League of Legends will no longer have global chat as Riot continues war on toxicity

Throughout most of 2021, League of Legends has undergone a series of drastic changes in order to reduce toxic behaviour in its community, with harsher punishments to AFKs and dodgers, as well as a reporting system during champ select being implemented in recent months.

While these have had great results, being effective against the majority of toxic players, much of the activity within each game remained outside of Riot's control, leaving room for verbal abuse and awkward situations between players.

However, this may be about to change with the arrival of League of Legends patch 11.21, as Riot has unexpectedly announced that during this update, that global, also known as "/all", chat will be disabled in matchmade queues.

According to their statement, this is because "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."

Riot will evaluate the impact of this change by measuring if player reports go up, or down, and through direct feedback through surveys and the game's social channels.

Under the current plans, players will still be able to use and show off their emotes, masteries, and spam interaction commands, while end-of-game chat will still be cross-team.

“Regarding that last one, we're aware 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,” Riot added.

League of Legends patch 11.21 is scheduled to release on 20th October.

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Featured image courtesy of Riot Games.