League of Legends Will Soon Have Harsher Penalties for Quitters

If you find yourself going leaving League of Legends matches early or going AFK for extended [...]

By Tanner Dedmon

If you find yourself going leaving League of Legends matches early or going AFK for extended periods every now and then, you might not want to make a habit out of it in the future unless you want to get hit with some pretty grueling penalties. Riot Games outlined plans this week to levy harsher punishments against the most frequent of leavers and AFKers that'll kick repeat offenders out of the game for up to two weeks if they keep up their game-ruining actions.

Leaving League of Legends matches early and going AFK ("away from keyboard" for the uninitiated) are two problems League players have undoubtedly faced if you've played more than a handful of matches. Whether it's because of an actual emergency or a teammate getting fussy, it's not uncommon to encounter a teammate or opponent who's not present in the game for some reason or another.

Those occasional leavers and AFKers aren't the ones Riot wants to punish so harshly, however. To get the two-week penalty reference above, you'll have to find yourself in what Riot called the "3rd Tier" of punishments.

"Again, we don't want to overly punish players who have rare disconnects out of their control, but through monitoring, we've learned that repeat AFKs/leaves are relatively rare and tied pretty directly to game-ruining behavior," Riot Games' behavioral systems team explained. "So, we're opting to increase the lockout severity of our existing higher penalty tiers, rather than add new ones. When players AFK or leave games they increase their penalty tier and when they play games without AFK they will slowly decrease it back towards 0."

The current tiers of punishments can be found below followed by the revised tiers that'll go into effect in the future. Riot did not give a release date for the changes for the behavioral system but said they're "almost here."

Today's Tiers:

  • 1st Tier: 5 min lockout and auto-loss
  • 2nd Tier: 10 min lockout and auto-loss
  • 3rd Tier: 15 min lockout and auto-loss

Revised Tiers:

  • 1st Tier: 5 min lockout and auto-loss
  • 2nd Tier: 30 min lockout and auto-loss
  • 3rd Tier: 14 day lockout and auto-loss

There's also an escalating LP loss penalty for leaving or going AFK in ranked games. Riot said that system has been in place for a while now.

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