Penalty For AFKers

The developers of Rainbow Six Siege aren’t the only ones who have AFKers on their minds right now. Riot Games, the creators of League of Legends, have released a dev update outlining their approach to the behavior and the plans they’ve hatched to address it moving forward.

The post lays out some upcoming changes that reflect Riot’s multi-faceted approach to the issue, noting that AFKing and leaving are “some of the most disruptive behaviors” players face. These include new penalty tiers for players who continue to AFK or leave “consistently,” a new penalty type to shield players from repeat offenders.

Queue Lockouts are a new penalty type described by Riot as “mega-delays” – an improvement over the existing Queue Delays feature. Queue Lockouts will show a pop-up to the player, explaining their punishment and prohibiting them from joining MOBA queues for a period of time determined by their penalty tier.

“When we issue a Queue Lockout, we’re not saying, ‘Hey, don’t you hate it when your time is wasted?’ The studio explains, “We’re removing the player from the population for a while so they can’t continue to AFK in games.” For behavior-changing reasons, once a player’s Queue Lockout has ended, they will still be subject to the “maximum-level queue delay” for the relevant period of time, so “players who take a break don’t get to sit out their entire punishment.”

This is where the new tiers enter the picture. Four new tiers have been added, bringing the total number of tiers to seven. The highest level is the most serious, with a 14-day Queue Lockout and a maximum Queue Delay of 15 minutes for five games (the same as the previous highest, tier three). It’s worth noting that it’s not a time-based system, so playing games without AFKing is the best way to lower penalties. You can’t just wait for it to finish on its own.

Finally, Riot claims that it has switched to a “more sophisticated model” that will help reformed players move down through the penalty tiers much more effectively than the previous system, so if you avoid AFKing, the system should recognize this and move you down accordingly. This means Queue Locking can be based on a higher degree of certainty that a player has been “consistently disruptive,” rather than poor connectivity or other unintentional hiccups, which is good news.

There’s no word on when these changes will be implemented in the live game, but Riot says it’ll test these new features in a few regions first to ensure they’re working properly. When they hit the PBE, we’ll make a note in our regular patch notes, so keep an eye on our site if you want to learn more.

Check out our League of Legends patch 11.19 notes to see what’s coming up for the live MOBA in the near future.