League of Legends Punishing AFK Players with New Penalties

If you’ve played an online multiplayer game or MOBA, you’ve been in this situation: that queue finally pops, you’re about to get things started, you’re ready to mop the floor with your opponents, and…someone disappears. No warning, no apology, gone. Attempting to suppress your rage, you question what could possibly pull someone away at that exact moment in time. Emergency bathroom break? Burglar smashing through the window? Forget about the pizza rolls in the oven?

At the end of the day, Riot Games isn’t pleased with the amount of chronic AFK situations in League of Legends. Announced in the newest development blog, a whopping 9% of players are guilty of doing it far too often, and in an effort to curtail this poor behavior, a new penalty system is being introduced. Until now, AFK players have been punished with queue delays, ranging from 5-minute to 15-minute delays. Repeat bad behavior, the punishment lasts longer. That makes sense, but apparently, it hasn’t been as effective as Riot Games had hoped. Time to whip out the big guns: queue lockouts.

Now, instead of queues taking longer, chronic AFK players won’t be able to queue at all. You’re about to miss those three tiers of queue delays because the queue lockout system has seven nasty tiers, the least severe punishment locking players out for a day. And the worst punishment? Prepare to be banned from queuing for two full weeks. At the moment, these new AFK rules are being rolled out in a few select regions, with a worldwide update coming in the future.

Worried about your bad internet shooting you in the foot? Don’t worry: Riot is upgrading its detection algorithm to better distinguish between chronic AFK players and those without the greatest connection.

League of Legends is free-to-play on PC.

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