New Pings? More Toxicity: LoL Players are Reinventing the Use of New Bait Ping

The 2023 Preseason in League of Legends kicked off only a few days ago and players are already criticizing Riot Games for some of the upgrades it has thrown their way this time around. Every year Riot Games stirs up the meta by introducing new changes to the game in the preseason and this year was no different. Players were introduced to jungle pets, the newly revamped Chemtech drake, and also a detailed communication system via the new communication wheel aka ping wheel. 

Apart from the old pings of assist, enemy missing, on my way, and danger, there are new pings in League of Legends to improve gameplay. They are:

• All In 

• Bait

• Hold

• Push

However, League of Legends players are using one of these new pings to be extremely toxic in-game to their teammates.

Misusing the bait ping in-game

The bait ping is a new one in League of Legends and it is a symbol that looks like a fishing hook. But some players are using this bait ping which resembles a rope to an extent. Unfortunately, this ping, which was meant to signal your teammate into baiting their opponent is being used as a subtle way of players asking the other “to h*** themselves.”

On 17th November, one League of Legends player and a Twitter user wrote, “ffs I can't believe people are using the "bait" ping to tell others to h*** themselves in-game, it's just the new question mark to spam that hook on people’s head.”

Challenger tier player humzh demonstrated how the bait ping is being misused in League of Legends. In a short clip, he said, “Someone ints, just give him the rope.” Following this, all of his teammates started spamming the same emote in-game.

(Trigger Warning: Mentions of death)

Likewise, streamer and support player Ioki wrote on Twitter, “The League community treats Objective Voting like a spam pop-up ad and uses the bait ping as a "rope" emote. What a successful Preseason.”

Another personality who talked about this was former pro player Christian "IWillDominate" Rivera. He said, “The fact that Riot released the Bait Ping to improve communication but everyone just uses it as a noose to tell each other to k*** themselves is just the perfect amount of irony.”

Preseason 2023 was solely aimed at improving communication in League of Legends. However, with players being extremely toxic with the usage of the new bait ping, the entire system’s usage has become meaningless. Just like how the ‘enemy missing’ ping is used to point out the mistakes made by a player, the ‘bait’ ping has turned into a spam emote in-game. Riot Games also brought in strict changes to chat restrictions and bans, and with this new ping system in place, players have found a new way to be toxic and BM (bad manner) their teammates.