Seals and punishments

Six steps, in this order. Almost every question comes from forgetting the last one: the standings do not change until the tournament is synced.

1. 01You playA tournament game, in the configured queue.
2. 02You earn a sealIf that game meets one of the 14 rules. You can hold three.
3. 03You throw itAt another player, from the standings. The wheel decides what they get.
4. 04They decideAccept, or reject for 100 points. Until they answer, their games don't count.
5. 05They play with itThe first game started after accepting is the one that counts.
6. 06It syncsThe game is downloaded, the punishment checked, and both of you get a notification.

Seals are your ammunition. You earn them by playing well —or by suffering— in tournament games; they can't be bought or requested. They belong to that tournament: they don't carry over and can't be spent elsewhere. The standings show a three-slot capsule: yours and everyone else's, because knowing who is armed is part of the game.

The percentages come from measuring 10,020 real performances, not from an estimate. Together they produce 0.236 seals per game: about 2.4 in a 10-game tournament and 4.7 in a 20-game one.

On the tournament's Standings tab, in the row of the player you're aiming at. The button only shows if you have ammunition left and that person has no unresolved punishment. A wheel opens, spins for a second and a half and stops on the punishment that came up.

• You don't pick the punishment. The server rolls it. The spin on screen is theatre: if the browser decided, anyone would reload until the softest one came up.
• The roll is weighted by hardness. Soft ones come up three times as often as hard ones, so a seal isn't a death sentence half the time.
• It filters by the target's role. A support will never get "no control wards": for them that's half the job, not an inconvenience.
• One at a time per person and tournament. While they have an unresolved punishment here they can't receive another, from you or anyone. It isn't a timer: the slot frees up when they serve it, reject it or fail it.
• You can't throw one at yourself, or at anyone not enrolled in that tournament.
• The seal is spent on the throw, whatever comes up. It only returns if the punishment fails to be created by a server error.

For the three champion punishments the site freezes the list when it's imposed and names them: the champion you must play, the three that get banned, or the ones already above 5,000 mastery —those run into the dozens, so the notification gives the count and the decision box lists them all. Nothing to guess.

Only one punishment can land at a time, even if two people throw a seal at the same victim in the same second: one goes through and the other gets their seal back untouched.

A notification reaches your bell —and the desktop client, if it's open— linking to the tournament standings. A red box appears at the top with the punishment, the champions involved if any, and two buttons.

• Rejecting costs 100 points off your tournament total, and that closes it.
• Failing it costs the same: 100 points. Accepting and playing as if nothing happened is no cheaper than rejecting outright.
• Serving it gives no points. The gain is not losing the 100 and being free to play normally again.
• You only ever have one per tournament. Until it resolves, nobody can throw you another there.

The 100 is calibrated: an average game is worth 92.6 points, and there are 76.4 between winning and losing one. So rejecting hurts more than serving the punishment even when the punishment makes you lose the game. That's deliberate: if rejecting paid off, nobody would ever serve one.

All of them are checked automatically. Hardness is how much it gets in the way, from 1 to 3, and it's also the weight in the wheel: hardness 1 comes up three times as often as hardness 3.

• 

  No Ignite

  Play without Ignite.

  1 · softgame data
• Silence

  Don't use a single ping all game. Riot counts the fourteen types separately, so it's checked by adding them up.

  1 · softgame data
• 

  Autofill

  Queue with Autofill instead of picking your two positions. Checked when you enter the queue, which is when the choice can no longer be changed.

  2 · mediumdesktop client
• 

  No Flash

  Play the game without Flash.

  2 · mediumgame data
• 

  No Boots, No Fleet Footwork

  Finish with no boots in your inventory and without the Fleet Footwork keystone. Both sources of mobility are out. Final items are what counts, so selling them before the end works too.

  2 · mediumgame data
• 

  No Control Wards

  Don't buy a single control ward all game.

  2 · mediumgame datanever to support
• 

  No Consumables

  No potions, elixirs or consumables all game.

  2 · mediumgame data
• 

  Out of Your Comfort Zone

  Play a champion with less than 5,000 mastery points. The list is frozen when the punishment is handed to you, so grinding mastery afterwards doesn't change it.

  2 · mediumgame + mastery
• 

  No Favourites

  Don't play any of your three most-played champions from the last 30 days. They are frozen when the punishment is handed to you, so swapping them afterwards doesn't help.

  2 · mediumgame + mastery
• 

  Random Champion

  Play whichever champion the second wheel lands on. Only champions you have played before enter the draw, so you never get one you don't have.

  3 · hardgame + mastery
• 

  Tight Budget

  Finish the game with no item worth more than 3000 gold. Final items are what counts, not purchases: selling the expensive item before the end works too.

  3 · hardgame data
• 

  Rationed Ultimate

  Use your ultimate at most five times in the whole game. Careful with champions that change form with R (Jayce, Elise, Nidalee): with them it's impossible.

  3 · hardgame data

Everything comes from the game data Riot publishes, which the sync already downloads. There's no honour system and no manual review: a punishment we can't check doesn't go into the wheel.

• The game has to start after you accept. Something accepted mid-game can't be demanded of that same game.
• Since you can only hold one punishment per tournament, the first game you play after accepting is the one that resolves it.
• If you get "random champion" and it gets banned —or another player takes it— that game does not resolve the punishment: it stands for the next one and costs you nothing. The game's own points still count, you played it after all.
• Mastery is frozen when it's imposed. The three champion punishments store the list at that moment, so grinding mastery afterwards doesn't change what's banned.
• Served or failed, you get a notification with the reason. The same one appearing twice is a genuine bug.

To know whether a punishment is worth serving you need to see what it's measured against. Each game scores like this:

No ceiling and no floor, deliberately: a game can come out negative if you lost while performing in the worst 5 % of your role and earned no feats. That happened 1 in 94 times in the simulation, and it isn't a maths error.

Performance is your percentile within your role across five measures —KDA, kill participation, damage per minute, vision and the stat that defines your position— against thousands of real games from the patch. A 19/4/9 carry and a 2/8/24 support score almost the same: it's calibrated so no role outscores another, and it's blind to rank, so mixed-level tournaments are fair.

The 20 tournament feats

Besides seals and punishments, every game is checked against 20 fixed feats —the same for everyone, except two signature ones per role— worth points according to how rare they actually are, measured over the same 10,020 performances. Nobody throws these: they land on their own.

What matters most is the whole loop between two people, not each screen on its own. A full run:

• □Earn a seal with a rule that's easy to force —marathon, team carry— and confirm it shows up after syncing.
• □Fill the capsule to three and check the fourth lands after you spend one.
• □Throw a seal and verify the punishment that comes up fits the target's role.
• □Try to throw a second seal at the same person before they decide: it must be refused.
• □If a champion punishment comes up, check the notification and the box name exactly which champions.
• □Have two players throw a seal at the same person at the same time: only one punishment may land, and the second thrower must get their seal back.
• □Accept and serve it: served notification, no deduction.
• □Accept and fail it on purpose: failed notification and 100 points off the total.
• □Reject it: 100 points off immediately, even without playing another game.
• □Play a game without deciding the punishment and check it never counts, before or after deciding.
• □With the desktop client open, receive Autofill and queue with a fixed position: it's marked failed on queueing, not when the game ends.
• □Switch the site language and check the punishment name and description come out translated.

When reporting a bug

This reproduces almost anything: your username and the other player's, the tournament, the punishment name, the rough time and, if it's about a specific game, its id or start time. If the complaint is that something didn't count, say first whether the tournament had already been synced: that's by far the most common cause.