'League Of Legends' Is Disabling All Chat In Effort To Combat Abuse
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Featured Image Credit: Riot Games, Fredrick Tendong via Unsplash
Riot Games has announced that League of Legends will no longer feature the ability to chat to other players in order to stem the tide of abuse in matches.
Patch 11.21, which is scheduled to roll out on October 20th, includes new skins for Kai'Sa, Karma, Thresh, Volibear and Yasuo as well as changes to the Ironspike Whip, Stridebreaker and Goredrinker. Speaking in a post to the game's official blog, Riot Games explained that abuse has been a "rising problem" throughout this year and player reports show that "negative interactions outweigh the positives."
This omission will be evaluated for its effectiveness in order to decrease the frequency of toxicity in League of Legends, and the studio added that team chat, emotes and CTRL+1/2/3/4 spam will still be available to communicate with other players. "We know this sucks for those of you who just want to compliment your lane opponent's skin, or ask for a dance party in Baron pit," conceded the company. "But we believe the tradeoff is worth it to cut down on the growing negativity /all chat has been creating in your games."
Here's TikToker Lexlou930 shutting down the hostility she faced from a salty Call Of Duty player by showing him how good she is at the game and keeping her cool all the while.
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Unpleasantness in online games is something that seems to be embedded in the experience. Yet, League of Legends has offered Riot Games lessons on how to tackle toxicity in Valorant, its colourful hero shooter that came out last year.
"Those specific salves inside of our game, we've done a lot of research to actually make sure and do that work," said game director Joe Ziegler in an interview with Eurogamer. "Just like any solutions thing, half of it is stopping people from hurting other people, and the other half is teaching them the better way to do it."
Anna Donlon, executive producer of Valorant, had previously said that she doesn't like to solo queue in the game for fear of harassment based on her gender and Valorant actually started recording its players' voices to determine whether or not they were using disrespectful language towards their fellow competitors. All in all, there have been steps taken to cultivate a better, healthier space for fans to enjoy together, but the road to the destination is going to be a long one.
Topics: League of Legends, Riot Games, PC
