Riot Games shows every intention of doing something about the infamously toxic culture of League of Legends. The developer today announced that it will be performing 14-day or permanent bans from the game for exhibiting toxic behavior online in League of Legends or its community.
Today, players that show extreme toxicity (intentional feeding or racism, etc) will be instantly 14-day or permabanned in #LeagueOfLegends
— Jeffrey Lin (@RiotLyte) July 21, 2014
Players who get accidentally caught up in the bans will have their situations reviewed on a case-by-case basis to ensure that they are treated with fairness, Riot’s Jeffrey Lin added.
If this #leagueoflegends initiative is effective, we'll be rolling it out more permanently. Every permaban case is reviewed.
— Jeffrey Lin (@RiotLyte) July 21, 2014
Players convinced that they have been unfairly banned can lodge a protest against the company and Riot will publish the chat logs for the sake of transparency.
“Today is the start of tests where we’ll be using a new machine learning approach + Player Support manual reviews to target extreme cases of toxicity (such as intentional feeding, racism, death threats, homophobia, etc) and handing out pretty severe penalties such as 14-day or permanent ban,” Lin wrote in a Reddit post addressing the issue.
“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. 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.”
In addition to the new policy, Riot Games has released a new CGI trailer to advertise League of Legends, featuring some of its most popular characters. Check it out below.