League of Legends Will Soon Monitor Champ Select and Post-game Chat for Bannable Behavior

A new ban system is being tested in League of Legends that will keep an eye on the champion select lobby as well as the post-game chat to catch any unsportsmanlike behavior that might occur.

While players can easily report offensive teammates or enemies for their actions in-game, the lobbies before and after the game take place aren't monitored as much. Support tickets can always be sent in with proof of players' verbal abuse or other bannable actions, but those pre and post-game areas have been less monitored, until now.

"We've been working on a system that involves looking through champ select and post-game chats looking for instances of verbal abuse or unsportsmanlike behavior," Riot Zaps said in a reply to a post on League's OCE boards.

Zaps comment was in response to a user who said they'd been banned with no explanation provided and wanted some answers. The Rioter explained that because the system is still quite new and is only being tested within the OCE server, the information on why players have been banned as a result of the system isn't available through the client.

"Because this is a relatively new system that is being trialed - there's currently no specific information in the client or in the email that you receive after being punished," Zaps said. "If you contact Player Support, they will provide you with more context around why you were punished. We're planning on improving the info provided at the time of punishment over time."

Plenty of banned players within the comments were quick to ask why they'd been banned with many of them saying they didn't deserve the punishment – a story that's not at all uncommon – and the Rioter offered to justify the bans by posting the banned player's chat logs if they were okay with the chats going public. Most gave the go-ahead, and what resulted was some hilarious snippets of obviously bannable offenses as well as some who actually sought to defend their verbal abuse.

The chat logs are ripe with offensive language and are too plentiful to include here, but you can look through the logs yourself within the post. League's new monitoring system is currently only being tested on one server, but expect to see it elsewhere soon if the testing goes well.