League of Legends Praised for Re-Engineering Chat to Reduce Harassment

The developer behind the massively popular online multi-player game League of Legends reduced negative user interactions and received public praise after making simple changes to its chat system. Facing a problem of “toxic” and abusive behavior, developer Riot Games came to a simple solution: make the chat feature opt-in for users. According to Riot, a week after the change was made “negative chat saw a decrease by 32.7 percent [and] positive chat went up, by 34.5 percent.” Riot was praised for effectively addressing its problems by “creating a simple hurdle to abusive behavior.”