LoL devs plan to address toxicity, smurfs, and possible plans for hard-stuck accounts

The most persistent and hardest-to-tackle issues in League of Legends like toxicity, smurfing, and hard-stuck players in ranked are on the minds of Riot Games developers who have revealed are planning to take on these problems in the coming months.

Riot’s League team asked players what their burning questions were surrounding the state of the game on Jan. 16, and as you can expect, the community wanted to know how Riot plans on tackling the negative avenues of ranked games. August “Iksar” Ayala responded, saying Riot has been working on these issues over the past few weeks and has focused on better initial placement for all queues, improved smurf detection, and keeping a closer eye on ranked games.

It’s no secret that a competitive game’s ranked system will have issues like smurfing and toxicity, and in League, these have been prevalent for several years. Every time Riot attempts to lessen the negativity in ranked games, it only seems to make these issues worse or sweep them under the rug to deal with later.

But Riot has recently improved where you’ll initially place in ranked, so you should be playing against other players at the same level according to Iksar. “It should be on us to get you into games with people of your skill level,” Iksar said, adding that if you were a low-elo player recently thrown into high-elo games, this should no longer happen.

As for creating accounts with ill intentions in mind, Riot is continuing to develop a system to automatically target new accounts that have been solely made to “run it down” and intentionally feed. Iksar did point out that tools were in place to combat this problem, but they weren’t perfect and needed to be faster and better at detection.

While not high up on Riot’s to-do list, the team is looking into addressing duo queues, specifically considering adding them to Masters queue and below. They plan on addressing the belief that you can have a “hard-stuck account” with the only apparent solution being to create a new account and start over. “We’d like to address any truth there is to this in addition to changing the perception that this is true,” Iksar stated, but added it was too early to share any solutions they’ve been considering.

For now, Riot seems focused heavily on queues and initial placements to help with ranked games and will be looking at more ranked avenues down the line. It will be interesting to see how the devs continue to handle ranked, smurfing, and toxicity as season 14 progresses, but it’s great to know the team is invested in finding a solution.