League of Legends removing all chat for a few patches as a test

League of LegendsCross-team chat is being lost, at the very least temporarily. Riot has removed the all chat option (also known /all chat), indefinitely. League’s next patch in hopes of combatting toxicity, the developer announced on Tuesday. Riot is testing player response to this removal. The feature will be disabled temporarily.

It League of Legends developer said that all chat is a vehicle for toxic behavior and that it hopes disabling it completely will result in less bad behavior, according to the Riot’s blog post on the change. By default, all chat is disabled League of Legends already, but the new change turns it off for all players — even ones who originally opted in.

You can only communicate with your enemy team through chat. League of LegendsYou can do this outside of the game. However, teams can still interact in indirect ways using emotes which are available inside-game.

Reaction to all chat’s removal has been largely negative, with players mentioning all of the weird, positive, and fun bonding experiences they’ve had there with the enemy team. Players are also memorializing phrases like “glhf” (good luck, have fun) and “gg” (good game), which will become useless in League of LegendsThis change is a result.

Riot said, “Team chat” is also a harmful aspect. League of Legends — Many players responded to all chat’s removal by writing that team communication is worse than all chat. Riot stated that team chat would still be available for coordination and communication.

Shortly following the announcement and its overwhelming negative response, League of Legends game director Andrei van Roon, the original posts’ author, took to Twitter to clarify a couple of points that the original post didn’t address.

Van Roon tweets that the changes will only be applied for testing purposes. Riot will then send surveys to find out how they went. The developer will then determine its next move, which could include disabling the feature, bringing it back unchanged, or even a unique solution for each region — depending on the survey response.

The change will be live at the very least for now League of LegendsPatch 11.21 is scheduled to be released sometime next week.