Toxic League of Legends players will be named, shamed and permanently banned
League of Legends developer Riot Games is getting serious about ending the famously toxic MOBA culture.
Starting today, League of Legends players who exhibit toxicity could receive two week bans - or even see themselves permanently barred from the game (or rather, for 2,500 years).
Responding to those who fear being caught by unfair bans, Riot's Jeffrey Lin said that all permanent bans will be manually reviewed - not automated.
In fact, if players are genuinely convinced they have been unfairly banned they can protest - at which point Riot will publish the offending chat logs.
"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 on Reddit.
"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."
Lin said that reform attempts have been successful with "most players" but some are so reluctant to give up their precious toxicity that Riot has been forced to remove them entirely.
Thanks, Destructoid.