League of Legends looking for new ways to deal with toxic players

MOBAs are notorious for having some of the most unforgiving communities out there. If you’re a new player it can be really hard to learn the game while you’re being called a noob every two minutes. League of Legends in particular has arguably the worst reputation when in comes to its community, although it has gotten a little better lately from what I’ve noticed. Riot has been actively looking for ways of dealing with toxic players for a while now, but the latest measure they tested might seem a little bit too aggressive for some. The company announced yesterday that players who show signs of “extreme toxicity” will be either banned for 14 days or even permanently banned from League of Legends.

https://twitter.com/RiotLyte/statuses/491270902554689537

Riot’s Jeffrey Lin then went on Reddit to explain exactly how the new system works and why it’s needed. He says that only one server will be tested at a time to see how effective it is and to minimize false positive. All regions will have to undergo the test eventually and depending on the results, the system might end up rolling out permanently on all servers. He also mentions that Riot is planning to implement a system that will severely punish players who leave or are AFK during League of Legends matches. More details on both these measures will apparently be revealed at some point in the near future.

“In the past, we’ve avoided publicly naming and shaming players,” Lin says. “However, we’ve learned in recent months that being transparent is extremely critical to the playerbase’s trust in our systems, so we’ve decided to do a compromise. If players complain about unfair bans for this particular system (so, have a ban year code of 2500), we’re going to be fully transparent and posting the chat logs that resulted in the ban. Some players have also asked why we’ve taken such an aggressive stance when we’ve been focused on reform; well, the key here is that for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely.”

While these new measures seem to be just what League of Legends needs, some players are concerned that they might get unjustly punished for leaving games because of client or servers issues. Hopefully Riot plans on addressing these aspects first before taking any further action.