Toxic behavior in online games can ruin the experience for players who just want to have fun. Riot Games has decided to disable /all chats for publicly matchmade games in an effort to reduce verbal abuse in League of Legends — at least temporarily.
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The feature allows players to communicate with the opposing team and can provide a source of amusement.
However, game director Andrei Van Roon and lead game producer Jeremy Lee stated in their announcement that, for the time being, negative interactions outnumber positives due to an increase in in-game verbal abuse this year.
Teams will continue to see each other’s emotes and CTRL+1-2-3-4 spam, and the change has no effect on the chat function between allies. Riot is aware that there is still verbal abuse in team chats and that the change will not completely eliminate the behavior from the game.
However, the developer believes that team chats are too important to disable because they are used to strategize and coordinate actions.
According to Polygon, the reaction to the change has been mostly negative, with people mentioning how much fun they’ve had bonding with opposing team players. Some argue that the majority of toxic behavior occurs in team chats rather than outside of them.
van Roon has since clarified on Twitter that the plan is to test the change for a few patches, beginning with patch 11.21, and then solicit feedback from players.
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Riot Games may decide to keep or reverse the change based on the feedback it receives, though it may also keep it in some regions where the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
A few more all chat test details:
– Plan is to test for a couple of patches, then survey player opinion
– Potential responses then include keeping the change, reverting it entirely, keeping it in regions positive on it and reverting elsewhere, changing which queues it applies to— Andrei van Roon (@RiotMeddler) October 12, 2021
