Boards›Player Behavior

Mid intention abuse

ModAzure Ole·1/29/2016, 10:05:45 PM·9 votes·1,543 views

Teambuilder had its aches and pains, and I like the new system better. There is a phenomenon that concerns me, however, and it goes like this:

1: A player, no matter the reason, desires only one role, rather than one of two 2: Mid lane is generally believed to be the most popular role 3: Choosing mid increases your odds of getting the other selected preference as opposed to picking, say, support [2]

4: a player desiring only one role will pick it and mid even if they have no intention or ability to mid at their elo.[1,3]

This was rather apparent when, out of the 15 or so games I've played with the new system in ranked, I've encountered our mid laner asking to swap roles three times. I captured some pregame chat from my most recent encounter here, where two players committing it, one admitting outright.

I'm at plat 2 at the moment, one of the highest places you can be after a bracket reset. Not tooting my horn here, my point is that these are high level players; this kind of abuse probably happens more often elsewhere.

Couple of questions: Is this report-able and how? (I'm under the impression reports bring up in-game chat logs) Is there any mechanism to prevent this sort of behavior?

Feel free to weigh in or share anecdotal evidence. Reds, as always, are appreciated

19 Comments

Ada Wong1/29/2016, 10:11:28 PM4 votes

For me almost every game I am Top/Mid lately the last few games have done great in but I have had "Junglers" picking the role they can't even play coming into my lane and feeding /griefing causing loss of lane and such its really pathetic, and it lowers my ELO hard when every other game is a loss even if I am able to carry a game where players are bad because of a Jungler Intentionally Griefing, or a ADC in my last game who refused to group, and then a over-all team that couldn't play without just running all in before peeling.

The problem seems to be a pandemic, and currently I do not feel Riot is doing anything or has any intention to do anything about this troll behavior that wastes my time as well as 3 other players who are playing to compete when they do this and make the game unplayable.

Truly Prideful1/30/2016, 7:55:44 PM2 votes

They need to just let people queue for a single role at the cost of a queue time penalty. It would help some things, at least let the one trick ponies get their role and not ruin your game when they don't.

disregardable1/30/2016, 12:32:14 AM1 votes

Choosing a role to play (regardless of your skill level in it) is not reportable. Asking for a lane swap is not reportable. Taking a role you weren't given without your team's permission is trolling and reportable.

What you've described isn't abuse.

DeynaTaggerung1/30/2016, 7:32:12 PM1 votes

I don't think it's right to say a player only wants one role. I know I personally am fine playing one of several, just so long as I get my main (mid) about 60% of the time. However there are definitely a lot of people who are only really good with a single role. I think for that it makes sense that especially at higher elo as people are more specialized that people be able to stick more to what they do best.

As for reports, Riot looks at all the chat logs from pre-game all the way through post-game chat.

ValyrianBlade1/31/2016, 1:14:30 AM1 votes

Unfortunately it's not reportable. It's Riot's fault for their system as many players told them how bad it would be and actually warned of this issue before it came out.

It's probably more prevalent at higher elos though. At lower elos you've got two things going against it:

  1. More players probably actually want mid so there will be enough mid primaries to get assigned the role.
  2. Higher elo players are more likely to care so much about their ranking that they'll do anything to help improve it. Lower elo players will likely just focus on two roles. They want to climb too, but most are of the mindset that they're already better than their elo in 3-5 roles, so only choosing their best 2 is easy!

To prevent it: Riot needs to make changes to their system. Fill secondaries should receive a bonus to their LP (or at least their MMR) gains since they're playing at a higher level by default (being able to play 5 roles at elo X is better than being able to play 2 roles at elo X). Then people should be allowed to choose only 1 role and those players should simply have much longer queue times (and possibly experience some small, unnoticable, penalty).

Bowstin1/30/2016, 10:02:18 AM1 votes

Don't get why you think it's a problem if higher ranked players are the main ones doing this.

Obviously it's working.

Yuumi or Lose1/30/2016, 12:30:57 AM1 votes

One problem I had was I got Top and someone else got jungle, but he wants top. I picked Trundle at the start of the champ select as my pick intent to let everyone know so they don't ban him. The guy that wanted top is banning second. He asked me to swap roles and I said no. He then banned Trundle to get back at me. Because of this, I feel unsafe picking a champ at the start of a match.