Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 10, Spirit Blossom Thresh Toggle, & more

Today's red post collection includes Riot Scruffy's quick gameplay thoughts for July 10th, covering disruptive behavior reduction, any rank flex queue & more, plus changes to Spirit Blossom Thresh, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 10

Here's Riot Scruffy with this week's quick gameplay thoughts for July 10th - "Disruptive Behavior Reduction, Any-Rank Flex Queue.":

"Disclaimer

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.

Disruptive Behavior Reduction Phase 1

Hot on the heels of last week's Behavioral Systems update, our first set of changes are coming in the next patch, 10.15. They’re just a start, but we wanted to get some improvements into the game quickly while we are actively working on bigger improvements.

Intentional Feeding

Detection - We’re tuning our current systems to be more strict in classifying behavior as inting. We still don’t want to punish players for a bad game but we think there is room between our current thresholds and where a player having a bad game would be. Specifically our detection will be roughly 25% more aggressive so if it previously required a 0-100 game it now will require a 0-75 game. (It's more complex than KDA, numbers are intentionally unrealistic to avoid being taken literally.).

Penalties - These are staying unchanged for now. Players detected inting are given an immediate 14 day ban that becomes more severe if they are repeatedly detected.

Leavers and AFK

Detection - Detection improvements for intentional idling, especially cases where a player is moving occasionally to avoid the current afk detection systems.

Penalties - When a player leaves or AFKs without reconnecting, they will receive an automatic loss even if their team won the game.

Penalties - We’re going to be assigning leaver punishments more strictly. It will take significantly fewer AFKs to begin receiving queue time penalties. The more a player leaves, they will have increasing queue time penalties.

Next Steps we’re going to continue upgrading our detection systems

Understand more complex cases, like when a player starts off playing normally but at some point in the game decides to start intentionally feeding.

Finding cases where players have found ways around the current detection and are “treading the line” to not get caught while still ruining games (like the occasional movement case we're fixing for 10.15).

Revamping the penalty systems with a wider variety of penalties that'll allow us to take action earlier while still being fair, and to create a greater degree of granularity in terms of how penalties for different types of game-ruining behaviors ramp up in severity on repeat offenses.

Any-Rank Flex Queue

We’re excited to have this much needed update for Flex Queue coming to live servers in patch 10.15! After seeing the success of an unrestricted rank system in Clash, we’re applying the same approach to Flex Queue. Queue with any of your friends, no matter their rank! Similar to Clash, the system will use a weighted average that prioritizes the higher skill players.

On the whole we think this better serves the queue to be more accessible to groups that want to test their skills even if it creates more games with a wide spread of ranks.

Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there.

Scruffy"

Miscellaneous

After feedback, Spirit Blossom Thresh has been updated to toggle between his forms. Here's Riot Caption OG with more:

[1] Got Thresh toggle working now. Which one will you choose?

[2] For context, here is how his toggle works:

*Collect the desired souls, right now 45, and ult to transform to human.
*By ulting, toggle is activated (Ctrl + 5). There will be a delay once you trigger a toggle.
*Toggle wont be active in combat.Once your out of combat, it activates"

Riot Eggo McLeggo also provided context on why they decided to change it:

[1] "Omar is the hero we need. The toggle between human and demon form is now working, let us know what you think! We always get a lot of questions about toggles so we're putting out an official response soon but here's a little TL;DR if you're curious: "

[2] "Just like any feature we add for a skin, toggles take time to develop and test. That doesn't mean we CAN'T make them but it means sometimes we'll choose to spend that time on something we think will mean more to players than the toggle. This is especially true if swapping"

[3]"back and forth doesn't really make sense for the champion + thematic's narrative. For Thresh we thought it fit really well and spoke to his power as a shapeshifting demon. In a lot of other cases, we haven't thought it made too much sense. It's a little bit of a rare situation."