AFK?

NorwayFOO·9/30/2013, 11:41:05 PM·2 votes·1,973 views

Ok, so the last four or so games I have had from one to three afkers on my team. Each match those that were still around did fantastic but not good enough to beat the odds. Some of the games we honestly could have won if just one more player was their to help cover an extra lane while we made a push. This is why I would like afkers to be turned into bots. Sure this might not be as helpful as another human player but still it would help even out the team. Even so, in some cases the bot might not be helpful at all and it may even start feeding the enemy team which is why I assume we don't have bots to begin with. This being said I would also like a way to vote if we want a bot or not, or if we should keep the bot or not. That way we can turn on and off the bot depending on whether we see a use for it or not.

12 Comments

RiotMontag10/1/2013, 12:29:21 AM6 votes

I agree this is a problem we need to work on. However, I'm not sure "replace with bot" is necessarily the right answer. Without diving into too much detail, bots are basically really dumb right now when it comes to human teammates, and they'd probably do more harm than good overall.

Right now the Player Behavior folks are working hard on champ select. If you look at behavior issues across the game, a lot of them can be stopped dead in their tracks or at least highly mitigated with a better champ select. I'd include AFKs in that group. AFKs happen very infrequently in pre-mades. If we can get a group of strangers to operate much more like a pre-made, we're a lot less likely to have AFKs in the first place.

But once we have that system in place, it might make sense to take a look at AFK mitigation, something that solves the problem of, "I have an AFK now; how do I deal with this?" It depends on how it stacks up against other problems that affect behavior. We try to look at all the things we could possibly do to promote a sportsmanlike community and tackle the highest-value stuff first. AFKs is on that list -- and it's something I bring up with the PB team on a regular basis -- but we want to make the biggest impact, so it might not be at the top just yet.

NlghtDemon10/1/2013, 1:13:42 AM4 votes

how about if someone afks for the whole game somebody who is waiting in a que should be able to join that game and take his spot and when they connect they should start at a level that matches his or her team. And this concept would apply to people who dodge champ selection if someone leaves somebody waiting in a que can take there spot. I think this would be an effective option and should be called "Player Swapping".

soup dumpling10/1/2013, 1:09:18 AM3 votes

What happened instead of a bot, the afker was replaced by a player who would come in game with an averaged level and gold base? And to compensate, the player would be granted a sort of first game bonuses.

CHIESUTOOOOOOOOO10/1/2013, 2:15:06 AM2 votes

Yeah this "Player Swapping" is a good idea. So according to you guys here, we could give our idea to Riot about an afker being swapped with another person in queue. But maybe if the team allows a new player to join by majority vote or something?