports to post-game report categories where corresponding categories exist. Later on in the year, these system should get into place to issue penalties and mitigations directly in Champion Select.
Where Competitive Gameplay is now
Codebear stated that ranked experience has seen significant improvement since the last preseason. Across the board, 99% of ranked matches pair opposing teams that average within half a division of each other, and teammates themselves are within ~1 division of each other.
Matchmaking
“Improve queue Competitive Gameplay Matchmaking quality without compromising queue time or availability”
- Dynamic Position Popularity & Autofill: Position popularity fluctuates throughout the daym but the current algorith isn’t performing to the standard we want it to. Early testing indicates that by improving the way we calculate position popularity, we can potentially reduce autofill rates as low as ~0.6% of all games, down from the current ~2.5%.
- Premade Skill Balance: In 2020, Riot shipped Premade Parity to balance out premades across teams. The team is looking at additional filters to specifically improve skill balance between each team’s premades.
- Dynamic Map Side Advantage: In a perfectly even skill matchup, map side advantage could mean that blue side has a very slight advantage due to meta shifts. Riot is looking to make matchmaking’s side correction dynamis as well, so it can automatically adjust as advantages change.
Ranked
“Improve progression satisfaction and skill expression in our systems”
- Ranked Decay: Apex tier (Master+) and high Diamond players that take a few weeks off from League are decaying further than we’d like, down to visible ranks that are expremely off from their skill level. The team is looking into better options for decay rate that will allow players to roll out in a low-disruption way before the end of the season.
- Social Comparison: Ranked leagues with people you don’t know, and almost never see in games, are hard to feel a connection with. Riot is experimenting with a more personal social comparison leaderboard right where the players need it – directly in the ranked lobby.
Competive Gameplay Rewards
“Make rewards more recognizable and relevant for time spent in League”
- Flex Rewards: Since last year, player’s have seen more and more players spending a significant amount of time and effort climing with their group in Flex. This season, we’re going to be offering two versions of each per-tier chroma, one for Solo/Duo and one for Flex.
- Clash Rewards Visibility: Getting together with the crew and tackling the gauntlet of Clash is thrilling, and exactly how League shuold be experienced. However, there been indications that once players lose two games in a tournament, it’s hard to find the motivation to continue on. With that in mind, we’ll be getting a visual display of the possible reward in each stage of the tournament to motivate players to persevere.
Whew, this was a big one. We hope we’ve succeeded in our attempt to compress this to post to the most valuable information only. Hope to see you soon in the next /dev post!
You can read the full article on the League of Legends Official website.