I’m not.
On May 18th, 2016, Riot Games announced its newest in-game feature for League of Legends: /remake.
Riot Socrates made the official forum update, listing out the following details:
- If any player is dc’d or flagged afk for at least ninety seconds at the three minute mark, and there’s been no first blood, all players on the short-handed team are prompted to /remake with a chat message
- All players on that team have one minute to prompt a vote by typing /remake in chat
- The vote needs at least two of four players (or at least 30% of the players on the voting team to agree), at which point the game ends
- All players connected to the game basically pretend the game never happened, gaining or losing no LP/IP/XP, and seeing no change to their overall W/L records
- The dc’d player (or players) takes full LP losses or drop a promo game, and are also flagged by Leaver Buster
- Note for ranked: To protect competitive integrity, Diamond V and above players will also take a loss when the dc’d player is in their premade; We’ll keep an eye on this restriction to see if it needs to extend to lower ranks
In essence, this measure will allow short-handed teams, whether due to disconnect or other reasons, to forfeit a game by having a /remake vote before 3 minutes have elapsed; the result will be the match immediately ending and essentially not existing for any of the players in the game.
This seems like a wonderful change at face value; I’m sure many of you have felt the burden of playing out a four-on-five match from start to finish, and this would give friendly players the chance to prevent any negative impact to one’s league points.
Concerns with /remake
Loopholes
Reddit user undeadpz pointed out that if the full-strength team notices that a player is AFK within the first 3 minutes, it may be advantageous to intentionally give up a first kill. By doing so, that team can prevent a /remake from happening. This measure appears to be fairly extreme, and it may very well be, but it might also become a legitimate exploit once remakes are rolled out.
Possibility for Abuse
The final note from the Riot announcement articulated that Diamond+ players in a premade stack will take an LP loss if they should call for a remake. But what about all the players below Diamond? That’s over 98% of the ranked population with the opportunity to abuse this measure in their premade stacks, by having an optional “sandbag” teammate. This teammate would go AFK under circumstances such as: messed up level 1 without a kill given, avoiding certain players (i.e. noticing the other team has a smurf by using lolnexus.com after loading), or simply wasting the time of an opponent you do not like.
What About the DC’d Player?
90 seconds isn’t a lot of time, if you think about it. The time it takes for me to restart my router, reconnect to the internet, and load back into League of Legends is 3 minutes at minimum. Should we really be punished for a small mistake that doesn’t necessarily have a huge impact on the game anyway? I loaded into a Master promo game about two weeks ago at seven minutes, with my team down roughly 3,000 gold, and we came back to win the match in 25 minutes. I had technical issues arise before the match, but missing the early part of lane phase didn’t affect me so greatly since advantages aren’t pressed very hard in solo queue.
What About the Opposing Team?
If I’m on the other team, I’m incredibly irked by a remake. Not only did I just sit through a 30 minute queue time, but now I’ve also gone through the entire champion select process, loaded into game, shown my early cards, and even played some of the game itself. Why should I be punished for someone else’s mistake?
The option to remake is really going to light some fires under some high-elo community members, who already spend less than half of their time engaged in League of Legends actually playing the game. I definitely do not envy the rare occurrence that someone should have to go through – 2 hours of technical proceedings for a 5 LP gain.
There’s definitely some merit to being able to remake, but I’m not sure that the benefits will ever outweigh the consequences. Perhaps on release it will be as positively received as the crafting system. But I’m willing to bet that like others before it – the Honor System, Dynamic Queue – remakes will end up being a huge waste of human capital and wash away to the wayside as another failed project.