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

4. New Punishments

One issue that has also become a hot topic of discussion is whether players who get punished should be banned from playing ranked for a certain time, put into a low-priority queue, or some other new form of punishment beyond just chat restriction and full account bans. While I am personally against a pure ranked ban or a similar punishment system like they have in DOTA (where you have to play a certain number of “normal” games before you can play ranked again), I do agree that a new punishment system should be looked at.

One proposal I have that no one else (to my knowledge) has proposed is MMR/LP punishments. Simply put, players who get reported and punished will lose LP and/or MMR off their account in ranked, making them have to climb back up due to their poor behavior. These punishments could scale up as well, starting with maybe 25 or 50 LP losses for your first punishment, but scaling to dropping entire tiers on subsequent reports. Perhaps the final LP/MMR punishment would be a full rank demotion (dropping from Diamond down to Plat) before account bans could come in.

Another option I would propose is being forced to autofill for a certain number of games if your account gets reported, even in your promotion games. This would be a good medium between the low-priority queue of DOTA while not forcing toxic players to troll and grief in normal games.

5. Regulate Smurfs

Smurfing has been a problem in League of Legends for years, but right now there isn’t a good solution to this problem. Many players have called on Riot to allow streamers to buy a smurf account that is tied to their main account and doesn’t require leveling to 30. I completely support this idea, since it would make the experience for true new players much better, eliminate the practice of selling accounts, and give Riot a way to monitor players on their multiple accounts.

I would say that punishments shouldn’t transfer completely from a main account to a smurf, and vice versa, but your behavior on all of these accounts could factor into whether you get a full account ban. In addition, regulating smurfs in this way would prevent players from circumventing full account or IP bans in those very toxic cases.