As League of Legends players, you may have received an unwanted invitation to surrender at some point. It is quite typical in LoL games to encounter players who raise the white flag frequently and prematurely. Because of this, Riot Games has been encouraged to adjust the surrender mechanism in League of Legends. The game developers aim to prevent a player from becoming a nuisance by making numerous attempts to surrender.
A new change in the LoL surrender system
Chris “Riot Auberaun” Roberts has been the company’s spokesperson for announcing the change to the surrender system. The Summoner’s Rift production manager quickly caught the attention of many with a quick response on Twitter about the idea. Riot Auberaun posted on his Twitter account that the concept of the new change is that the team decides to surrender in League of Legends more than by a single player. The situation was immediately familiar to several players, so the suggestion was more than welcome.
No more surrender spam in LoL
To get into the details, there are four main components to this redesign of the surrender vote system in LoL. The first change to the system is that we will no longer see the player’s name who initiated the surrender vote. With this first change, Riot Games seeks to prevent other players from harassing players who want to surrender, as their “punishment” will now differ.
The crucial modification is as follows. A player who initiates a vote to surrender will be immediately banned for six minutes and cannot initiate another vote until that time has passed. The waiting time for others will remain at three minutes. However, a player who has already started a vote must wait twice as long as the other players.
We've got some surrender updates hitting PBE going in for 13.16. Intention here is to make surrendering more of a team action rather than 1 person spamming FF every 3 minutes, along with other misc improvements. We plan on doing more of this type of systems work going forward. pic.twitter.com/DPWfDAXTUL
— Chris Roberts (@RiotAuberaun) August 10, 2023
If the vote is finally negative, the waiting time will certainly start for each participant individually. Furthermore, the vote will disappear when the remaining votes cannot affect the result, ending the waiting period for the other participants. Last but not least, improvements will be made to the text message in the LoL chat when someone initiates a surrender, specifying whether the vote resulted from an AFK, Remake, or traditional surrender.
This modification will go live in the PBE to begin its testing phase with patch 13.16, the next scheduled patch. So far, initial reactions from the community have been positive, and they do not like to see the surrender signal when there is still time for a change. With this approach, players who tend to give up too soon or when they find themselves in a difficult personal circumstance will keep quiet for a little longer.