Remember chat rooms? Much like the popular 90s AOL hangouts for lonely Americans, pedophiles, and children, Riot has decided that their chat rooms are also a thing of the past. Well, sort of.
In a statement to the community, Riot announced the immediate closure of their official public chat rooms.
The official public chat rooms have grown rife with RP sellers, scammers and Elo-boost spam. The default four rooms we established can be used by a tiny fraction of our players at a time. Given the number of League players, most conversation spills into private, community-created rooms.
Unfortunately, private chat rooms and even the awesome community hubs like Dominate Dominion and Summoner School lack moderation tools beyond the ignore button. While the experience in private chat rooms is better than the public versions, we still want to provide tools to address unwelcome drop-ins and toxic behavior.
Long term we’re exploring and working on major and minor improvements to chat and chat rooms aimed at enhancing usability and adding new functionality.
As an immediate action we’re going to disable the public chat rooms until they’re useful and accessible. In their current shape they just don’t work and can actively create negative experiences for many players (especially new players).
We’ll keep all private chat rooms and messaging available to everyone, and bring the official public chat rooms back as soon as we can.
Players that are hell bent on using chat rooms may still do so in the form of private chat rooms on the site. All is not lost when it comes to the public rooms though. According to Riot, they want to re-evaluate them and possibly re-introduce them with improvements later on down the road.
You can read the entire statement on the official League of Legends community page
