One of the reasons I and I suspect many others, stepped away from enormously popular MOBA titles like League of Legends in the past, is because of player toxicity. It's bad enough losing a team focused game, but when someone decides to blame the entire outcome on you, you have to question why you are playing in the first place. Developer Riot Games though has always placed a lot of emphasis on improving this by cracking down on negative play and now it's claiming that LoL players have been on their best ever behaviour as of late.
This is quite impressive, considering the game's player controlled banning system, called the Tribunal, has been in “recess,” for the best part of a year. Although Riot plans to bring it back at some point, it's currently still reworking it to iron out some of the issues people had with it. How then, has Riot been cleaning things up so well? Through new automated tools.
A new system of detection for certain racist and aggressive words and phrases has prevented most people from coming up with clever ways to call each other names and there's even a clever detection tool in place to spot people deliberately feeding the other team. “Leaverbuster,” was also implemented late last year to pick out those that consistently leave games early and place them in a low-priority-queue so that their games take longer to find.
All of this, says Riot, has helped make the game cleaner and more pleasant than ever before.
“Leavers/AFKs [are at a] record low in the history of League. I'm hoping to share more data around this when we wrap up analyses,” said RiotLyte on the LoL subreddit (via PCG).
He went on to claim that toxic players are now only obvious in around only two per cent of games, a record low for League of Legends and that when the tribunal finally does return, it will give users the chance to reward positive play as well, even rewarding some with in-game items.
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KitGuru Says: It's good to see Riot is still clearing house when it comes to ‘toxic' players. Have you guys noticed the game improving over the past year in that respect?
They do it well, punishing the toxic players (chat restrictions) and rewarding the positive players (free skins) has certainly has its effect. Also, the fact that you get a warning nowadays when you are reported by a teammate teaches you to focus on the game and less on the players.
or it teaches you that there are still petty toxic assholes in the game 🙂
get reported pretty much every day in arams whether i say anything or not.
Sure sometimes i deserve it no doubt i give as good as i get but i always find i get told i was reported when i’m not being a twat 😮
Maybe you’re always being a twat? I’ve never been reported.
I’ve been scarred from the toxicity awhile back. Even after this new system in place, I find it hard to want to go back to the game.
I’ve been playing HotS instead.
You should be banned from this site for suggesting he was a twat. Very toxic behaviour.
Riot everywhere!
I’d love to see better systems for this on Battlefield. I love the fact that it is a game focused on teamwork and highly rewards it…yet 50% of people seem to hate playing as a team and will gladly put other team members in harms way and calling each other names. A good slew of “your mum” jokes and other such levels of emotional maturity accompany a lot of matches, and it’s a shame for a game that could build such a global, tight-knit community.
Lowest leavers in history, first ranked match in Season 5 and our team has 2 AFK’s XD
I got reported the other day for asking the enemy team to report a player for trolling as he said in all chat that he was trolling, Apparently I was being toxic.
Preventing people from chatting does not count as lowering toxicity in one’s behavior. It’s equivalent to cheating. One can’t be verbally abusing when he’s not allowed to speak at all, lmao. Doesn’t change anyone’s personality, just keeps it contained in a box that will eventually open once again.This cheap-shot actually ruins the game even further. Takes away the one true thing that matters the most: communication.
This is exactly what you get when your goal to reach the global population’s pockets owns a higher percentage than preventing little uneducated, illiterate, naive and all-emotional under-aged players from participating in a non-controlled way (i.e. parental overview out of the top of my head).
My opinion is that Riot observes their loss in territory against upcoming MOBA games so they’re trying to sweeten some people up with false positives. Reminds me of how politics worked back in Neanderthal’s era.
League of Legends has been a blast for a few months about 5 years ago. It even managed to keep up it’s fast-paced awesomeness up until the end of Season 2. After that point, only a true maniac would keep on participating in it’s games. This whole project didn’t even put any effort into properly educating newcomers about how to properly achieve victory. Key points, in-game atmosphere, yeah I’ve seen a lot of Phreak’s videos giving out a couple of tips around new champs but that’s nothing. There never has been a true effort to make youngsters understand the true essence of what’s needed to be done and in what spirit, in order to achieve victory.
Last point on the table: Most repetitive game I have ever played. There literally haven’t been any major implementations or any new introductions (new 5v5 maps with different objectives for example), just recycling. Everything new is something that already was in the game, with a shiny new polished artwork and re-combined mechanics that have the same effect, just in a different way.
Try uninstalling the game. After about 10 to 15 days of absence, and while playing something new & far better (in my humble opinion), you’ll see that you won’t even think about going back to this mess again. I now even like Dota 2 more than League of Legends, and to think that I despised it’s slow paced animations and attacks. Anyway!
Heroes of the Storm for the win.