New League of Legends Patch Punishes Toxic Players

Yesterday, we asked Riot Games if they could do something about the chronic harassment and every present toxicity of the League of Legends community at lower levels. Today, Riot announces that their new patch will severely punish toxic players.

This update comes by way of the official patch notes for the recently dropped 3.04 patch. The patch introduces a “restricted chat mode” for people who have routinely made gameplay unpleasant for others. If a player is found to be harassing others, they can be forced into this mode by game moderators. While in restricted chat mode, they will have a limited number of messages that they will be able to send out in game. They will also have restricted access to [All] chat. Players that manage to successfully complete matchmade games will be able to earn their chat privileges back.

Unfortunately, there are still a few problems with this system. First of all, it doesn’t stop players from using their restricted messages to grief players to the best of their ability. In addition, since completing games is all it takes to regain your chat privileges, it would be very easy to get your chat privileges back and immediately start trolling again. Since being put into restricted chat mode required moderator intervention, it seems as though the speed of people getting out of restricted chat will outpace the speed of people being forced into it.

Either way, it’s at least a step in the right direction. However, in the future it would be nice to see even harsher penalties laid on toxic players, like flat out bans.