League of Legends Is Removing an "Unacceptable" Ping Soon

One of League of Legends' most controversial pings is being removed entirely soon in exchange for something that's hopefully going to be a bit less geared towards harassment. That ping is the "Bait" symbol that's supposed to be used to encourage teammates to bait an enemy into fighting so that allies can join in, but as any League player can tell you, it's hardly ever used for that purpose. That ping is being replaced with another option that hasn't been revealed yet, and Riot Games also said that it's updating another pinging feature which similarly gets abused as a harassment tool instead of a communication method.

Chris Roberts, Riot's product lead on League's Summoner's Rift team, first shared news of the plans to update these two pings at some point. The bait ping is said to be changed in the "near future" with no specific timeframe was given, but the second update for scoreboard pings will be happening in Patch 13.19.

Bait Ping Update

The Bait ping was one of the ones first added when the Preseason 2023 update landed alongside the similarly new pings Push, All-In, and Hold. These pings don't typically get used as much as the cardinal pings that have been around for years and years now, but the Bait ping does get some use albeit in a less than helpful way.

Right now, the Bait ping is typically spammed over an ally whenever they've done something viewed as a mistake. Part of this comes from the fact that some players previously perceived the Bait ping as more of a rope-like symbol and used it to suggest self-harm on allies, and part of it comes from people referring to their teammates as nothing more than bait itself. Either way, it's one of the pings more often used for harassment, so it's being changed.

The League community treats Objective Voting like a spam pop-up ad, and uses the bait ping as a "rope" emote

What a successful Preseason. pic.twitter.com/Yn6ZoqseoM

— ioki (@i0ki_LoL) November 18, 2022

"Also, the way the bait ping is commonly being used today is unacceptable and we will be removing and replacing it the near future," Roberts said on Twitter.

It has not yet been said what the replacement for the ping will be.

Scoreboard Pings Update

The talk of the Bait ping update was actually an add-on to Robert's primary announcement that the scoreboard pings would be updated in Patch 13.19. The update will make it so that scoreboard pings are "only visible to yourself" which means that you won't be able to spam ping an ally's portrait to indicate that they're alive or dead over and over again after a botched play or an instance where they should've helped you.

As expected, players had lots of questions about this one. What happens if you ping an ally's Teleport to show your team that it's almost up and that they can join a fight? What about if you need to ping a support's Ignite to indicate that you're going all in for the kill? Roberts responded soon afterwards with some clarification, but we'll have to wait until the patch notes drop to fully understand what the plan is.

In 13.19 we'll be making scoreboard pings for allies visible only to yourself so pinging things like "Kha'zix – Alive" 6x can no longer be used to harass teammates. We're maintaining the allied ping functionality so that you can still see exact allied ult & item cooldowns.

— Chris Roberts (@RiotAuberaun) September 20, 2023

"As a clarification – this is just for pinging allies, you can still ping enemies & enemy attributes on the scoreboard and they'll go through to your whole team," Roberts said.