Emotes Feedback: Muting, Spamming, and PBE

TL;DR: You will be able to mute emotes, and we are ready to limit how spammable emotes are. We’ll continue to listen to feedback as these go to PBE and make changes accordingly.

First off... wow! We received an incredible amount of feedback and reaction yesterday after we announced we are bringing emotes permanently to League. This feedback is what helps us deliver a better experience, so we sincerely appreciate hearing your concerns upfront.

This is one of the reasons we’re gonna keep emotes on PBE for so long: So we can continue to make changes based on your feedback as you try them out.

We understand the clear concern about emotes potentially causing toxicity/BM. We also know that this product won’t be for everybody, so we can see why frictionless opting-out has been a major thread so far.

This is why we tied emotes to chat mutes. This type of muting is intended to punish people who are misusing the system, rather than blocking everybody right off the bat. In our tests, emotes have led to some really memorable moments when used in earnest, and we want to give those a chance.

Still, we’re ready to explore broader mute options like a “mute all enemy emotes” button, a “mute emotes” button for each teammate (similar to the ping muting button), or both.

There are systems that we already have in place, too, that we can adjust during testing. One that’s in place is an “ammo” system, which limits the ability to spam emotes (similar to how pings currently work). We have a lot of leeway to make this system as strict as it needs to be. We can adjust how frequently emotes can be used before a timeout period, how long that timeout period is, how frequently emotes can be used at all, etc.

Emotes will be in testing on PBE until we are ready to do a staged rollout starting with a small number of regions. If you have a PBE account, we would really appreciate you giving them a try and leaving feedback as soon as you’ve had a chance to play with them.

Thank you again—really. We know there’s work to do, and we’re excited to start iterating based on these conversations.