Riot's way of dealing with AFK

DannShadow·12/30/2014, 12:59:08 PM·5 votes·1,977 views

I think that the way you (Riot) deal with the AFKs is stupid. They don't even look into it they just straight up, ban, tempban, suspend or punish you, it's stupid. They could email you asking why you were AFK, spend a little bit of their time reading them, hire someone? they have the money to. You could have lost your internet connection, you could have been helping a family member, your family member could have died? they wouldn't know and you'd get suspended for it. It's ridiculous, they need to change the way they suspend 'AFKs' -DannShadow

26 Comments

OJ19112/30/2014, 1:03:47 PM4 votes

sigh you have to afk a LOT before you get suspended, though idk when low priority queues kick in

to put it another way, if you are dcing often enough to get banned without having actually afked/quit, you probably shouldn't be playing league at all because you are ruining your teams games on a consistent basis.

and if you are having to afk/quit for legitimate reasons enough to get banned well, maybe you should sort out the rest of your life before playing games.

AJStarhiker12/30/2014, 4:10:58 PM2 votes

Actually, some one who has life stuff that can interfere unexpectedly can play, it just has to be in customs. Preferably with other player who know he or she might not be able to finish the game. I remember a firefighter asking about this a while back and I suggested finding/starting a clan for first responders to have custom games with players who are okay with a unexpected leave.

For the situation with unpredictable family, everyone needs to step back and unwind from a constant care situation. If that happens to be League, either play customs (if there's no one else available) or arrange for someone else to provide care for that hour or so while you play.

Might suck having to give up climbing the ranked ladder, but there are options to keep playing.

Voltage2212/30/2014, 1:06:07 PM2 votes

Agreed. Their OWN server issues lately with this whole "firewall" error crap has gotten me warnings and low priority queues. They really need to fix this so it gets actually leavers/AFKer's instead of just blanket banning everyone who may have a issue.

Eleshakai12/30/2014, 2:27:49 PM2 votes

This is what drove me to quit. I don't like the implication that LoL should be more important to my life than everything else.

Soybean1612/30/2014, 5:26:13 PM1 votes

you quit after feeding because you are mad at your team and are being stuck-up about it
Riot e-mails you and asks why you quit
you respond "My mother fell down the stairs, so I had to come help her and take her to the hospital because she was in lots of pain
Riot forgives you of the AFK
repeat
never get banned

Centuros12/30/2014, 5:31:58 PM1 votes

email you asking why you were AFK

Yeah, like people who ragequit wouldn't say they had internet/real life troubles.

Cryptekkk12/30/2014, 5:52:50 PM1 votes

The only real solution is loss forgiveness, which I KNOW they can do because the person that leaves shows red in the end game screen, but only for the team with 4 people and only if they lose. The other solution would be to give the team with the leave extra gold based on what he'd be earning AND the gold if he'd sold all his items AND the gold of what he had when he left spread out 4 ways.

Jakubrus12/30/2014, 6:55:45 PM1 votes

When you hit "I agree" to Riot's terms of service (which you have to do to play in the first place), you agree that your account and everything associated with it belongs to Riot, and they can do whatever they damn well please with it. If you don't like it, play something else. There's always Dota 2.

BeatzBoyFTW12/30/2014, 1:11:33 PM1 votes

I got 3 people in different matches on this month who afk'ed because their wife is giving birth. You can see what's the point I'm trying to say here about Riot's vicious way of banning people who leaves games no matter what the reasons are.

AJStarhiker12/30/2014, 4:45:55 PM1 votes

And what you don't seem to understand is that the majority of players don't get more than a warning. I left the first game I played because I didn't know any better. Since then it's always been some kind of unexpected incident, ranging from a bad power cord to a messed up graphics card (that one was weird-- blacked out terrain and any time I used an ability, the screen froze) to the generic connection errors.

The system accounts for emergencies. That's why it takes multiple games to even trigger a warning. But if you know you might get called away suddenly? Then maybe you shouldn't jump into that queue.

debugginOut12/30/2014, 5:25:41 PM1 votes

Some of this may be repeating other comments but ....

It takes multiple times to get banned. I have had to leave 2 games this week. Now those were the first 2 games in months but I received no warning, ban, or email. The issues you mentioned are edge case scenarios and should not happen on a regular basis so you should have not fear of ban.
Connection issues, crashes, etc. happen but unless it is an ISP related issue, should be correctable within 5 min. There is no reason to bail on your team if you have a temporary setback. Most people can completely reboot their computer and get back into a game within that time. Don't want windows update to mess up your game? Change your update settings. Otherwise learn to use your task manager and kill the LoL process and restart it then get back in; or reboot if you absolutely have to.
Worried about having to get pulled away? Then create a custom bot game and play AI. Sorry but when you play an online team game, you are committing to real people for some period of time. It is no different than if you were playing pick up game of basketball with a group of friends. If you have to bail on them, you are screwing over their plans. If I have time for 1 game a night (which is usually the case), I am going to be annoyed if the entire experience is ruined because you decided to leave (valid reason or not).

Other games punish quitters as well, one example that comes to mind would be people leaving Madden games.