On April 3, Mark “Riot Scruffy” Yetter published the latest edition of Quick Gameplay Thoughts. Yetter, the Lead Gameplay Designer of League of Legends, uses these blogs to explain things currently in the works. In the past, such blogs have contained information about upcoming rework ideas, champion changes, and design changes. This time around, Yetter focused on Dodge Penalties in League of Legends.
Increasing Dodge Penalties
Riot Scruffy starts the blog by explaining why Riot feels the punishment for dodging champion selects needs to change.
Champ select dodges are something that hurts the overall player experience by putting 9 players back into a longer queue after they’ve already spent a lot of time and effort getting their last game started.
There are many underlying reasons why a player may want to dodge a lobby, and we think dodging is ok as a very rare outlet for players. Today, we think players are dodging too frequently, and without significant enough penalties when they do.
He then explains two changes that Riot plans to use to adjust the severity of punishments for dodging champion selects. The first will increase the timeout for players dodging champion select. This timer currently starts at 6 minutes and scales up with each consecutive champion select dodge. The second change currently under consideration is increasing the LP penalties for dodging games. At present, the first dodge costs 3 LP, with consecutive dodges costing 10 LP.
The controversy surrounding the changes
Happy VALORANT friday everyone! Just posted some Gameplay Thoughts covering:
Dodge Penalties
Fiddle Follow up and learning curve
Duo Parity Update
Wrapping up Jungle workhttps://t.co/WKUtPTJlEs— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) April 3, 2020
However, the reveal of these plans has seen a lot of criticism from the community. Many players argue that the occurrence of “trolling” in champion select is too frequent to consider increasing the penalties. As of now, there is no way to report players who purposely troll in the champion selects, either to make someone else dodge or to ruin the game for other players.
This trolling is something nearly every League of Legends player has come across at one point or another. The most common troll picks in League of Legends include the famous “Disco Nunu”, running ghost and cleanse, or the more recent top lane Yuumi picks. Because of all of this, it seems unhealthy for the game to further punish players wanting to avoid this experience. The consensus seems to be that if Riot Games wants to make this change, they should first resolve the trolling issue.
For more League of Legends, be sure to read all about the Golden Guardians upsetting G2 Esports in the first playoffs match of the LEC Spring Split.
