View source for News/Riot Games Reveals Details of Punishment System

{{News
|seo_title=Riot Games Reveals Details of Punishment System
|seo_keywords=Riot Games
|image=Riot_new1.png
|tags=Riot Games
|date=2025-05-13T10:01:35.000Z
|sources={{NewsSource
|source=Twitter
|url=https://x.com/RiotPhroxzon/status/1921653601279394222
|article=News/Riot Games Reveals Details of Punishment System
}}
|author=Andura
|category=More
|content=[[Companies/Riot Games|Riot Games]] has shared a deeper look into its evolving approach to handling player behavior in League of Legends, with Lead Gameplay Designer Chris Leung-Harrison outlining a shift from harsh punishments to more thoughtful, reform-oriented systems. In a recent post, Leung-Harrison addressed both community concerns and the philosophy driving Riot’s decisions, emphasizing that the goal is not to simply penalize negative behavior, but to cultivate a healthier and more respectful environment in the game.

Matt Leung-Harrison stated,

Focusing on the 95%
Our ultimate aim isn't to simply punish bad behavior, but to foster a well thriving League that encourages good behavior and reform. 95% of disruptive incidents come from otherwise neutral or positive players having a bad day or lashing out in a moment of frustration. Even worse, seemingly innocuous comments like “how did we lose that fight” can easily cause a defensive clapback that escalates into an all-out flame war that might ultimately result in an AFK, soft int or similar. Given our large playerbase, even if each individual rarely has a negative moment, statistically you're likely to encounter negativity a decent amount of the time, it's just not that likely to be the same person (except maybe in high ELO).

Let’s say that if a teammate has a 1% chance of lashing out, by the time you’ve played 17 games, your chance of having a lash out on your team is over 50%; increase that to 5% chance and that’s 50% by the 4th game. Throw in the fact that if someone lashes out, it often causes more lashing out in retaliation. And those sharply negative experiences stand out more vividly in memory, making it feel more severe and common than it is (though I'm not trying to argue that it isn’t common). This why giving a light nudge to our usually well-behaved players is so important, because correcting the proliferation of incidental disruptive behavior is significantly more impactful than getting the worst of the worst out (we want to do that as well though).

Harsh Punishments
While the intuitive approach to encouraging better behavior might be to impose harsh penalties for a soft int (like a 14 day ban on first offense), small, well-designed and timely nudges have proven far more effective than strong deterrents to get people to do the right thing. There's an extensive branch of research in behavioral economics from places like Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia that suggests that punishments for IRL crime that are proportional to the offense (ie. typically smaller), swift, and clear, tend to produce better behavioral outcomes than deterring people with severe punishments upfront.

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Similarly, we've seen in League that simply increasing punishment severity hasn't meaningfully changed the rate of offenses. The critical factor that is suggested to dissuade negative behavior most effectively is a clear indication that the behavior has been accurately identified and delivered as close to the offense as possible, rather than a generic penalty warning that lacks specificity and is potentially days late. Our recidivism rate (likelihood to re-offend) following penalties is actually quite low (<10%), which implies that an immediate warning or a light penalty (like a 1 day ban) tends to be quite effective.

Reporter Feedback and Rewards
Our systems are benefited greatly by high quality reporting. If you shotgun report everyone on the enemy team every game, we’re not going to be able to use that and it will decrease our trust in your reports in the future. Reports don’t do anything by themselves, but they do increase our likelihood of escalating penalties or detecting a behavior in the first place. We can understand that reporting feels like it may have lost its value over the last few years, but we are trying to change that and we want to reward successful reports with things like LP refunds and autofill waivers and hopefully more in the future. So please help us out by reporting bad behavior when you see it and not just let it go unreported.

Quick feedback also helps the offender clearly associate their actions with consequences, which makes it clear which behaviors won't be tolerated. Things like notifications post-game for bystanders and victims also help build trust that the system is working. We're continuing to work on getting this to be even more timely and accurate (currently, there's still a bit of a backlog on report processing from games from a while ago). Similar to the battle against scripting, we’re going to continue to figure out how people are creatively getting around our systems and keep adjusting over time.

Sometimes you’ll get notifications for people you’ve reported for doing bad things in other games, but not the game you reported them in where they did something pretty bad. This is because we want you to feel like “hey you’ve told us this person is doing some bad stuff, maybe we’re not detecting it fully today, but we hope to detect it in the future. Here are some places we are detecting them within our current means though.” We don’t have all our detections on day 1 today, but we will be able to go back and validate our new detections against people that you’ve told us are bad actors each time we build a new one.

It is more important to us to not have false positives that degrade trust in the system than swing for the fences and erroneously punish people who are just having a bad game. The problem of “why was this X behavior not caught” is a better state to us than “I got erroneously punished and was innocent”. Of course some of these bad games are not really “bad games” 🙃, but it requires nuance for us to be able to detect these with confidence at scale over millions of games. We want to move as quickly as we carefully can. 

Egregious Behavior
For the very small fraction of people (~0.1%) who engage in repeated, egregious behavior, a lot of them continue to escalate their misconduct and keep doing it until they get perma'd. We intend to give these players an extended, and typically permanent vacation from the game. The supply of purchaseable accounts is getting smaller and smaller post Vanguard, but permabans can sometimes be circumvented through swapping to alts, buying new accounts or acquiring them from inactive friends. This remains a complex challenge we're actively investigating to ensure penalties can’t just be avoided with no consequence.
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