Riot Games has taken a proactive step to combat toxicity in their MOBA, adding a League of Legends auto-mute future that stops disruptive chatting before it reaches the screen.
A new behavioral system update was added in patch 12.20 that has many players praising Riot for taking real steps to combat toxicity. Unlike champion select and in-game reports, this new system stops toxic players’ messages from being displayed by filtering out key phrases.
The new behavioral change was announced in the patch 12.20 notes, and players have immediately begun to see the effects. The change is the first that actually stops a player that hasn’t yet been chat restricted from saying certain slurs, epithets, and derogatory terms.
If a player does trip the filter, the message containing the prohibited language is never sent to the other players’ chat, instead, a message is displayed that alerts the intended recipients that the player in question has used prohibited language, and will no longer receive chat messages.
This doesn’t apply to simple profanity, it’s specifically targeting language that Riot Games considers zero-tolerance. So the occasional f-bomb won’t be tripping the live chat filter, but particularly egregious language will be stopped before it hits other players’ screens. The announcement that the player has been server muted is meant to make clear to others that this player’s behavior was unacceptable says the design lead.
The praise from the community has been effusive, cutting off toxic players from both sending and receiving messages for the rest of the game. While allowing players to mute each other is good, it wasn’t proactive enough at stopping incidents of in-game toxicity.
Just in case your 0/10 Yasuo doesn’t manage to trip the filter but you’d still like to hear him silenced, here’s how to mute chat and pings in League of Legends. Simply press the tab key while in-game and locate the bar belonging to the champion who you’d like to mute on the scoreboard. In the top right of that champion’s score bar, there are icons for selecting multiple types of muting.
The speech bubble, when clicked to display a line through the symbol, will mute chat. Next to it is a small ping icon, which will mute the player’s pings. Each of these is easy to do or undo with a single click, but you can also use the command “/mute” and “/unmute” followed by a space and the player’s summoner’s lane to mute them. The same can be done with “/mutepings” and “/unmutepings” followed by the same.
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