Riot Shuts Down League of Legend's Public Chat Room Because Players are Too Toxic

2 Jul 2014
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Toxicity is something that every user of the internet has to deal with. So much so, that I wouldn’t be surprised if they made it so that every time you connected to it there was a disclaimer saying “Warning: Anonymity makes people jerks and they will be mean. Do you accept these terms?”

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Well, as it turns out its gotten so bad in the ever-popular League of Legends Public chat rooms, that the company behind the e-sports phenomenon had no choice but to remove it entirely. Although it’s an extreme step to remove the chat all together, Riot has determined that “In their current shape they just don’t work and can actively create negative experiences for many players (especially new players).”

“The official public chat rooms have grown rife with RP sellers, scammers and Elo-boost spam” according to a statement published by Riot today – and if you’ve ever been in the Public chat in League of Legends you probably don’t need much convincing to see why the game developer has made such a move. But if you’ve never played the game and are wondering how bad it is – imagine if you combined the darkest reaches or Reddit with 4-chan. And if you don’t know what those are just realize – its bad.

Of course, private chats and direct messaging will stay open, as “the experience in private chat rooms is better than the public versions.” But as many players can attest to, they aren’t that much better. Many of the biggest private chats lack any sort of anti-gamer-rage-hater mechanic beyond an ignore button. By taking the public chat offline, the folks at Riot are giving themselves a chance to completely revamp the system by (hopefully) providing many tools to combat the internet ilk.

Until then, however, players of League of Legends will just have to live without having a public chat. I just hope that by the time it comes back some of the meaner folks will have learned their lesson.