At the start of the 2014 LCS series, Riot Games said it would donate all fines collected over the course of the season to a worthwhile charity. Today it announced that those fines totaled $31,850, all of which has been donated to The Trevor Project, a charity that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth.
"For the first major donation, we wanted to see the money collected from the 2014 make a difference to one cause," Riot said in the announcement. "When we sat down and thought about what was meaningful to us as a community, one cause resonated with most of us—the fight against harassment and discrimination."
And while the fines are the result of bad behavior among League of Legend players, Riot emphasized that the majority of the LoL community is firmly against abuse: Games in which players used homophobic slurs and exhortations to suicide were reported a significantly higher rate than those that included simple F-bombs.
"As a community, you find these words hurtful and unacceptable and so do we," Riot wrote. "We know that harassment and its consequences goes beyond just words in a game—and that’s why the work of organizations like The Trevor Project is so important. We hope that this money will be able to boost their work creating a safe and inclusive environment for all of us, regardless of sexual orientation."
Riot has rolled out a number of measures to combat "extreme toxicity" in League of Legends over the past year, most recently an automated system of punishment for players who engage in abusive in-game behavior.
