League of Legends (LoL) creator Riot Games has announced a series of major changes to the way it handles misconduct in professional LoL tournaments with the introduction of a new standardized penalty system for pro players.
The esports industry has had its share of scandals over the last year, with problems ranging from doping to illegal match fixing and even extortion, so it is no surprise that Riot has its hands full keeping the game’s professional scene on the up and up.
With the 2016 season of LoL now underway, Riot said that it has decided to explain its stance on professional tournament rulesets, including why it will be making some changes this year.
“Our goal for League of Legends esports is to showcase the highest quality of play and sportsmanship in competitive League of of Legends,” Whalen Rozelle, Riot’s director of esports, said in a blog post. “To meet that standard, we need to establish and uphold goalposts to ensure a fair and stable ecosystem for players, teams, and the league.”
“The goal of both regional and global rules is very simple: to deter and penalize behavior which is at odds with the health of the league. They’re also designed to offer a clear and transparent set of guidelines for players and teams to be able to fully understand the consequences of any rules broken.”
Penalty Indexes
To better support its goal of providing clear guidelines for players, Riot has announced that it will be introducing penalty indexes, which will be used to standardize the way “typical offenses” during matches are handled.
Rozelle explained that this new system will be made up of two parts.
The first part will be a League of Legends Champion Series (LCS) index for “common or minor offenses which warrant a suspension of less than 3 competitive months.” This includes offenses such as unsportsmanlike conduct onstage, exploiting a bug despite receiving a warning, lying to LCS officials about a player’s eligibility, and more. Minimum and maximum penalties for these offenses can range from a simple warning to multi-game suspensions and fines costing several thousand dollars.
The second part of the penalty index system will be a general index for “major offenses warranting a suspension of 3 competitive months or more, and whose penalties will be the standard across all global leagues.”
It is unclear if these major offenses include specific rules for things like that time a manager threatened to have a player’s mother evicted if he didn’t play.
Riot’s goal “isn’t to penalize more frequently”
While the new penalty index system will allow Riot to quickly and easily dole out punishments for various offenses in the LoL esports scene, Rozelle said that the real intent behind the system is consistency and transparency.
“To be clear, our intent in streamlining our disciplinary process isn’t to penalize more frequently,” Rozelle said. “Instead, we hope that clearer communication about league discipline sets expectations, disincentivizes misconduct, and educates teams and players.”
In the interest of transparency, Riot will continue to disclose all official rulings and penalties for offenses in competitive LoL play, but going forward it will be using a new penalty tracking system rather than releasing full reports for every ruling.
“We think there are better ways to give context about fines and suspensions than producing uniform posts for all offences, minor or major,” Rozelle said.
The new penalty tracker will be less in-depth than the previous rulings Riot released, but they will be released more quickly and will cover straightforward offenses. Rozelle said that more complicated issues will still receive official explanations.
“Penalty indexes and the LCS ruleset aren’t intended to be stone tablets from above – LoL esports is still young and we’re learning how exactly leagues are best governed,” Rozelle concluded. “As such, we expect the system to evolve over time. As always, we’ll monitor the results of these changes and make adjustments as needed to better serve the ecosystem.”
You can read Rozelle’s full post here.
Image credit: Riot Games (c)