League of Legends Gameplay Thoughts: Early Surrender

The new early surrender feature hasn't even been in the game for a full week, and it seems the Riot is already considering whether the merits of the feature are great enough to keep it around, according to Meddler's gameplay thoughts. According to him, the introduction of the new system hasn't really had any impact upon how often people surrender, it's just made some games that would have ended at 20 minutes end at 15 minutes instead. Seeing as that seemed to be the point of the new system, one must wonder if that's necessarily a terrible thing. He also noted that players proved no more willing to (or opposed to) leaving games, which brings into question whether the new system actually prevent the toxicity that it was thought to.

"The early surrender option went out a few days ago in 7.10," said Meddler. "We're seeing a bit of early friction around it in some games, based off the earlier test we ran in Oceania for a couple of months that's not unexpected. What we saw there was, after a settling down period, surrender rates before and after the introduction of the earlier option were unchanged. Effectively some games that would have been surrenders at 20 became surrenders at 15 instead. Other things we were measuring (afk rates, number of reports per game etc) didn't meaningfully change. We expect we'll see a similar trend in other regions, going to be keeping an eye on that though. If that's not the case would certainly be worth discussing adjustments (is this a feature that's a good fit for some regions but not others? Is 15 mins the correct time? Etc)."

As of now, there are no changes planned for the feature, but the very fact that Riot doesn't view it as the sweeping success it was thought to be initially brings into question whether some regions may soon be force to surrender at 20 again.

Want to hear more about the latest gameplay thoughts from the Riot Live team? Check out these other articles on the topic: Gameplay Thoughts: LeBlanc, Gameplay Thoughts: Zac, Gameplay Thoughts: Guardian Angel, and Gameplay Thoughts: Yasuo. Keep tuned to WWG for all the most up to date gameplay information!