Riot Games plans to address toxicity after Voyboy video

For those that play League of Legends, the in-game experience can be rather polarizing. But for veterans and new players alike, the issue of toxicity regularly comes up. It’s hard to go a night without running into another player that exhibits toxic behavior during a match. Over the last few years, this has become a growing part of the League community. These players negatively impact the solo queue while rarely receiving any form of punishment. As a result, figureheads of the community, such as Voyboy, have spoken up about the growing problem in the hopes that Riot might actually do something about it.

Recap of the problem

In a previous article, we wrote about a video posted by League of Legends veteran Voyboy. In this video, he spoke about the immense problem of player toxicity and how this continues to affect the gaming community to the detriment of League of Legends. He was quite disappointed with the game after being repeatedly targeted by trolls and other toxic individuals that sought to sabotage his match.

Voyboy has reasoned that most players feel the same way. Now it’s up to Riot to find solutions to deal with the growing toxicity. And surprisingly, Riot Games has spoken up about the problem and outlined a number of steps they are going to take to address this problem.

Riot Games responds to Voyboy

Andre “RiotMeddler” van Roon posted to twitter with a summary of upcoming steps that Riot Games will take to address game-ruining behaviors. As the first step, they’re planning an overhaul to the reporting system, which will have its trial run in North America before being rolled out to other regions in several weeks. Previously, players only received a notification that a toxic user was punished if their report was the final one that triggered the system. As a result, many felt that their actions didn’t matter. The new system, however, will notify everyone if a punishment is given to a player, regardless of the report category within the individual’s next few games.

Another step is addressing behavior during champion select. During late Q2, players will be allowed to report and mute toxic members of the community even as early as champ selection. The initial reports will be used to create a foundation of different types of champ select behavior before a punishment system is implemented for unacceptable behavior.

After these changes are made, Riot plans to reevaluate its previous stance on automated detection of toxic behavior in-game. This follows along the same lines of the work it is doing for VALORANT. Historically, the system hasn’t always been used since some players were falsely banned. But currently, controlling subtle toxicity is incredibly important, so Riot needs to make some compromises regarding incorrect bans based on community reception.

The long-term game plan

Riot still plans on coming up with some long-term plans. RiotMeddler stated that he will provide another update by next month when some of the current fixes are implemented or ready to release. In response to this, Voyboy posted another video, during which he asked for the community to do its part in promoting positive behavior to help save League of Legends.

Everyone has a part to play in this game’s success. Let’s do what we can to reduce toxicity and just have a good time.

Ryan Goodrich

Ryan has been writing since long before he could even write. He's written resumes, software user guides, consumer electronic reviews, and myriad web content spanning a variety of industries. But now he's writing about video games, which is much more interesting.

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