In a recent /dev video, Riot talked about upcoming changes to the honor system and their griefing detection systems. Read on to find out what's new and what's coming!
Honor System Updates
The Honor system was first introduced on October 1st way back in 2012. It's a system meant to incentivise positive behaviour among the League of Legends community. When it was introduced in 2012, players could commend their teammates by tagging them as "friendly," "helpful", or for good "teamwork". Additionally, you could tag an enemy as an "honorable opponent", if they were humble in victory or graceful in defeat.
This system was scrapped between Season 6 and Season 7 in place for the Honor system as we know it today. With the 2017 Honor system, players could honor a single member of their team with either "Stayed Cool", "Great Shotcalling", or the catch-all commendation, "GG <3". No longer being able to honor opponents was an unpopular change, but the changes in rewards were well received at first.
In the past, especially honorable individuals would get ribbons on their profiles, and players in the top 10% of each honor category would be given a summoner icon. With the 2017 system, players would get keys, key fragments, champion shards, and ultimately "Honor 5 Tokens." Honor 5 Tokens could be redeemed in the Honor 5 Token Shop in the crafting tab. While this was an exciting prospect in 2017, the shop has virtually not changed at all in the past six years - still offering only Medieval Twitch and Grey Warwick for one Honor 5 Token each. In future updates, namely in Seasons 9, 10, and 11, both skins received a chromas that could be redeemed in the shop as well, but no major addition has been added to the store.
Now, six years later, the Honor system is getting another update.
One of the things the Riot team wasn’t happy with is that Honor as a system has stopped being about... well, honor. Honor was conceptualised as a reward for when players behave well. Today, instead, it's often used to acknowledge teammates who played well. This is partly due to the constriction of only being able to honor one single person. It feels bad to honor someone who was friendly when they went 1-7 while another teammate toiled for 35 minutes to drag the team to victory.
In the little sneak peek shared yesterday, Riot revealed a brand new after-game screen where players can honor others. In the new version of the honor screen, it seems that players will now possibly have four honors to give out, and enemies can now be designated as honorable too. Riot also expressed that they were overall unhappy with the current honor system rewards. Though, what, if anything, they'll change - we'll have to wait and see.
Riot hinted that there were other changes lined up - new long-term plans for the system overall - but for now, this little sneak peek is all we get.
Behavioral System Updates
While we're on the topic of honor, let's talk a bit about dishonor. In their recent dev video, Riot also talked about how they're working on preventing disruptive gameplay; AKA, griefing or "soft inting". Griefing was defined as "taking deliberate actions with the intent of reducing the team or a teammate’s likelihood of success."
There is a clear difficulty here in identifying behaviour that is a result of a bad day or a bad game, and actual griefing. Riot has systems in place that are meant to identify and punish griefing, but how successful are these systems at detecting intentional griefing?
Apparently, the systems sit at around 70% detection accuracy, while Riot is aiming for at least 95%. To increase the detection accuracy, Riot is currently in the process of making changes to the straightforward detection systems, as well as making an improvement to the way they use compound data.
