League’s Honor System Updated

League of Legends has made great strides in improving its overall community attitude over the last year.  Recent bans on professional players have shown that Riot Games takes the exposure these skilled players receive very seriously, and that a certain minimum level of decorum is expected of all players regardless of skill.  Introducing its Honor System immediately reduced the reports of negative behavior that Riot received.

Now that Honor has been around long enough to start getting an idea of the long-term effects it has, Riot has taken another look at what the results show.  With almost three out of four points of honor being awarded between players who have never played together before, it goes without saying that players are getting along with strangers better.

Even more telling, a full 16% of players have the Honorable Foe crest, which is a huge number of players to be considered an honorable opponent for a game genre famous for negative trash talk.  Less appealing is the knowledge that only approximately one percent of players have managed to unlock any of the three crests based upon honor awarded by one’s own teammates.

The good news is that Riot has also determined that a game of League of Legends with a player who has the Great Teamwork crest has a 71% chance of resulting in no reports and one with a player who is a Great Leader has an 80% chance.

Obviously the Honor System is working on some level, but Riot has determined that the crests awarded by a player’s own team are clearly more difficult to earn than expected while the Honorable Opponent crest seems to be easier to earn than expected.

Riot has therefor “tweaked” the requirements for these different crests.  It is now easier to earn one of the ‘Great’ crests from your work with your team and is now also more difficult to earn the Honorable Opponent crest from your foes on the Fields of Justice.

This means that some League of Legends players who previously had the Honorable Opponent crest will now need to re-earn it, while others will find themselves having the ‘Great’ crests where they didn’t before.  Keep it classy, summoners.  I look forward to spreading the Honor in my own games.