League of Legends Players Will Soon Be Punished for Toxic Champ Select Behavior

League of Legends players have been able to report problematic teammates during the champion select process for a while now after the feature was rolled out in 2020, but those reports didn't actually lead to consequences. They simply added to Riot Games' learnings about players' behaviors during champion select with Riot saying it would "deploy a punishment system" when it had enough info to proceed with confidence. That time is right around the corner now with Riot saying this week that it'll issue punishments based on champion select reports in the near future.

Hana "TimTamMonster" Dinh, the behavior systems product lead working on League, shared the latest on the champ select reports efforts in a post on the game's site detailing the various behavioral systems in place within League. Dinh acknowledged that the punishments weren't added as promised but added that even though those reports still make up a small portion of the total reports received by Riot, the punishments will soon be administered to those who are found guilty of disruptive behavior during champ select.

"Another area we lost some of your confidence in is Champ Select reporting. Although we have been monitoring these reports, we didn't add punishments for them accordingly as promised. Champ Select reports only make up about 3.2% of reports today, but we know that your experience in every part of the game still matters. I'm happy to share that we are tying punishments to Champ Select reports, and you'll see an update on that in a patch coming very soon.

Dinh also added that the League team is working on upgrading its systems that detect verbal abuse. It's supposed to lead to those systems being improved tenfold once those upgrades are rolled out, but Dinh didn't give an idea of when these upgrades would happen.

Aside from simply punishing the problematic players, Riot also said it'd be implementing new rewards for players who are on the opposite end of the spectrum and are deemed most honorable within the game's Honor system. Those rewards include a special recall animation and an exclusive skin for honorable players with both of those releasing at some point this year. The skin will be awarded to players after the season wraps up.