League of Legends: Wild Rift Patch 6.2 Introduces China’s Social Credit Score System on July 17
The upcoming 6.2 patch for League of Legends: Wild Rift will premiere a new Player Behavior System designed to encourage good behavior with exclusive rewards and punish bad behavior by banning players from core features like Ranked and normal PvP games.
League of Legends: Wild Rift is a mobile strategy and action game developed by Riot Games, which is fully owned by Chinese Tencent – one of the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. In 2015, Tencent was one of eight companies in China to work with the government on its national initiative of a Social Credit System.
“We know that Ranked can sometimes bring out the competitive side of folks, but we never want it to come at the cost of a great experience for everybody else,” said David Xu, Wild Rift’s Executive Producer in a YouTube video, and continued: “We’re excited to share that in this patch, we’ll be introducing our Player Behavior System.”
“You’ll earn a higher score and unlock exclusive rewards over time by being a great, respectful teammate. But if the system detects you being unsportsmanlike or negative towards your teammates – well, your score will drop, and so will your access to features like Ranked.”
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Scant Information About Honor Score System
Only a screenshot from the YouTube video offers a glimpse into the Player Behavior Score system and how it’s designed. Ranging from a score of 0 to 350 points, and divided into five brackets, each bracket describes which features are available.
For example, a player will need a score of at least 300 points to access all features in the game without any restrictions. This is also the minimum score for unlocking Player Behavior rewards. Meanwhile, less than 60 points will render the game unplayable for competitive players.
The only possible way to earn points back is to play each game without committing any violations. As of this writing, there’s no saying officially what’s considered to be a violation except for Xu’s vague comment about being unsportsmanlike or negative towards teammates.
Updated And Imported From PC
League of Legends: Wild Fire currently relies on players reporting bad player behavior. The upcoming 6.2 patch aims to largely detect behavioral violations automatically. PC players have been subject to behavioral monitoring for a long time already. This system has now been refined enough to be introduced to mobile players.
Riot Games posted an article co-authored by Riot Revenancer and Riot Heronic of the Behavioral Systems team on its website on Aug. 22, 2024 about how happy they were with the Honor and Behavioral Systems implemented in League of Legends (for PC) and what the future plans were.
“We want the honor system to reflect good behavior, not how many games you’ve played and how well you’ve played in them,” the article reads.
The article also goes on to define punishable infractions such as griefing, or “soft inting,” as “taking deliberate actions with the intent of reducing the team or a teammate’s likelihood of success.”
Other examples of bad behavior mentioned in the article include chat abuse, going AFK, and “straight intentional feeding.”
Likely Improvements to Detection Accuracy
At the time the article was written, the then automated detection of bad behavior sat at a 70% detection accuracy, which the authors found unacceptable, and by making changes they would like to improve the system to an absolute minimum of 95% accuracy.
“This won’t be a perfect system – an automated system won’t ever be able to catch every behavior that a human might be able to identify through added context. But we’re committed to continuing to expand this effort to the best of our ability, and a strength of this approach is that we can do so piece by piece as we add handling for additional griefing scenarios.”
“We’re going to take our time with this process to ensure that we get it right, but you can expect to see more updates in the near future as we start taking action.”
Reactions on YouTube
While there’s some support in the YouTube comment section for the honor system coming to the game, others wish that Riot Games would focus more on issues with matchmaking.
Commenting on YouTube, ic0nrc wrote: “This has been out in China for years – so glad that they finally introduced it to global servers. I just wish they finally add a real working reporting system,” about the new honor system.
YouTube user gc1087 fired back with: “dumb, instead of fixing the root cause, which is the trash matchmaking, they added a behavior score for the sensitive people.”
League of Legends: Wild Fire is not the only mobile game with an honor system in place that could render it unplayable. The title joins an esteemed list of games with similar systems: Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, PUBG Mobile, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Arena of Valor all have the capability of fully shutting players out.
