If you’re still complaining about the League of Legends community being toxic, records are telling a bit of a different story. The community has come a long way since the introduction of Riot’s disciplinary system, reducing the amount of actual reported toxicity to about 2% of all League of Legends games.
League of Legends is a completely free to play online game that is an inherently high stress team game which could often lead into easy avenues of verbal abuse. However, League of Legends actively punishes these acts through their tribunal system. The system starts with players reporting anyone they think was detrimental to the game’s experience for any number of reasons including, but not limited to, sexism, racism, homophobia, and generally abusive language. After which players can help judge cases at Riot’s official tribunal website in addition to each case being reviewed by Riot’s system, which is reportedly able to tell the differences between semi snide comments and actual malicious intent.
“As a result of these governance systems changing online cultural norms, incidences of homophobia, sexism and racism in League of Legends have fallen to a combined 2 percent of all games. Verbal abuse has dropped by more than 40 percent, and 91.6 percent of negative players change their act and never commit another offense after just one reported penalty.” Says Jeffery Lin Riot’s lead game designer and social systems designer in an article on re/code that’s worth checking out if you want the full details in what goes into designing and effectively implementing these disciplinary systems.