LoL devs clamp down on toxicity with new features & longer bans

Liam Ho
Singed Splash Art

The League of Legends developers are looking to further combat player toxicity by introducing new tools and extended punishments for offenders.

It’s no secret that League of Legends is a pretty toxic game. The highly competitive community isn’t the nicest when it comes to treating each other with respect, particularly in ranked matches. In each match, you’re bound to see a couple of insults hurled between the teams, as well as between teammates.

Developers Riot have tried their best to reduce the level of toxicity from players, including introducing new punishments and incentives for positive behavior. However, the battle with toxicity is a forever ongoing war, one that the devs can almost never win. Regardless of what the devs do, players always find a way to be awful to one another.

Now Riot is clamping down on toxicity once more, introducing new features and more punishing bans as a part of Patch 14.3.

Riot introduces new tools and extended punishments to combat toxicity

Patch 14.3 brought a fair amount of changes to League of Legends, however one change that definitely flew under the radar had to do with combating toxicity.

The new patch introduced a feature that would pop up after reporting a player, asking them if they’d like to block or change their chat settings. This is a nice quality-of-life inclusion that can assist players in dealing with toxic individuals or help them adjust their chat settings to avoid communicating with them.

Alongside this change, Riot also increased the duration of chat penalties, which are punishments that prevent the player from being able to type during games. The notes themselves don’t mention exactly how long they were extended but serve as a warning to not misbehave in your games.

In the never-ending war of toxicity and Riot, it’s uncertain how much of an effect these new tools will have, but regardless it’s always nice to have more options available to players.