The team at Riot Games have always been more active than many other online competitive games at attempting to keep it’s community a fairly reasonable place. Some would argue they have to with one of the world’s largest consistent player bases and a game that can be innately complicated or high stress. League of Legends has had many systems in place to report people and have proper action taken to punish those who are considered toxic to the game. Assisting the enemy team, verbal harassment, negative attitude, and leaving the game are all examples of ban-able offenses. Overall Riot’s system currently in place has proven more effective than ineffective, but they’re looking to improve, this time with the focus being more immediate feedback and punishment for these toxic players.
The new reform system being tested currently in the European region focuses on multiple aspects of verbal abuse within the community and aims to have players realize that it is wrong in as little time as possible.
When negative behavior occurs, we know that the faster a player receives feedback, the better their chances of reforming… the community actively rejects: homophobia, racism, sexism, death threats, and other forms of excessive abuse. These harmful communications will be punished with two-week or permanent bans within fifteen minutes of game’s end.
The new system will analyze the chat logs of players with a focus on the reported player’s input to the chat, but doesn’t completely disregard the other players. If the system deems the player worthy of reform, it sends the reported player a “reform card” through email and in the League of Legends client with examples of their verbal abuse along with their punishment, whether it be a warning or a ban. Changes are coming to the types of bans as well with upgrades to recognizing other ban-able offenses as well as improvements to chat bans, as examples. Riot also wants to reward players who are a positive influence on the League of Legends community and will be rolling out rewards for positive players as well as notifications for players that accurately report others that deserved their punishment.
Riot is looking to implement this system into other regions in the near future, so make sure to play nice summoners!