Riot is testing League of Legends behavior detection for “blatantly trolling”

Riot Games is assuring players that it is “very confident in our accuracy rate” for detecting negative behavior in League of Legends, amid growing concerns that more bad actors are popping up in the MOBA. LoL lead gameplay designer Matt ‘Phroxzon’ Leung-Harrison also says Riot is currently testing even more ways to find other toxic behaviors in-game right now, which includes anyone who’s “blatantly trolling” you.

Last year, Riot introduced Vanguard anti-cheat to League of Legends. The studio’s in-house security software has proved controversial since day one, with some players claiming it was bricking PCs, which Riot denied at the time. Since then, the MOBA‘s community has been very vocal about its problems with Vanguard, from performance issues to cheaters still being prevalent in matches. Now, Phroxzon is addressing some of the commentary around negative behavior in LoL, and outlining how Riot is dealing with bad actors.

“Been seeing some commentary on negative behavior stuff recently, a few things I’d call out,” Phroxzon writes. “1. We are very confident in our accuracy rate for existing detections; please feel free to forward any examples where you feel like someone was punished and it didn’t match expectations—happy to review (game ID and server helps!).

“2. Some of the behavior you’re still seeing was expected; our focus has been on hitting an extremely high accuracy bar (98%+), which meant being more conservative out of the gate with detections as we gained learnings. We’re actively testing detections for other behavior types now, including some of those instances where you may feel people are blatantly trolling. These tests help us validate false-positive rates without attaching punishments. Please give us a bit of grace here—it’s high-priority work and we’ll check back in with our progress in the next few months.

“3. With a strong baseline now in place (system running well at scale + player support pipeline set up + tech profiling complete), we’re excited to start ramping things up. We’ll go into this in more detail in the next dev update with numbers!”

Following their post, user ‘DanielDKXD’ took to the Reddit comments to ask if it’s even worth selecting the “cheating” option when reporting botted/bought accounts, claiming they never see any of them get punished.

“Since Vanguard has been released, [the] Anti-Cheat team has banned over three million accounts for cheating/being botted and bought accounts. Of those, over 1.4 million accounts were actively used in Ranked (solo queue),” Phroxzon responds.

“And so yes, please use the Cheating option, it’s helpful in informing these efforts. Anti-Cheat team tends to do botted account banning in waves, so we don’t reveal our detection methods, so it’s unfortunate, but an accepted outcome that they will be able to ruin some games before eventually being detected and permabanned. This is part of the ongoing war against ‘ways to avoid our anti-botted account’ methods and players who want to ruin everyone else’s day.”

If you’ve been (somehow) out of the loop, make sure you catch up on all the WASD drama. A new datamine could potentially hint at keyboard movement controls fully making their way into the game, which would be the biggest change to LoL in years.

Check out the current League of Legends Mythic shop rotation if you want to burn a hole in your pocket. Otherwise, take a look at our complete LoL tier list for the current patch.

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