Boards›Gameplay

Game 'Pause' Feature

TheNotoriousBus··1 votes·443 views

Will Riot ever decide to create a pause feature during games when summoners go afk?

I was just involved in a game where my team was playing fairly well and for whatever reason divine intervention decided to mess things up. (late game) I got the dreaded "Attempting to Reconnect" popup for about 3 minutes until the game finally froze. Then I restarted my computer and logged in, only to find a ridiculously long wait. There is an option to reconnect to the game you left, but multiple messages popped up saying the server was too busy to reconnect me. (I think that defeats the purpose of the function)

By the time I was finally able to log in, the game had ended and even though we won I was still probably reported for leaving.

I can understand not having a pause option, especially when summoners just get fed up and leave, leaving the game in a stalled state but I think it would make sense to have such a function and cap it at around 5 minutes. That would give those of us with unfortunate luck to have a snowballs chance at getting back in the game without causing negative outcomes.

Any thoughts? (P.S. This is my first board post and I'm unaware of how the whole system works, or if this topic has already been discussed. If so could someone point me in the right direction? Thank you!)

3 Comments

Sir ArmaMalum1 votes

This a generally wanted feature and is actually already in the game in the "tournament draft" mode. It has a cumulative pause time (between both teams) cap of 30 min and most fan-made tournaments have a soft-cap (unless a dc is present, this is the cap before disqualification) of five minutes. The main problem with this getting into normals and ranked is that a pause feature must be able to pause the entire game, and thus allows one person to affect the entire other team.

A vote system has been talked about, but the you run into that one ass who doesn't pause because they want to abuse the fact they have a dc.

Overall , the idea of a pause feature is a great idea, it's the challenge of making it non-abusable. Just like the issue of a "dc from start" forgiveness/restart feature.

TheNotoriousBus1 votes

Thats a good point. I really didn't consider the abuse of power angle. It was just extremely frustrating being heavily involved in a game and not being able to fix it. i'm sure they'll come up with something reasonable for normal/ranked games eventually.

Caoil1 votes

I think a similar way about dealing with DC's is the system DOTA 2 has in place. If a player on your team DCs for 5 minutes, then your team is allowed to leave the game with no penalty. The DCer is forced to play a certain amount of game time in an AFK queue with others who DCed or AFKed during a game. The enemy team would still be awarded a win but only a fraction of the LP based on how long the game lasted (ie. a 5 minute game with a player who never connected would award the winning team very little LP compared to a 50 minute game where they would be awarded close to the full amount).

I think there would be some necessary changes to implement this for LoL, such as maybe the first time giving the DC/AFK a warning and penalizing them the total amount of LP they would have lost in a ranked game (In normals only give the warning). The second time within x amount of in-game time they are placed into the AFK queue. Since they have to spend a certain amount of time in that queue to get out of it, playing for the meantime on a smurf or going AFK in those games doesn't help. Also since it's based on in-game time, a player who had an unfortunate disconnect or who had to leave for other reasons won't end up in that queue if they don't DC often. Kind of like how the tribunal system worked when it was still up.

Every system is abusable, and this could be abusable at times, but no more so than queue dodging at champ select. There will still be trolls and intentional feeders who can screw over your games, but you won't be wasting your game playing a 4v5, or a 3v5 because of players who never connected.

More from Gameplay

3 Refunds per season, upvote if you want 3 refunds per season.
Gameplay764 comments
7,167
votes
3 Refunds per season, upvote if you want 3 refunds per season.
Gameplay156 comments
3,510
votes
UPVOTE FOR URF
Gameplay606 comments
2,440
votes
Yes plz.
Gameplay456 comments
1,721
votes
3 Refunds per season, up vote if you want 3 refunds per season.
Gameplay114 comments
1,716
votes
When is ANYONE at riot going to address the awful new player experience?
Gameplay634 comments
1,383
votes