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

6. Tie Honor Level to a Meaningful Reward

It’s clear to most players that your Honor Level doesn’t really do anything, especially for the high elo players. Yes, having a higher Honor Level is great if you want to unlock cosmetics for free and get some cool new icons. However, for high elo players, they generally don’t care about honor as long as they aren’t getting banned.

I would propose that, in Diamond and above, we tie your Honor Level to LP gains and losses. Give players at Honor Levels 4 and 5 a slight acceleration to their LP gains and slightly fewer on losses (like one or two additional/fewer LP per game at Level 4, three or four per game at Level 5).

Players may complain that this creates a system where less-skilled players will get artificially ranked higher just because they are being nice. To this, I would say “so what?”

It is not hard to get Honor Level 5, especially when you play the volume of games most high elo players do. Players who are pushing for Challenger will want a quicker climb, so if this can incentivize players to be less toxic that is overall better for the ladder.

Your individual skill in League of Legends is not the only determining factor of whether you can climb or not. How well you play with your teammates, whether it’s supporting them to improve in game or just not tilting them, is a skill. It’s time that players feel more rewarded for being good at that skill.

7. Monitor High Elo Games

This was a suggestion from streamer NEACE from a few years back, but I think it has a lot of merit. If Riot does decide to tighten the rules of unacceptable behavior in high elo, they should also take the extra steps to ensure that this is not abused. One of these steps should be having one or two Rioters doing random reviews of high elo games every day to make sure there is no behavior that is threatening the competitive integrity of the top of the ladder.

Random spot checks of high elo games not only puts some fear into players that they will get spotted for game-ruining behaviors even if their teammates don’t bother to report them, it also creates an opportunity for transparency. Riot could release certain VODs with an explanation for why they consider certain behavior to be toxic or not. Players could respond, either in agreement or disagreement, and Riot could then iterate their review approach.