Riot outlines new measures to improve player behaviour in League of Legends

Riot Games has confirmed in a blog post that it will be “making behavioural systems matter more” in its 2022 approach to League of Legends. The developer will be handing out honour points to further incentivise good in-game behaviour, while the toxic ones receive harsher punishments.
Hana “TimTamMonster” Dinh, the new Product Lead for Behavioural Systems led some major changes coming to LoL, and she is aware of the lack of progress. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve largely focused on “behind the scenes” upgrades to our detection and punishment systems to improve your experience, and we now know this isn’t making enough of an impact,” she said.
According to the data obtained Riot, only 5 percent of the player base is consently disruptive, for which, they will be improving the punishment system. The remaining 95 percent, however, have only been found to be toxic every once in a while when they get tilted during a game. She also noted that 86 percent of the in-game reports are made up of these occasional toxic instances.

Over the years, League of Legends has built itself a reputation for being one of the most toxic online multiplayer playgrounds – hence, the lack of an in-game voice chat system. To enforce positive play among the 95 percent, Riot will be upgrading its Honor 2.0 system, introduced in 2018, which fell short of expectations due to a lack of updates.
In the new change, players who receive endorsements from others and manage to raise their Honor level to 5, will receive an exclusive skin as part of the End of season rewards. “These exclusive rewards will give you a new way to show off in-game, in addition to exing Honor skins, chromas, and other rewards,” it reads.
In 2020, Riot introduced Champ Select reports, which allowed players to report others on the match start screen. However, they never added punishments as promised, and will soon see changes in an upcoming patch.

Another area the studio will be focussing on is verbal abuse. Dinh claims that the team has a number of exciting projects lined up to increase detections. “We expect to see improvements in this area up to 10x. While Verbal Abuse isn’t directly reflected in game stats like KDA, it is a widespread issue that often leads to other disruptive behaviours,” she said.
“In turn, I ask you to remember this: When you get frustrated, only you can stop yourself from being disruptive. All 95% of us can support these systems being the type of player we want to play with – even in Ranked,” she added. “It’s not always easy, I know, but even the most perfect systems can’t prevent all instances of bad behaviour from occurring. Because it’s not just about building systems to influence human behaviour.”