Product lead for behavioral systems Hana “TimTamMonster” Dinh posted a candid update (opens in new tab) to LoL’s official website, committing to “shifting [Riot’s] approach” to toxic player behaviors “to directly impact your experience and strengthen our community”.

“I know many of you have been disappointed in the lack of progress made in Behavioral Systems over the last few years. You’ve told us again and again that this space is important. And I’m with you. That’s why I’m here to share some updates kicking off Riot’s new approach to this space in 2022,” they wrote.

After revealing that changes thus far have chiefly been “behind the scenes” upgrades, Dinh acknowledged that Riot’s “detection and punishment systems to improve your experience […] isn’t making enough of an impact”. 

“The data shows that only 5% of players are consistently disruptive,” Dinh explained. “These are players we definitely should be punishing, and we will always continue improving our systems for that. But the other 95% are regular players who get tilted every once in a while, and these players make up 86% of our reports. In other words, almost all reports are on the average player who usually behaves well.”

After also confirming that Champ Select Reports is still problematic – “although we have been monitoring these reports, we didn’t add punishments for them accordingly as promised” – the update then turned to verbal abuse, something Dinh says affects “the majority of players”. Consequently, the team will be upgrading “to more advanced models to increase Verbal Abuse detections” after which it “expects to see improvements in this area by up to 10x”. 

To help improve player behavior, Dinh also revealed that although Riot had “failed to update” Honor 2.0 and “fallen short of [player] expectations”, there will be an exclusive skin for players that reach “Honor 5” as part of the End of Seasons rewards to reinforce positive play.

Riot isn’t the only publisher trying to control toxic behavior in its player base. Over 350,000 Call of Duty accounts have been banned (opens in new tab) in the last year for racist names or toxic behavior, whilst Call of Duty: Warzone (opens in new tab) co-developer Raven Software revealed last summer that over 500,000 cheaters have been banned from the battle royale’s servers (opens in new tab).

Looking for something new to get stuck into? Here are the best PC games (opens in new tab) right now.

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The Major League Gaming Summer Championship took place over the weekend with the top League of Legends, StarCraft 2, Soul Calibur V, and Mortal Kombat players coming together under one roof to fight for a large cash pool. But it’s League of Legends that’s in the spotlight in the wake of the event as the pro scene is once again engulfed in controversy.

The controversy stems from accusations (and one alleged confession) that the two top teams, Curse and Dignitas, colluded to share the prize money from the top two spots (rather than risk walking away with only second place earnings.)

They also gained the ire of MLG when the two teams agreed to play the first match of the championship series in an all-random, middle-only style (characters randomly assigned, only fighting in the middle lane.) Which GR’s resident LoL fan Hollander Cooper likened to a Counter-Strike championship match in which the two teams agreed to only use knives. In other words, they weren’t taking competition seriously, and in the process being disrespectful to the fans who tuned in to see top-level play and MLG who, after all, was paying them tens of thousands of dollars to compete.

The two teams were stripped of their earnings in the tournament, and will receive no season credit for their placement. Team Curse has issued a formal apology to the fans and to MLG in a video statement (opens in new tab).

This isn’t the first time that the League of Legends pro-scene has seen some controversy. At the World Cyber Games (opens in new tab) late last year several allegations popped up that, interestingly, also included Team Dignitas.

Recently, Riot Games announced a big investment in the pro-LoL scene complete with player salaries, designed specifically to make playing LoL more lucrative in order to avoid controversies like these.

On the other main stage at Major League Gaming, the competition was less controversial though still entertaining. The StarCraft 2 bracket featured a string of upsets as major players like Taeja and MarineKingPrime were knocked out fairly early while the Korean Zerg, Leenock, walked away with his second MLG championship.

The post League of Legends top two teams disqualified at MLG for alleged collusion appeared first on Game News.

