New League of Legends system will insta-ban racists, feeders, leavers and other jerks

Riot Games social systems lead designer Jeffrey Lin has announced company plans to implement a new system in League of Legends that will instantly ban players that show "extreme toxicity." This includes intentional feeding, racism, death threats, homophobia, leaving games or any other kind of di*kish behavior.

The bans can range from 14 days to permanent. Players that get permanent bans will see a ban code of "2500" during the tests, Lin explained.

Though the initiative is temporary right now, with all permabans to be reviewed, Lin said that Riot will be rolling it out more permanently should it prove to be effective.

Over on Reddit, Lin provided further clarification on the new system.

In the past, we've avoided publicly naming and shaming players; however, we've learned in recent months that being transparent is extremely critical to the playerbase's trust in our systems, so we've decided to do a compromise. If players complain about unfair bans for this particular system (so, have a ban year code of 2500), we're going to be fully transparent and posting the chat logs that resulted in the ban.

Some players have also asked why we've taken such an aggressive stance when we've been focused on reform; well, the key here is that for most players, reform approaches are quite effective. But, for a number of players, reform attempts have been very unsuccessful which forces us to remove some of these players from League entirely.

In addition, we'll be talking about this effort in more detail and about another system that will be addressing Leavers/AFKs very severely in the future. We'll do these in the usual channels like the League forums. I just wanted to mention this briefly on Twitter today in case some players were confused why they see some players getting banned until 2500 year codes.

As a long-time League of Legends player that has been on hiatus from the game — mostly due to the toxic player base — the implementation of this new system gives me hope for the future. League of Legends is a fun game, but the toxic players ruin it. Hopefully this system employs some much needed change among the LoL community because, quite frankly, the asshole behavior is killing the fun of the game.