Champion select reports will finally matter, says Riot Games

Champion select reports were a long-requested feature by fans of League of Legends, but their initial implementation has had mixed results.

According to a statement by Riot Games, new punishments and systems to address champion select reports and make them more impactful are imminent. What might these changes entail and how will they make them matter?

How are champion select reports changing?

Champion select reports have already been implemented in League of Legends, but for the time being, there’s no way for the report to prevent the game from occurring or do much of consequence. In a developer blog post addressing how to best implement behavioral systems, Riot said that updates for the system to weed out pre-game toxicity are coming sooner than fans might have hoped.

In the post, Riot said that punishments will finally be tied to reports that come through during the pre-game draft. According to Riot, pre-game reports account for 3.2% of the total reports in League of Legends, but not having a direct punishment system for reporting options already inside the game struck some fans as pointless.

Riot explained that punishments for these reports will be arriving in a patch sooner rather than later. It seems like the report system will be tied to the same punishments as in-game disruptive behavior like inting, verbal abuse, and similar such offenses.

The other topics on behavioral systems that Riot addressed were encouraging the 95% of players who aren’t consistently disruptive and trying to target the most consistent disruptive behavior. If Riot can encourage the players who are already behaving well to keep on the straight and narrow while disincentivizing the most common instances of toxicity, the vast majority of the issues would be solved.

Toxicity will never be fully removed from League of Legends, but Riot Games seems to be doing its best to drastically reduce it.