Rally and Fortify are getting removed outright. To replace them, Riot is bringing Promote back from the dead to allow players to upgrade a catapult minion. The spell had a good reaction when it was added to Dominion, and the developers have tweaked it to work in Summoner’s Rift, too. Riot has also created a new spell called Surge, “that will imbue your champion with a powerful aura, boosting the combat effectiveness of both you and your allies.” It’s essentially the replacement for Rally, which relied on players standing still for longer than they typically do in the game.

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A majority of the remaining summoner spells will remain unchanged, while others will be enhanced to make them more suitable for end-game play. Heal will scale better for late-game play, making is less of a joke for higher-level players, and Cleanse will remove all debuffs, including that of other summoner spells like Ignite and Exhaust.

But it’s not all peaches and gravy. Flash and Clairvoyance, two of the most powerful summoner spells in League of Legends, will be getting hit with nerfs. Flash will teleport champions less frequently and less distance, a change that’s sure to infuriate players (it’s likely the most used summoner spell), and Clairvoyance will have an an increased cooldown and reduced duration. They hope that the change will make players rely less on Flash as the go-to spell, and that Clairvoyance will be used more tactically.

We’re most excited about the possibility of Heal not sucking anymore. Before, it was the weakest of the Spells, but one that we desperately wished was more powerful. With the buffs there’s a chance it will add some new strategy to the game, something we’re more than a little happy to have.

The post Riot shuffling League of Legends Summoner Spells for Season Two appeared first on Game News.

Update 4: Riot has confirmed with us that Matt Marcou “at no point suggested a rule change,” and that “All decisions were made by the WCG.”

Update 3: Riot’s Matt Marcou has posted an official comment on the forum, explaining some (but not all) of the events that took place.

Update 2: Since posting we talked with Michael O’Dell, the Managing Director and Team Manager of Team Dignitas, about the controversy. He gave us a brief look into their side of the story, saying, “Basically from our point of view we have done nothing wrong at all. Jatt was cleared to play in the qualifier by WCG USA and we were told by WCG USA that it was best of 3 double elimination after we enquired about that…,” O’Dell said. “Really its WCG USA who should clear that up officially not us.”

He also reaffirmed Dignitas’ stance on the mid-game pause, saying that it was a game crash – something every League of Legends player can likely sympathize with.

Update 1: We’ve made some clarifications and updates based on additional information.

Original story: The League of Legends community is up in arms today over the events of this year’s World Cyber Games qualifiers, which wrapped up over the weekend. All over the globe teams competed to win their country’s tournament in order to be sent to Korea for the finals.

But fingers are being pointed at the winning team, Dignitas, who took the crown from Chicks Dig ELO (CDE) in the qualifiers for the American competition. The community is in a frenzy over two major points of contention.

But should they have? That’s the question that’s even more troubling competitive League of Legends fans. Because World Cyber Games doesn’t have a representative in each country and there are no standardized guidelines, each country’s qualifying tournament had a different set of rules. WCG Australia, for instance, was single elimination for all of the qualifying rounds, and then best of three for the final, whereas the US and Canadian tournaments switch to best of three at the semi-final levels.

Once the competition got to the finals, WCG posted rules that stated that the winner of the upper bracket would have a one game advantage over the winner of the loser bracket. This means that in order to win, CDE needed to win two games, and Dignitas had to win once. CDE won the two games they needed to win.

This is where it gets really fishy: the rumor is that Matt Marcou, the e-sports representative from Riot Games, suggested a modification to the rules for the final rounds. It was changed from a best of three game system to a weighted best of three set system. Thus, CDE and Dignitas had to play another set of matches, which Dignitas won. There’s rampant speculation over why this actually took place, with many suggesting that Dignitas complained about the fact that they had to play more matches to win.

There are other bits of dispute spread across the community as well, including some accusations of blatant cheating on Dignitas’ part (some say that Jatt paused the game to view the other team’s locations by checking out their streaming footage), but we’re not able to confirm any of that – it may just be the gossip of angry fans.

We’ve reached out to Riot Games for a comment, and to find out how much of these stories are true, and how much can be chalked up to exaggerations on the part of the community. We’ll also update this as we get more news. Stay tuned!

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