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Ranked Loss Prevention

Linre Siether·2/14/2018, 11:38:43 PM·1 votes·363 views

Hello everyone, I'm here to talk about an issue that has plagued League of Legends since its inception, losing ranked games because of AFK players and never-ranked players in placements.

I just finished my 10 solo queue placement games for this season, with 4 of my 10 matches having AFK players on my team, and 0 AFK players on enemy teams. Last season between all of my promotional and series games for rank advancements I had over 60% with AFK players on my team, and over 80% that either had an AFK or a player playing his very first ranked game (happened with 13 players, and 11 of them ended up in Bronze, and 2 in Silver).

A relatively common feature in MOBA games is loss prevention for players with an unranked person on their team, or with an AFK on their team. Why isn't this included in League of Legends? The match remake system is a joke that doesn't even work half the time it is supposed to, and the times it is intended to work is only a fraction of the AFK matches. Of the past 20 games I've had with players who never even connected to the game only 11 of them allowed us to make a remake vote.

Riot, you need to update your Matchmaking and Ranked systems to have better balance, and to not punish players because of the teams YOU assign them. I just hope some developers read this and actually consider implementing a method of ELO or Loss prevention for such cases. Especially since Riot support's answer is to report players (so most of them won't be punished anyway) and use the Match Remake system (which only applies to small number of cases, and works in even fewer).

3 Comments

Chermorg2/15/2018, 12:01:15 AM1 votes

So, no. MOBA games do not commonly have loss prevention for an AFK player. Someone AFKs the entire game in Overwatch? Nope, you're still losing SR. To my knowledge neither Smite, DOTA, or other MOBAs have any form of loss prevention for AFK teammates.

Further, the reason none of these games have it is because it would mess up matchmaking. You can't give one team a win and another team a loss in games with a player-controllable variable. Loss Prevention works for games which the variable is not under players control (i.e. connection issues plaguing players, maintenance, etc). Players cannot control the Loss Prevention. If players could control when Loss Prevention kicked in just by AFKing, not only would you have more AFKs (oh, if I leave, my friends here won't get a loss of LP/MMR/whatever), but you'd have people artificially climbing ranks - as one team would gain 100+ LP and another would lose 0 LP (or 20 or so if you consider the AFK as getting a loss regardless).

Lastly, keep in mind, assuming you AFK never (let's just assume), statistically the enemy team has more AFKs than your team ever does.

Linre Siether2/16/2018, 11:15:16 PM1 votes

There are several MOBA's that have loss prevention, it is more common for matches with Unranked Players than for AFK players. I never said anything about giving a Win to the players this would apply to, and Riot does have a system in place to accommodate Loss Preventions (currently related to server issues).

The Idea that there would be an increase in AFK's (or toxicity as many have said to try and get other players to AFK for you) is a sign that the punishment system for players who break the Summoner's Code is poorly executed (which we have all known for a very long time).

There would be some extra balancing involved, such as possibly reducing the LP gain for the winners, Loss Prevention not applying to the duo/team friends that queued up with the AFK. In fact many of the points for the Compensation Mode (for the current server issue Loss Prevention) could help with the inflation, such as: •Players will still receive a win at a 50% rate for LP/MMR gains. Reducing the LP and MMR gains could help prevent or reduce any inflation.

If a stranger that the game assigns to the same team as me decides to AFK that is out of my control. If I was toxic to try and get someone to AFK then I deserve to be punished by the system already in place to punish players who break the Summoner's Code. If my Duo Queue buddy goes AFK that is somewhat in my control, as I chose to queue up with him/her, and I should still get a loss.

Yes, statistically one should encounter more enemy AFK players than ally ones if he himself never goes AFK, but in individual cases with smaller sample sizes the more skewed it can be.

A Loss Prevention system could be abused, but Riot is already supposed to be dealing with the methods of abuse, namely toxicity and AFK players (which Riot needs to be doing a better job with in the first place).

Audhulma2/16/2018, 11:41:47 PM1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Linre Siether,realm=NA,application-id=yrc23zHg,discussion-id=8IFzIA5x,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-02-14T23:38:43.648+0000)

Why isn't this included in League of Legends?

Because people would harass an ally into going AFK, or take turns doing it as duos/trios/etc so that the rest of the team wouldn't lose MMR, effectively abusing the system. It can be abused easily. This conversation came up many years ago, the reasoning behind not having it hasn't become any less legitimate.