Behave: Riot is instantly banning toxic players in League of Legends today

Riot banning toxic players

Riot’s running an experiment today in League of Legends. Any player in the MOBA who shows “toxicity” such as racism will instantly be banned for two weeks or permabanned. 

Social system lead designer, Jeffrey Lin, dropped the news on Twitter today, prompting a slew of questions due to its somewhat vague nature. Lin took to Reddit to clarify how this works and that it’s just a one-day experiment. 

The experiment will just last the day, though if it’s successful – in that it doesn’t throw up a lot of false positives – it may be implemented on a more permanent basis.

Lin also clarified why Riot was taking this approach when it’s been trying to reform rather than punish players. “Well, the key here is that for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely.”

While the developer has, in the past, avoided naming and shaming players, it has decided to change its stance on this, but only in very specific cases.

“In the past, we’ve avoided publicly naming and shaming players; however, we’ve learned in recent months that being transparent is extremely critical to the playerbase’s trust in our systems, so we’ve decided to do a compromise,” Lin explained on Reddit. “If players complain about unfair bans for this particular system (so, have a ban year code of 2500), we’re going to be fully transparent and posting the chat logs that resulted in the ban.”

Do you think this will have a positive impact on the game, reducing the number of bad eggs?