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Riot to Disable League of Legends All-Chat to “Combat Toxic Behavior”

Andrei van Roon, a game director for Riot Games’ League of Legends, announced that the /all chat functionality (which allowed the player to converse with and/or berate the enemy team) will be disabled as a test to prevent “negative interactions”, forgoing the previous option of allowing the player to disable it if they so desired.

Andrei posted a tweet that summarized what they are planning, a test that they hope would keep opposing players from interacting by simply disallowing interaction, but they assure players that team chat will still be allowed:

The League of Legends site provides further details, that preventing speech altogether is a fair “tradeoff” to allowing some mean comments to pass:

While most of our focus around behavioral systems in 2021 has been on gameplay-based behaviors like AFKing and inting, we’ve heard from you that verbal abuse has been a rising problem this year, too. We’re working on a number of changes to systemically address this at both the League and Riot levels, but one direct change you’ll see soon is that in patch 11.21, we’re disabling /all chat in matchmade queues.

While /all chat can be the source of fun social interaction between teams, as well as some good-hearted banter, right now negative interactions outweigh the positives. We’ll evaluate the impact of this change through verbal abuse reports and penalty rates, as well as surveys and direct feedback from you all.

/All chat is the only thing being disabled. Enemies will still be able to hear and see your emotes and champ mastery (unless muted), as well as CTRL+1/2/3/4 spam. End of Game chat will still be cross-team. Allies will still be able to coordinate with each other in team chat.

Regarding that last one, we’re aware that verbal abuse happens in team chat too, so disabling /all chat won’t get rid of abuse altogether. But team chat also plays an important team coordination function, so the potential value it brings is much higher, even if it can also host some negative experiences.

We know this sucks for those of you who just want to compliment your lane opponent’s skin, or ask for a dance party in Baron pit. But we believe the tradeoff is worth it to cut down on the growing negativity /all chat has been creating in your games.

This rapid growth of oversensitivity will probably ensure the removal of team chat and possibly any form of social interaction altogether sometime in the future.

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