Riot Games

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Riot Games Received 3 Billion Reports Against Its Players in 2021

Abhimannu Das
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Highlights
Riot Games' Player Dynamics department is getting some upgrades as more automated processes and evaluation systems are being implemented.
The publisher is currently working on implementing more automated evaluation systems to detect disruptive behavior.
Over 240 million reports were received by Riot Games every month in 2021.

Riot Games implemented a ‘Player Dynamics’ team to consolidate its efforts against cheating. Riot Games had announced the launch of the team back in May 2022 and it also recently published details on the progress the team has made so far. Over 3 billion reports were received in 2021 and Riot Games is taking steps to make the evaluation process as smooth as possible.

Riot Games received 240 million reports against players per month

In 2021, Riot Games averaged 240 million reports against its players per month and a total of 3 billion reports across all its titles. If every Rioter spent 365 days a year with their only job reviewing these reports, Riot would still need each person to review about six reports per minute to keep up. With reports being false or invalid in a lot of cases, manual reviews are still necessary.

Riot Games wants to implement automated solutions which can detect disruptive behavior at scale. These systems need to be able to distinguish behavior that warrants penalties from behavior that doesn’t. While it is easy to do so for players going AFK (away from keyboard), it is difficult to implement for other types of disruptive behavior.

Across the industry, the breakdown falls around a 95/5 percentage. That means that 95% of people who are disruptive in games are only disruptive sometimes. For those players, warnings and light penalties are usually enough to prevent them from reoffending. The last 5% are consistently and intentionally disruptive. Riot Games also revealed that out of all the players that received a penalty in 2021, less than 10% of players received another one within the calendar year.

Voice evaluation is in the works and it will be implemented across most of Riot Games’ titles in the future. Text evaluation improvements are also in the works and Riot Games is also focused on credibility-driven evaluation and real-time evaluation.

The new credibility-driven report evaluation seeks to crack down on outlier players who receive significantly more reports over multiple games than the average population while slipping by automated detection systems. This system currently focuses only on disruptive behavior in communications, but Riot Games is expanding it to gameplay offenses and inappropriate names.

Real time evaluation is also being improved so players are punished mid-patch instead of going through a long process of reporting, manual evaluation and punishment.

Right now, about 27 players per every 1,000 playing Valorant are showing up as AFK. Some of these are bots trying to grind out XP. Riot Games is ensuring that these lobbies are filled with other AFK bots and if no damage is done, no experience is earned.

Intentional Feeding (Inting) detection is also in the works and while active throwers are rare, they are present and Riot Games wants to get rid of them. Similar systems are also being worked on for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift as well. Legends of Runeterra does not have voice chat and it might not receive some of the active monitoring systems due to its 1v1 nature.


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Abhimannu is a PC esports writer at AFK Gaming. With over seven years of experience in esports journalism, he has worked on a myriad of games and their ecosystems including Valorant, Overwatch and Apex Legends.

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