The toxicity of playing League of Legends has almost become a running gag in the community. However, many players have a problem with it for legitimate reasons, and development team Riot now wants to take the problem seriously. For this purpose, a separate department has now even been founded.
The new team is called "Player Dynamics" and is intended to investigate the gaming behavior of the community in more detail. Based on this analysis data, conclusions can be drawn about the origins of toxic behavior in order to be able to deal with the problems directly.
Ask the right questions
Weszt Hart, head of the Player Dynamics department, describes the analysis process in an interview with Engadget as follows:
"What is the intended experience and what are the expectations of the players? How are these expectations disturbed? What are the causes of this? If the root cause is, for example, mismatched expectations, we have to consider what we can do differently in the design to adjust expectations. "
In order to start this analysis process, the team builds on previous experiences from the analysis of player data as well as knowledge of sociology, anthropology and cognitive science.
In addition, according to Hart, those responsible want the Avoid the term "toxic". This term is not clearly defined for many players, some members of the community would feel attacked by certain statements, while others would call it a "trash talk".
Certainly Riot also has a primary interest in parting with this ugly name that League of Legends has been associated with for years and days. After all, a recent survey found that 98 percent of the community had been offended before.
The second attempt
However, this is not the first time that Riot wants to tackle community trolling. As early as 2012, a team was created that was responsible for the honor system in the successful MOBA. Here, players were rewarded for positive gestures and friendly behavior after the round, and punished for toxic behavior.
While the system worked well in one direction, the penalties were relatively easy to circumvent and therefore did not ensure the desired success in the long term. One can only hope that Riot will have more success in the new attempt than before.
Incidentally, the team should not only look at League of Legends, but around all upcoming titles from Riot To take care of. The developers seem to be really concerned about this long-standing problem, especially with the announcement of their new Valorant project.
You can find out exactly what it is and which role models Riot's first new project since League of Legends uses in our gameplay preview of Valorant.
