In a post by Riot Socrates, League of Legends developer Riot announced live-testing for North American and European servers of a new system for ranked play that will restrict players from playing in ranked matches if the Tribunal has flagged them as abusive or toxic to the game’s community.
The post can be found on Riot’s official League of Legends forums and outlines Riot’s continuing stance that good sportsmanship, teamwork, and positive encouragement rather than vulgar language, raging, or poor sportsmanship should be rewarded.
The Crackdown
Over the last six months, Riot has been taking stronger precautions against negative attitudes in League. Back in June, two top League players were banned from the game for offensive behavior. And a month later the developer added harsher punishments for abusive or toxic behavior to the Tribunal system.
This newest step appears to be intended to continue this trend in the hopes of removing abusive and toxic players from all levels of competitive play.
So how does the new ranked restriction system work? Well, if a player in a ranked match uses the in-game chat to communicate an abusive, toxic, or offensive message and gets reported for it the Tribunal will handle the case as it usually does.
However, if the complaint is found valid the offending party will be subject to a chat restriction in all modes of play – not just ranked.
Furthermore, flagged summoners will not be able to enter any ranked matches until they’ve played a number of unranked matches – while chat restricted – and submitted to a final evaluation of their behavior by the Tribunal.
Furthermore, according to Socrates post:
Related to Ranked Restrictions, we’ve determined that Ranked Rewards should reward positive sportsmanship just as much as they reward great play, so the most negative players who are Ranked Restricted at the end of the season will be ineligible to earn ranked end of season rewards such as the loading screen borders or Victorious Morgana champion skin. 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 behavior have more than enough time to adjust and reform before the end of the season.
So with these changes, serious League of Legends players truly have every reason to curb negative behaviors since not doing so can result not only in removal from ranked play but also disqualify them entirely from season rewards.
The changes are live and in place on NA and EU servers, and pending further testing Riot intends to roll out the changes on all servers soon.
