Riot will experiment with voting to surrender. What exactly will change?
Games in League of Legends can be really long. In individual games, team fights can be very evenly matched, and picking a winner can be difficult until the final blow is dealt to the nexus. However, there is also the other side of the coin – some games can end just minutes after they start. And while it’s not worth prejudging its outcome after one lost team fight, sometimes things just don’t work out, and the gameplay turns into a wait until the 15th minute, at which point you can finally give away the victory.
Gameplay is generally faster now, due to the considerable power of mythical items, which can be acquired relatively early in each game. Much more often than before there is a snowball effect, which leads to a situation in which the opponent simply has no chance on the lane. For this reason, Riot decided to improve the situation a bit and allow players to surrender the game in a simpler way.
Easier to vote to surrender
Surrender was a vote that allowed to surrender when the majority of the team voted for it. In the 15th minute, 5 “yes” votes were required, and as of the 20th, 4 were enough. One Rioter published information according to which the above-described rules will change. Riot Auberaun, who works in the team responsible for the replayability of the gameplay, wrote that the surrender changes will be tested from update 13.2.
Starting in patch 13.2 we’ll be testing a change to the surrender rules for Normals (Blind and Draft). Teams will be able to pass a surrender vote with 4/5 yes votes starting at 15 minutes.
The rules that applied in the 20th minute of the match will now apply to voting, which can begin in the 15th minute.
Riot Auberaun wrote that the implementation of the fixes is due to internal data that suggests that a failed attempt to surrender in the 15th minute often ends in defeat anyway. Nevertheless, the team also wants to allow time for opponents to have the opportunity to feel victory and not have games end too early.
As already mentioned, the fixes will hit the live servers in update 13.2, which is scheduled for January 24. For the time of testing, they only affected blind pick and normal draft queues. Whether the changes will eventually also appear on ranked games is uncertain at this point.