League of Legends is making changes to detect more intentional feeders

Reddit user and League of Legends player CarryOrDieTryin posted to /r/leagueoflegends late last week to complain about a troll who wronged him. The post, entitled “Player Intentionally Feeding in Diamond despite multiple reports” links several damning photos of the poster’s teammate, a Rammus who intentionally killed himself 16 times in an eight minute game.

Everyone has experienced a situation like this, although 16 deaths in eight minutes is fairly impressive. Naturally, the post garnered some attention from the community, including one Rioter Ben “Draggles” Forbes, who work Comms for the developers. Forbes showed up to let everyone know that Riot is working to fix problems like intentional feeding, or at least make it easier to catch.

Hey folks, here's a quick update on what we're doing about stuff like this. The truth is we're not happy with the current system when it comes to detecting players who are inting. Our systems have gotten a lot better at catching flamers, but they’re not that great at stopping trolls.

So in the coming weeks we're doing a couple things to make it better:

We're developing some changes to our automated system that we think will catch far more inters automatically. It's never going to be perfect, but we're pretty confident we can catch more intentional feeders without increasing our false positive rate.

In the meantime, we'll be doing more manual reviews and bans

Looking even further out, we're considering some broader changes that could make it harder to troll. However, these sorts of things are earlier on in design, so don't expect much on this front for a little while.

We’ve been pretty quiet on this front, but know that we think it's unacceptable for players to ruin games by inting, and we're serious about improving our system so we can get better at stopping it.

Catching intentional feeders has been one of League’s toughest challenges. After all, how can you really determine the difference between someone trolling and just having a really bad game? Forbes remains ambiguous about two separate methods to fix this problem. The first is a change to their detection tech and the second is a mysterious tease meant for the far future.

The most comforting thing from this post is the commitment to manual reviews and bans. Riot’s transparency on this issue is certainly appreciated by the community, as is evident from the comments on Forbes’ post. Whether things improve in the coming weeks, months and years is another story entirely. But conversations are at least being had, and that is the first step to improving everyone’s time in League of Legends.