League of Legends is testing new disciplinary measures for 'extreme toxicity'

The League of Legends community has an unfortunate reputation, but Riot Games is eager to change it. Lead Designer of Social Systems Jeffrey Lin has tweeted that the studio will test new disciplinary measures today (July 21), with a view to introducing them permanently should they prove effective. Punishable offences include "intentional feeding, racism, death threats (and) homophobia."

"Today, players that show extreme toxicity (intentional feeding or racism, etc) will be instantly (banned for) 14 day or permabanned in #LeagueOfLegends," Linn wrote. If the one day test run works, the company will roll out the policy permanently. Linn later clarified the new rules - and the way they'll be enforced - in a Reddit thread .

"We'll be testing one server at a time in small doses to monitor the effectiveness of the system carefully and minimize false positives," Linn wrote. "All Riot regions will get the same test at some point in the future. Depending on the results of the tests, we'll be rolling this system out more permanently on all servers."

"In the past, we've avoided publicly naming and shaming players; however, we've learned in recent months that being transparent is extremely critical to the playerbase's trust in our systems, so we've decided to do a compromise. If players complain about unfair bans for this particular system (so, have a ban year code of 2500), we're going to be fully transparent and posting the chat logs that resulted in the ban."

Lin also said Riot is looking at introducing measures to punish leavers and AFKs (away from keyboard). It follows a rather awkward situation last month when two League of Legend Championship Series players were suspended for "extremely toxic behavior".