Why dodging is a problem for League, and what we’re doing about it.
Barackprobama
Hello everyone and welcome to our summary of the recent /dev: post by riot games. In this article Barackrpobama, a competitive team design lead, explains why dodging is bad for the overall quality of the matches, shares some juicy data with us, and talks about current and future changes to the dodging system and penalties. We’re going to provide you with the bare bones of the article so you can quickly check the changes they are planning to ship in patch 11.15.
Why Dodging is Bad for the Game
Barackprobama explains why dodging is bad for League of Legends: when a player dodges, the matchmaker has to throw everyone back into queue and form teams out of the remaining players. While this won’t make the quality of the game worse in, let’s say, a silver game, you can expect how dodging will affect the top of the ladder. Diamond players and above will have to wait longer queues and the matchmaker (due to the long queue time) will try to pull players from a wider skill range to fill open positions.
He also stated that dodging to get favorable circumstances reduces the competitive integrity of the League of Legends. For example, a player that one-tricks a certain champion will most certainly dodge if his main gets banned, instead of trying to get better at the game overall.
We expect players to try their hardest in all situations, even those that are uphill battles from the start.
Of course, there are real cases like emergencies or disconnects that warrant not playing a game you’ve started. That’s why the first punishment tier is light, so that occasional dodging for legitimate reasons isn’t overly penalized.
Dodging Data
High MMR Champion Select Failure Rates
By quickly looking at this data, we can see that a whopping THIRD of the champ selects ends in a dodge! At high levels of ranked play, a lot of players use the dodging system to have favorable odds in most games possible.
“The good news is that only a minority of highly ranked players are truly abusing the system. Only ~%1.6 of highly ranked players are dodging 3+ times per day. This is the primary behavior we’re targeting.
Which leads to an average increase of 40% in the time it takes to get into a game at this level.
Obviously, this isn’t a great state of affairs, which leads us to…”
“What We’re Doing About It”
As a refresher from last time, we’re adding a new dodge penalty tier to curb those 1% of players who dodge 3+ times a day.
| Tier | Queue Lockout | LP Penalty (Ranked Only) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 minutes | -3 LP |
| 2 | 30 minutes | -10 LP |
| 3 (new) | 720 minutes (12 hours) | -10 LP |
In addition, Barackprobama said that they will be changing the strategy they currently use by changing the way dodge tiers reset. Previously, your dodge tiers would be fully reset in 24 hours since your last dodge. Now the tiers will reduce one by one every 12 hours. This change is aimed only at the high levels of play, while legitimate dodgers will recover much faster.
Future Work
“As mentioned earlier, we understand that we also need to attack the root causes of dodging. Here’s a snapshot of some of what we’re looking into:
Adding New Punishments to Champ Select Reporting – This will be a way for players to report someone who is intentionally planning to ruin the game from champ select and have that player bear the consequences of their behavior.
Autofill/Secondary Role Parity – We’re investigating targeted enhancements to matchmaking that will prioritize both teams having the same roles autofilled, not just the same number of players.”
If you want to read the whole article, click here.
If you want to read the recent /dev article about Sona, click here.