Stop being so toxic in LoL: Heavy punishments are on the way in upcoming patch

Toxicity is inseparable from League of Legends at this point to such an extent you may consider it a game feature, but Riot Games wants to flip the script. The devs are looking to curb overwhelming toxicity levels in League with a critical change in an upcoming patch.

Riot is set to ship a new feature that locks toxic players out of the ranked queue in one of its upcoming patches, according to comments from Riot HuntedFork on League’s subreddit on Sept. 6.

Essentially, this will be tied to chat restrictions that have been refreshed during season 13 and it will time you out of the ranked queue for five games. So, if you catch a suspension from a game or you’re getting more severe chat restrictions, you’ll have to earn your right to play League competitively again. 

This, however, will apply to leavers as well, and as their punishment, these players might get a 24-hour-long suspension at the end of which they need to play at least five normal games to regain access to ranked. 

Right now, this is only limited to five matches of normal games, no matter the severity or regularity of your behavior, but HuntedFork didn’t exclude the possibility of having much stricter punishments in the future.

These measures won’t be applied to players immediately, though, and will only ensue after you’ve already met a couple of queue delays and hits to your Honor. 

The entire idea behind this system is not only to tune down the overall toxicity of the community but to prevent “account hopping,” an act where a player logs into a different account and plays League on that account while waiting for the punishment to run out on their original account.

“Many of our punishments are time based,” HuntedFork said. “This means that people with multiple accounts can often swap accounts and play until the punishment on their main has expired. With game based ranked restrictions, those people will eventually need to come back to their main and play those normal games. There’s no way to use an alt account to circumvent the punishment entirely.”

Overall, this sounds like great news for League because toxicity has been slowly getting out of hand and this could be the way forward. Again, this system is not fully polished or finished yet, but it’s expected to go live “sometime in the next patch or two,” according to HuntedFork.