14 DAY TRIAL // League of Legends developer Riot Games decided to block players whose behavior is deemed to be too toxic in game, preventing them from joining ranked matches.
The developer talked about taking various measures to improve the notoriously unfriendly attitude of some of its fans on numerous occasions, and now it's apparently enforcing the most substantial solution yet.
The overall toxicity of the Dota 2 and League of Legends communities have spawned many an Internet meme, and both Riot Games and Valve are concerned with providing a less hostile playing environment for their players.
How Riot is addressing the issue
In a recent post on the game's forums, Riot Games outlined some of the Ranked Restrictions it's going to enforce in order to curtail the in-game chat privileges of negative players and even going as far as preventing them from joining ranked queues until they've completed a certain number of Normal Draft mode games.
The developer pointed out that players who will be affected by the restrictions will also notice chat restrictions in other queues, and the possibility to report those who manifest negative behavior will still exist.
"As with Chat Restrictions, after they finish the predetermined number of games, we'll perform a final evaluation to make sure they've actually improved their in-game behavior. Players who haven't shown improvement will continue to be restricted from playing ranked," the developer wrote.
How this will impact the game
The developer also noted that the most negative players, to be Ranked Restricted at the end of a season, would be ineligible to earn the ranked rewards distributed after each season end, including loading screen borders and champion skins.
This means that in addition to not being able to participate in games, players who are notoriously bad mannered will not even get to enjoy the spoils of their hard work throughout the season, introducing further incentive for them to behave themselves and refrain from verbally abusing others.
"While the majority of players will not be affected by this ruling, we wanted to message it well in advance so that players concerned about their behaviour have more than enough time to adjust and reform before the end of the season," Riot said.
The reaction from the community has so far been pretty skeptical, with many being worried that casual players who enjoy unranked games will be subjected to bad behavior from overly competitive players, who will have an even harder time not offending others when subjected to the relaxed setting of the Normal Draft mode.
The new measures are being rolled out to servers in North America and Europe for the time being, with more regions to be added over time.