Although toxic behaviors are nothing new in League of Legends, one must admit that they became more and more common over the past year. The COVID-19 pandemic may have played an indirect role in that by forcing people to stay at home when they were quarantined, which might explain why the Rift suddenly became the place where people exteriorize their frustration by spamming pings, questions marks, and "[insert role] diff".
What now seems commonplace for most players has been heavily underlined by a lot of prominent members of the League community, including Voyboy who made a pretty deep statement in a video, weeks ago. This event was kind of the spark that ignited a topic that had been kind of neglected for years. Toxicity is really nothing new in League but when it tends to become the norm, then there is a real issue.
As a consequence, Riot Games pretty much started a crusade on toxicity, promising to implement efficient tools and features that would allow them to be better at identifying and punishing toxic behaviors. The first one was implemented with Patch 10.13, and you can now report and mute players during the champion selection.
The Champ Select Report tool
With two update cycles, Riot Games had the time to analyze the tool, and gather feedback. Most of the time, the tool was used to report players when they intentionally or not banned the champion of one of their teammates. Other cases obviously include flaming and other toxic comments in the chat. Based on this early feedback, Riot are already planning several improvements, starting with a better confirmation system during the ban phase.
Now, Riot are targetting several other toxic behaviors:
- Intentional feeding
- Sabotage the game through disruptive gameplay actions
- Intentionally leaving the game
- Remain inactive during the game
- Disconnections during the game
The goal is to reduce these behaviors but especially to reduce their impact on the players who're suffering from them.
Detection, punishment, and reforming
In order to detect intentional feeding and AFK players, Riot teams looked at hundreds of hours of gameplay to improve the detection system and manage to detect toxic behavior during the games. Their main objective wasn't only to identify toxic players, but also to find ways to compensate the other players who must endure these behaviors.
With the upcoming changes, Riot will be able to identify that kind of behavior twice more easily than they were before. As a direct consequence, they'll be able to punish them more regularly. Riot also plans to introduce more feedback for players, with the aim of preventing this behavior from being reproduced. At the same time, they want to ensure a better experience for players who suffer from toxic behaviors, and that's why we should see soon the possibility of surrendering earlier if any AFK players are quickly identified.
Moreover, Riot Games promises stricter queue restrictions for accounts that tend to disconnect or AFK often... All of these changes should be implemented in August.
From August, the LCK will host a brand new tournament called Academy Series. The goal? Discover the region's emerging talents...
Original content by "Cthulhu".
