League of Legends: 7 Ways Riot Can Improve High Elo Solo Queue

2. Manual Review of Reports

Players in high elo should be told to give details as to the nature of their report (tell them in the “report” prompt that failure to add details will not flag this report for manual review) so that a Rioter can see if the report is valid. Let’s say an ADC player is reporting their jungler splitpushing bottom while Baron is up. That player could provide the detail as to why they think this behavior is reportable and a Rioter could review the replay (along with chat, pings, and the like) to see if the player communicated why they were going to employ this strategy, if there might be a reason for doing this, or if there is some borderline call the player made.

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If the jungler was just tilted, not thinking, and clearly making a bad play, the report is valid. But if there is some rationale for this play, the report is returned with an explanation (for instance, “this player communicated that he didn’t think the team could win a fight around Baron against their comp and felt splitpushing to take objectives was a better play”). Whether the play is correct or not is sort of irrelevant; what matters is that the player is trying.

And, yes, players will try to hindsight hero themselves into an explanation after the fact even when they were on autopilot or raging in the moment. But, with the appropriate context clues from the game, Riot can find a way to detect these more edge cases of toxicity.

3. A Vote System for Dodges

Dodging has become a big problem in high elo as players complain about the long queue times. It sucks to wait in queue for upwards of 10 minutes only to get in a lobby that someone dodges at the last second. This is a tight line that Riot has to walk because dodging is an important safeguard against players getting trolled in lobby by another player, playing with a teammate on a champion they’re unskilled on, or just playing with a comp that has narrow win conditions.

With the news that Riot is planning to add a feature that will allow players to report in the pre-game lobby, it seems like the risk of getting trolled by teammates will be diminished. However, it will still happen and those other reasons still exist to dodge. Losing 3 LP and five minutes waiting to queue up again is not enough of a deterrent to keep players for dodging.

Instead, I would propose that players can vote in the lobby whether they would like to dodge or not. This vote will go until 20 seconds remain before the game starts. If four of the five players vote to dodge (similar to a surrender vote), the lobby gets canceled with no MMR or LP loss. After the vote, though, if you dodge the game your account is locked from ranked for 24 hours.

This will create a safety valve for high elo players when they end up in a lobby with a lot of autofilled players or when a one-trick gets banned out. They can make the decision as a team to dodge the lobby in cases of an obvious griefer, but if a player single-handedly wants to dodge the game they should get a big restriction for doing so.