Riot Comes Out with Outline for Dealing with Toxic Players

Cover and thumbnail courtesy Riot Games

• Immediate changes include more punishment notifications.
• Short term changes deal with reporting players during champ select.
• Their long term plans are still to be determined. 

After Voyboy came out with a video calling out Riot for lack of action toward Solo Queue’s massive toxicity problem, League Game Director Andrei “Meddler” van Roon has come forward with an outline of Riot’s short and medium-term goals when it comes to combating toxicity. 

The plan mainly focuses on players who int/AFK in games and not on people who are genuinely trying and having a bad game or series of games even, so if you’re one of the latter, you don’t need to worry. 

One immediate change is going to be to how punishment notifications are generated. Previously players would only be notified that a reported user has been punished if that punishment was triggered immediately after the game you were reporting them for, and the punishment would be for the specific category. The actual punishment system looked at a player’s games over time and aggregated reports from different categories together. This resulted in notifications being substantially lower than the actual punishments. 

The revised notification system will notify the player who reported if punishments had been dolled out regardless of the category of the report. This would be triggered even if the player in question gets punished after any of their next dozen or so games. Riot has started trialling these improvements on the NA servers. If the tests on these servers go well, the features will be rolled out worldwide in the next couple of weeks.

Riot’s short term changes include integrating reporting and muting in champ select. Previously players had no way to deal with toxic behaviour in champ select other than dodging. Starting sometime in June though, players will be able to report people in champion select. 

In the medium term Riot will be testing out more responsive detection of deliberate inting/pseudo AFKing, while their long term plans are still to be determined. Riot also wants to rework other behaviour-influencing triggers when it comes to the Honor system, other social/recognition in features like Clash, etc. Riot will come out with more updates on these changes “within a month.”