Today we got another patch, this one full of bug fixes and small tweaks to existing characters. It also brought some painful reminders that Riot is still a very young company and growing to fast to handle its exploding community.

I’ve written a lot, both here and on the official forums, about the queue dodge penalty system. It sucks. It doesn’t work. People still dodge and troll and do whatever they can to avoid playing with certain players or champions or whatever. This most recent patch actually increased increased the queue dodge penalty. Instead of rewording things, I’ll copy my thoughts from a forum thread I created today.

No one likes to get queue dodged. It sucks. Adding a penalty doesn’t encourage players not to queue dodge, though. It encourages people to attempt to force a teammate to queue dodge. Increasing the time penalty will only make this problem worse.

The whole point of the penalty was to encourage players to make an informed decision about whether or not to drop queue. An informed decision shouldn’t force you to always make a bad decision. I don’t want to join a game with an AFK player or a player who chooses revive/smite Eve and threatens to feed if he doesn’t get mid solo. I also don’t want to wait six or a ridiculous fifteen minutes for another game while that player gets dumped right back into queue.

And let’s say I actually start the game and our friend leaves or goes AFK or feeds or any number of things trolls do just to get to the next game – what’s the penalty for that player? He has effectively ruined the game for 9 other people and in most cases wasted at least 25 minutes of time for 9 players. Even if he leaves it doesn’t count against him in any fashion whatsoever. He gets a leaver mark that can’t be seen until he has likely already ruined a game? That’s like covering up the scarlet letter until Hester Prynne has nailed every married man in town and then telling their wives they should have seen it coming.

Get rid of the queue dodge penalty. It didn’t fix anything when the penalty was two and ten minutes. It made the game creation process much, much worse. I realize the queue dodge system sucks but this little band-aid won’t stop the bleeding. Figure out something new (new lobby system, perhaps?) that will actually address the problem.

In short, the dodge penalty is not doing its job – improving the game experience by reducing dodged games. It’s actually making things worse by incentivizing players to troll, which is terrible for a community.

The reason I think this all points to Riot’s immaturity as a company is that they’ve remained quiet about it, responding to few if any of the posts regarding the dodge problem, and there are a lot of them (posts). Riot is trying to force this system, which is a crap solution, to work when it just doesn’t, instead of implementing a new lobby system or some other player management system that accounts for things like dodging and leaving.

Granted, they might be working on something, but the dodging has been an issue for months. I wrote about my first experience with the queue dodge penalty back in February. The development cycle for these kinds of fixes is way too long, most likely because Riot is understaffed, so the company comes up with these bandages when what they really need is surgery.

Thankfully the community has started to turn around. When the queue dodge system first came out, anyone willing to speak out against it was downvoted into oblivion. Players are starting to realize, though, that the current system sucks and it really needs to be fixed. There’s a lot of support in the forums for reverting the change. Even if the old system wasn’t any better, it certainly wasn’t this bad.

Get on the forums and show some support.

One of the best differentiators between League of Legends and Dota is surrender. If at 25 minutes it seems a sure loss, teams with a heavy majority vote – 4/5 – can surrender the game by simply typing /surrender. It’s a great mechanic for those steamroller games, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a brutal beating. It saves time and a lot of frustration for most everyone involved.

It can be annoying, though. I’ve had many games that have been close, only to have the other team surrender as we’re pushing down inhibitor turrets. It’s a small thing, but sometimes it’s nice to have that complete victory. The thing is, the minor frustration of not finishing a game is nowhere near the frustration of enduring a guaranteed loss because your teammates won’t surrender. Quite a few players believe there is some sort of surrender penalty and won’t surrender because they don’t want to cripple their IP gain. It was almost implemented – luckily, Riot was smart enough to see the problem and simply moved surrenders to 25 minutes instead of keeping it at 15.

Apparently Zileas posted a few months back suggesting a penalty for surrender. I haven’t been able to find that post – what I found was an old post asking Riot to reconsider. Zileas posted a couple times inside, both of which provide a disconcerting look what was then the possible future of the surrender mechanic. Basically Riot wanted to distinguish between true losses and surrenders so that it could properly “reward” players who stay until the bitter end. In turn, teams that surrender will be subject to a penalty, likely in the form of reduced IP gain. His first response is below:

Players tend to do what they are rewarded for. Players get a lot of satisfaction out of “Finishing” opponents off in our game, and everyone enjoys that sometimes. We want to reward people to not surrender for this reason.

This “reward” system completely ignores the fact that players can “surrender” by standing afk at fountain while the other team pushes it in. The strategy is used all the time with AFK players because it’s a waste of everyone’s time to play the game out. The new system wouldn’t have “rewarded” anyone, it would have incentivized people to AFK, effectively ruining the game. This was one of Dota’s major problems, one Riot combatted with the surrender vote.

Zileas’ second response revealed that the game would be going to 15-minute surrenders if a penalty system was implemented.

we want 15 min surrenders — but the platform doesnt distinguish between losses and surrenders presently. Once it does, we will go 15 mins. Right now, if we did that, the optimal behavior would be to chain surrender at 15 mins every game.

Luckily the system never went through. I’m not sure I would have noticed if that was the way surrender had always worked. We likely would have just seen a lot more AFK once a player thought the game was decided.

