Making sure the League remains full of Legends.
By Alex Walker on June 6, 2014 at 6:54 am
Is it any surprise that MOBA players in general are poorly behaved? Well, that's too broad a statement. There are many who are lovely, beautiful people on the inside. And that's true for any game in the genre – Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, DOTA 2, Heroes of the Storm, even smaller games like Smite. But it's well known that the genre has a propensity for attracting some of the most obnoxious, distasteful human beings in online gaming.
Riot Games have been working constantly on cleaning up its servers, as it were, and a large part of that lies with the action it takes towards its best players. Ninjas in Pyjamas, one of the oldest professional gaming teams in history (first known for their exploits in Counter-Strike back in 2000), have seen two of their players banned for six months. Alfonso Aguirre Rodriguez, known as 'mithy', was such a foul mouth that players reported him in 30 percent of the games he played for verbal abuse, profanity and a poor attitude. His teammate, Erlend Holm, also known as 'Nukeduck', notched up similar figures, with almost two-thirds of negative reports against him citing verbal abuse, profanity and a poor attitude. Holm was so bad, in fact, that he continued to get reported even after his account was Chat Restricted.
While you can take the sarcastic route, point at Holm and say that even money can't buy class or teach someone manners, you have to give Riot credit for doing the right thing. It's always difficult to ban the top gamers, because they're the ones who people in the lower leagues want to watch. They're the trailblazers. But, and I can say this from personal experience, if you have someone at the top infesting the rest of the scene with rotten, toxic behaviour, then it becomes a problem throughout the rest of the scene.
Personally, I'd have banned him for longer, but that's not Riot's policy, and the kid does make a living from this. Both players have been barred from participating in the League Championship Series and the Challenger Series for the remainder of the year. Let's see if they can grow up a little.
Source: Thanks, Polygon!
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