Whether rightly or wrongly, Riot’s MOBA League of Legends has become intimately associated with the troubling issue of player toxicity since it launched back in 2009. According to the studio, though, the issue perhaps isn’t quite as prevalent as people think. At least these days.
Riot puts its success down to a ‘Tribunal’ system for player harassment, which has, for the most part, allowed the community to police itself.
“As a result of these governance systems changing online cultural norms,” says Riot in a blog post over on ReCode, “incidences of homophobia, sexism and racism in League of Legends have fallen to a combined 2 percent of all games. Verbal abuse has dropped by more than 40 percent, and 91.6 percent of negative players change their act and never commit another offense after just one reported penalty.”
Riot’s attempts to improve the atmosphere of its game have uncovered some interesting facts. Rather than coming from a hardcore group of absolute sods, as it often feels like, Riot says that much of the abuse comes from members of the wider community having a moment of madness.
“Our team found that if you classified online citizens from negative to positive,” Riot explains, “the vast majority of negative behavior (which ranges from trash talk to non-extreme but still generally offensive language) did not originate from the persistently negative online citizens; in fact, 87 percent of online toxicity came from the neutral and positive citizens just having a bad day here or there.”
One thing you can’t accuse Riot of is ignoring the problem. The full blog post is well worth reading. Meanwhile, the battle continues.
