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