Should Riot tweak Wild Rift’s "Deserter Penalty" in a future update?

With League of Legends: Wild Rift’s recent open beta release in different regions worldwide, the Redditors have already started voicing out their issues on various in-game features.

Wild Rift’s fan bases have been questioning its Deserter Penalty policies. As Wild Rift is a mobile-based version of League of Legends, a player’s in-game situation is much more volatile than that of PC-gaming. Since sudden calls, emails, or network glitches are much more frequent and uninvited, short disconnections are turning out to be a common aspect here.

The Deserter Penalty is one of the most talked-about Wild Rift features. Players all across social media have frequently been seen complaining about its disadvantages in terms of unwanted halts to their games.

Even though Riot games had introduced certain changes to their AFK penalty policies in their recent patches, the issues did not get resolved completely, according to a number of Wild Rift players.

Should Riot tweak Wild Rift’s LeaveBuster policies?

The players have started demanding a considerable relaxation in AFK penalties, considering the various real-time limitations in mobile MOBA gaming.

Patch 1.0a is here! The first balance patch of 1.0 brings nerfs to Xin Zhao, and a bugfix for... overperforming bots in Practice Mode.https://t.co/ysVirjIY7z

— League of Legends: Wild Rift (@wildrift) November 9, 2020

In their recently updated patch 1.0, Riot Games had already reduced the AFK penalties to a certain extent.

The first AFK penalty (3 to 6 min) was reduced from the 30 minutes ban to 10 minutes, and a 6+ min desertion’s ban was reduced from 60 minutes to 20 minutes. Further AFK penalties within a gap of seven days would now lead to a ban of six hours rather than 12.

Still, the Wild Rift fans want the desertion ban policies to be more relaxed, considering the frequent possibilities of network ruptures. According to them, it is alright to punish an AFKer, but the buffer-time for reloading a failed network should be allowed more. It is unfair to receive a deserter penalty just because of a short, uninvited disconnection.

In a recent Reddit post, a Wild Rift player, Fit_Satisfaction_477, stated:

"Deserter Penalty for a very short dc doesn't make sense. Today my app closed by accident, and immediately I started loading into the match. I wasn't there for the loading time, everything went smooth, and we won a game, and then I see I get deserter.

The player said that he understood about Riot wanting to punish afkers, but he felt that it was unfair to get a Deserter Penalty for no proper reason.

He further added that when his phone had issues, he wanted to restart the game to perform better but could not do it because he would get the penalty.

Wild Rift is still running on its beta version, and a whole lot of updates and tweaks are expected to be released in the coming months. Keeping the game-experience intact as well as mobile compatible is a big challenge for Riot. Updates featuring changes in LeaveBuster policies are certainly expected to come soon.

Okay so i have a suggestion please fix ur Lag and also Speed up the Recon Speed i accidentaly hit the Quit button pop up and confirmed it And i got penalty due to the very slow RECON SPEED I BEG YOU FIX IT pic.twitter.com/KfUolDQs8S

— ꠹ꪖꫀꪑꫀᦓꪊ (@jaemesu) October 24, 2020

The players do think that some considerations can be made on sudden game crashes and accidental quits. Some AI features can also be embedded in the game to continue the play during the user’s short-term absence.

After all, receiving a -5 after a good game for a short restart is definitely not the prize a Wild Rift player would want.