Riot adds Queue Lockout penalties against recurrent AFKs in League of Legends

Riot Games continues to deal and making changes to reduce and prevent toxic behaviour, like inting, queue dodging, and AFKs in League of Legends.

As they announced first back in April, their Behavioral Systems team revealed one of many updates for their penalties tier system, increasing the queue delay periods and the amount of LP lost, after falling into this game-ruining activities.

Since then, Riot has implemented a couple of adjustments to this, while releasing some stats around how the system has evolved around its players’ community, and while so far this has shown good results, there is still much to do to eradicate this problem.

Now, through one of their traditional dev blogs, Jordan “BarackProbama” Checkman, Riot's Competitive Team Design Lead, and “TimTamMonster”, the Behavioral Systems producer, sat down to discuss the upcoming changes to reduce the frequency of AFKs by introducing a new type of penalty: Queue Lockouts.

According to both Rioters, this new penalty will work as a mega-delay, as players who experience a Queue Lockout will have a popup displayed explaining their punishment, and will be unable to start games in MOBA queues.

“When we issue a Queue Lockout, we're not saying "hey, doesn't it suck to have your time wasted?" We're removing the player from the population for a while so they can't continue to AFK in games,” they explained on the dev blog.

After a queue lockout expires, it will be followed by the maximum-level queue delay so they can still maintain the benefits of behaviour modification and players who take a break don’t get to sit out their entire punishment.

With this new addition to the penalty ladder, any player that is currently at a very high tier will be reset to Tier 3, giving them a chance to reform before the Queue Lockouts begin. The new tiers will be set as follows:

That said, they also made clear this more sophisticated model will be more effective in moving reformed players down the tiers, as this will be influenced by multiple factors rather than just recent activity.

“As this is rolled out, we are committed to continuing to monitor AFKs, both in regards to the frequency of this behaviour and regional specific connectivity issues. We want to ensure we are being equitable across all regions who may experience different levels of connectivity,” they concluded.

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Header image via Riot Games.