The patch a few days back brought along one of the most undesirable things I’ve seen in League of Legends: queue dodge penalties. I’ve written enough about the semantics that you should have a feel for how it works. As a quick overview, your first dodge gets you an advertised 3-minute ban from joining queue. The next dodge is 10 minutes, with a reset 8 hours from the initial ban. Here’s how it really works.

This afternoon I queued up with a friend for a quick game. For whatever reason he didn’t join queue when I did. Instead, he was stuck at the invite screen for Arranged Team. By the time he asked if I was in queue, the game had popped. It showed him at champ select but on his screen he was still at the AT invite screen. He hit cancel and got dumped back to the home page. Instead of staying in queue and forcing him to relog, reconnect, and deal with whatever random hero he got, I dodged.

On relog we tried to queue only to be greeted by the new leaver screen that pops up over the client with a timer that counts down your penalty. Our timer? 5:14. I haven’t take math since my freshman year of college but that seems like slightly more than three minutes. Luckily we didn’t have the same problem, but I will say, I’m fairly annoyed by the fact that this isn’t functioning as advertised and that I was penalized because of a client error over which I had zero control. The more interaction I have with this new system, including the fact that dodging is till extremely common, the harder it is to believe that Riot actually pushed this through. There are so many reasons for a game to fall apart in queue that penalizing the process seems arbitrary and absurd.

I hope to god Riot realizes just how bad this system is and fixes it soon, but my guess is they won’t. It took a poll in the forums about Champ Select AFKers for someone from Riot to take interest in any opinion that doesn’t penalize queue dodging. This could have easily been considered prior to the patch. Now we get to sit back and watch as the company tries to clean up. It’s going to be a rough couple of weeks.

It’s patch day again, bringing us a slew of changes to some of the less popular heroes, a much needed (though still lacking) TF nerf, and the new champ, Mordekaiser. The patch also gave us one highly undesirable feature: queue dodge penalties. Overall, though, I’d say I’m pretty happy about this patch.

My favorite part so far has been the Jax remake. I’ve played two games with him and he seems like he’s in a good spot. The extra HP makes a big difference and the Leap Strike change gives him a nice escapability buff. He’ll still struggle at times, as all melee DPS does, but the changes make a significant difference. Also, that Vandal skin is badass.

I’ll be taking a look at the Warwick changes later today. I had a Warwick in one game, but he was awful so I won’t say he’s a good judge of the situation. The mana changes alone should be a boon.

The TF nerf seems good, though it doesn’t address his real problem – map control. I played a game as Jax with Mundo, Ryze, Pantheon and TF in which our Ryze went AFK around level 9. We still stomped them, mostly because our TF held his port for the perfect moment in just about every situation. Sure, he does less damage, but when he’s stunning people consistently and turning even fights into landslides, I can’t help but think they nerfed him for the masses but he’s just as good for skilled players.

Mordekaiser actually looks to be a lot of fun. The fact that you can cast his shield on creeps makes him a bit like Dark Seer from Dota, though it’s only allies. That would be an interesting change if they feel he isn’t laning well. He does seem to harass decently enough, and his ult is pretty cool. I’m not going to spend the RP on him and all my IP has gone into runes recently, so I’ll have to wait for a free week to give a real analysis.

Lastly, the queue dodging penalty. This thing is so stupid I hate to even write about it. Every time you leave during champion select you get a leaver mark on your account. The first leave gives you a three minute queue penalty. The second brings it up to 10 minutes, though that timer does reset 8 hours after your first leave. I can’t understand why they would implement this when there are so many legitimate reasons to leave at champion select and no options to deal with those issues. AFK summoners are just part of the problem. There are also team composition problems, and the fact that matchmaking will still pair you with people on your ignore list. Add to all of this the fact that people are still dodging like mad and it’s pretty clear that a dodge penalty is about the worst solution Riot could have come up with.

You can find complete patch notes in the announcements forum.

My friends and I have a new rule: no Heimer, no Eve, period. It held guideline status, but there was always some occasion where our team comp looked good, despite the potential for a noob Heimer or Eve and we would let it slide. Every time we made the exception, or so it seemed, we would lose. The player would be just as bad as we expected and our team would fall apart by the 30-minute mark. The same thing happened last night, which is why we’ve taken that guideline and bumped it up to constitutional amendment levels. In the current matchmaking system I will no longer play a game with Eve or Heimer in it.

Say what you will about queue dodging, I value my time in the game too much to spend 25 minutes watching teammates feed, and as experience dictates, Eve and Heimer players are noob players the vast majority of the time. I don’t have fun trying to drag them along behind me, giving encouraging advice that they just won’t heed. Instead, I’m always going to try to convince that player to switch toons or I’ll be dodging the queue.

There are a lot of other people who obviously feel this way. Most games I have to wait through two or three queue cycles before I can play. For the most part, it’s not something I mind, if only because I can understand the mindset. As queue dodging becomes more prevalent, it becomes more beneficial to my sanity to dodge as well. When it takes five to ten minutes to find a game, I want that game to be competitive, not a landslide in either direction. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that’s become almost necessary for my enjoyment of the game.

I would love if this was not the case and there is a simple solution: fix matchmaking. Queue dodging, for me, is a symptom of the poor matchmaking system. I would be totally fine playing with Heimer and Eve if I was confident my teammates were at least decent players and hopefully aware and ready to compensate for their respective champion’s weaknesses. That’s just not the case, though, and until I start to see significantly better players in my queue, I’ll be dodging the champions most prone to noob players.