The toxicity of online trading has become such an issue that publishers feel compelled to pull the rug out from under players. Indeed in a blog post published yesterday, Riot Games announces the closure of the /all chat in League of Legends.
This command, which allows you to address not only your teammates but also the fighters of the opposing team, will disappear when version 11.21 of the game is deployed.
The risk outweighs the benefit
“While the /all chat can be a source of fun interactions between teams, just like the breeding ground for good-hearted banter, at the moment it is the negative interactions that outweigh these positives”, explains Riot Games on its blog.
But the studio specifies at the same time that this only concerns the active chat when a game has started. The chat room at the end of a game will remain open to the opposing team. In addition, opponents will still be able to hear emotes which, although non-verbal, can still be used to insult another player (trolls are not lacking in imagination).
Lucid, Riot says however to be aware that closing the /all will not solve all the problems. In fact, language abuse is also common in team chats. But it is currently inconceivable to withdraw such a crucial tool for coordination. In this case, in this case, it is the positive points that outweigh the potential drifts.
A possibly temporary change
But it could be that closing the /all is temporary. Reading between the lines, we understand that Riot will closely monitor the effects of this decision by keeping accounts of player reports, while directly questioning players via surveys.
On Twitter, Andrei Van Roon, the director of League of Legends, details the implementation of this moratorium. The idea, he says, is to test closing /all for "a few patches" and then ask players for feedback. And the outcome will only depend on this return: “Possible responses will include keeping the /all closed, only closing it in certain parts of the world and reopening it elsewhere, or changing in which queues this closing occurs. 'applied ".
However, this tweet is already the target of disgruntled people, who point out on the one hand a solution which consists in dragging the dust under the rug rather than actually punishing the most toxic players, but also that the deactivation of /all exists already. In fact, everyone already has the option of deactivating this chat channel from the lobby, before starting a game. Some therefore believe that Riot would do better to communicate about this possibility rather than depriving its 115 million active players of this feature.
