Riot Games wants gamers to feel rewarded

Nov 25, 2015 08:56 GMT  ·  By

The development team at Riot Games has a long-term plan to make League of Legends a more welcoming environment for all engaged players, and the most recent move the developer is announcing is to lock out what it deems to be toxic gamers out of an entire system of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena title.

Gamers who are consistently reported by others as behaving negatively will be unable to get access to the chests and the keys that will be rewarded at the end of a match once the big 2016 update for the title is released.

Jeffrey Lin, who leads development on the social systems of the title, tells Polygon that the new system is designed to offer rewards to those who are positively contributing to League of Legends, increasing the long-term prospects for the title.

He adds, "It's a new carrot for playing with friends and for being a positive player in the game. We've never been able to give skins for free before in League of Legends, so this is our way of saying, 'Hey, if you're a positive player in the game, here's your way of earning something just for playing the game and being awesome.'"

Previously Riot Games tried to improve the behavior of its players by turning off the normal chat system that involves all players and by eliminating their chance to pick up ranked seasonal rewards.

The company has said that a lot of toxic players have been banned from the title or have reformed but that it wants to see even bigger improvements in the future.

League of Legends will get a huge update next year

One of the centerpieces of the changes coming to the MOBA is a new champion select system that's designed to make it easier for teams to use those characters that they are comfortable with while trying to deny the same choices to their opponents.

Once that's implemented in League of Legends, the developers will determine how to best introduce the new chest and key combination for loot drops, presumably during the first few months of next year.

It is designed to offer winners a chance to pick up extra content, including free skins, and it will be a blow for any toxic players to be locked out of it while everyone else benefits from the extra content they gain access to.

Lin makes it clear that Riot Games will test the entire concept a lot to make sure that it works well and that feedback from the player community will be welcomed so that it can be tweaked to serve the entire community.

There are plenty more changes that will be made to League of Legends in the big 2016 update.

Riot Games is keen to keep its MOBA as engaging in the long term as possible to fend the challenge coming from DOTA 2, the title created by Valve, and the new Heroes of the Storm from Blizzard, which offers a more stripped down take on the same genre.