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Disruptive behavior within the game is nothing new for a MOBA like League of Legends.
A competitive mindset and the grind to reach the top of the ranked ladder can often bring out the worst in players. This leads to excessive abuse hurled towards teammates and an overall toxic environment.
Riot Games have therefore implemented several changes to the reporting system within League of Legends to make the game a better place. Everyone has bad days but most players just want to have some fun. Therefore, toxicity and abusive behavior, especially racism, have no place within the game.
Riot wants to implement further changes over the course of this entire year to ensure that the toxic players are punished for their actions as soon as possible.
Key changes to the behavioral system in League of Legends
Riot Games had already rolled out changes in relation to intentional feeding. This is a scenario where players start dying to the enemy team on purpose to lower the quality of the game for the rest of their teammates.
These changes have already shown progress and therefore Riot plans to bring in more changes concerning hate speech, verbal abuse and going AFK within the game.
According to Riot Games’ Codebear,
“We’ve seen positive results from our intentional feeding confidence methodology, and early testing indicates we'll see similar improvements by rolling this out to other disruptive behaviors like hate speech, verbal abuse, and AFKs. (For the first two, the benefits will stack with the upgrades to our text evaluation systems.) This will involve heavy collaboration with central service teams who work on all Riot's games, so our progress will be slow, but we're still aiming to have this out in 2021.”
Riot Games also want to implement changes to Champion Select penalties in League of Legends. They want to ensure that in case someone reports a player while the champion selection is undergoing, then immediate action will be taken leading to termination of the game.
As mentioned by Codebear from Riot Games,
“We’ve talked about this across the past 9 months, and had promised that it was “coming”. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to make that promise a reality. For now, we’re looking at what we can do to hook up champ select reports to post-game report categories (and penalties) where corresponding categories exist. Later on in the year, we hope to get our systems into place to issue penalties and mitigations directly in Champion Select. We’ll focus on immediate action in Champ Select, including deterrent solutions for game impacting picks/bans, potentially including scenarios where we can kill the lobby immediately. We don’t have a confident bead on when we can get the latter in place, but we’re prioritizing the former in penalty integration as soon as possible.”
League of Legends is a game that is fun as long as players are friendly and tactfully approach difficult situations. However, toxic behavior can lead to players quitting forever which hurts both Riot Games both financially and in terms of popularity. These changes might take some time to implement as some are planned for the end of the year and others for next year. However, they will definitely prove to be vital in keeping the player base healthy and sustainable within League of Legends.
