League of Legends is one of the few online games that has integrated the surrender feature successfully. And yes, losing LP in a surrender game because your teammates went AFK is undoubtedly bad. But at least you have the option to do end it quickly. And with that comes the critical question: Do you actually lose more LP when you surrender in League of Legends? Or less?
Not too long ago, Riot Games introduced the “early surrender” option. The idea was simple: at the 15th-minute mark, a team has a chance to surrender the match over, but only if all the five teammates vote with “Yes”. And if only one person votes with “No”, the early surrender system will practically perish until the 20th minute, when the team can surrender regularly.
On top of that, the LoL players have the chance to “remake” the game in case a person didn’t connect at the start of the game. Practically, the remake means that if one or more of your teammates couldn’t load into the match for any reason, you and the rest of the team have 3 minutes to end the game. This only takes two people to vote or type /remake, so it’s a quick way to start a new game.
Both of these changes were done with one purpose in mind – dealing with the inters and the AFK players. Being in a game with a teammate who just gives up and stops playing after a few minutes is one of the most toxic situations in League. And no one has fun in it!
But while the remake is essentially “free”, the early surrender system punishes you by taking exactly as much LP as a regular defeat. This received a significant negative backlash from the LoL community. And rightfully so. No one likes to lose LP when they don’t deserve it. So, Riot Games had to change things further.
The New Surrender Changes and LP Mitigation in League of Legends
One of the most recent moves towards toxicity that Riot Games did was introducing the champion select reporting system. This feature allows players to mute and report toxic team members as soon as they meet in the champion select. And although it is a very nice change, it simply wasn’t enough.
But that is why Riot continued in their original path. On patch 10.22, the new measures against the inters and the AFK players took place.
The changes state the players no longer have to wait 15 minutes in order to surrender a clearly lost game because of an AFK player. Instead, the new system hunts and detects when a person goes AFK, making the surrender button available automatically.
If you aren’t sure of what this means, let us put it this way. Let’s say you’re in a ranked game and your jungler rage quits after a while. Well, you and the rest of the team are able to surrender the game right away. But what if the jungler comes back and votes with “no”? In that case, as soon as they get detected being AFK or, you can start the surrender vote again immediately.
In addition to that, Riot Games will implement an LP mitigation for early surrenders in League of Legends. From patch 10.24, whenever you’ll use the early surrender option, you’ll simply lose less LP. We still aren’t sure about how this system will work, though. The idea is that it will calculate whether you deserve to lose LP or you don’t. And based on that, it will make the judgment of how much LP you’ll lose when you surrender in LoL.
We’ll have to see how the LP mitigation will play out on the live servers, and we’re quite curious about it. But the important thing is that we, the honest players, won’t get penalized by toxic people’s actions. We will lose less LP when we surrender, and we won’t have to grind as hard. And that has our thumbs up!
Final Words
Look. No one can stop a person from rage quitting in League of Legends. And quite frankly, a few people can truly calm down and not int. So, this problem has been a part of LoL since its beginning. However, as the game aged and the community grew more respective, inting and AFK have no place in League of Legends anymore.
Losing less LP when surrendering and being able to quickly end a toxic game of League of Legends are fantastic features. In theory, the game should be fair to everyone and reward each person according to their efforts. We just hope that the systems work as well in practice so that we all can have a better and healthier League of Legends.
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