Chat Banned? No Gold Rewards
I'd like to start off by saying I don't play League too often, and really only got back into it this October. I was Silver I coming back in, and decided I would push for Gold to get the season rewards. I just hit Gold (huge achievement, I know ;p) and looked at the rewards. I saw that I'd have to queue a few times as Gold to be able to get them, and then I looked up a bit and saw a red "!" telling me that in order to obtain these rewards, I had to have a higher honor level. League of Legends has been successfully uninstalled from my computer.
I'm not the perfect player. In hindsight, if I could go back and /mute all in every game I played instead of pretending communication would help - I would. But hindsight is 20/20. Instead I received a 5 game chat ban over 3 games, only one of which featured me actually being toxic. The other two? Responding to toxic players who, instead of choosing to keep their toxicity to chat, chose to bring it to their gameplay in the form of int feeding and purposely screwing up the game for me and others. One such example is when my jungler ran into river to get scuttle and was met by the enemy jungler. They fought in the river until the enemy top laner (who I pinged missing) roamed down to pick up the kill on my jungler. I'll admit, I could have roamed down and helped, but in an early Darius v Garen (I was Garen) matchup, I felt it better if I let my jungler back off instead of attempting a 2v2 that could likely result in an enemy double kill. Well he didn't back off. I was pinged with question marks and flamed in chat for not helping, and subsequently had CS stolen from me and my enemy laner fed in an attempt to get revenge on me not helping my jungler. Once. In. River. 4 mins in. I explained it wasn't my fault he died - he had an option. His champion had plenty of escape mechanics, and we likely couldn't win a 2v2. He should have ran in my mind. This escalated into further argument until the whole team began flaming me because I couldn't put up a fight against my enemy top laner and was now feeding myself. So I got reported. A lot.
Fast forward after the chat ban, I run my mouth a little more, using the run-of-the-mill cuss words (not directed at people), and I catch myself a 25 game chat-ban.
I started at honor level 3. I now have no honor, and in fact it is locked. It is less than 2 weeks before season end, and I have hit Gold. I am reading that it can take months to unlock honor again, more months to hit honor level 1 again, and even more to get to honor level 2 (the supposed honor level needed to get rewards).
I understand you have want to clean up the game, Riot. But I've been playing this game since Season 1. I've been on-and-off with this game, but never got to the point where I said "This game is worth nothing, and not worth my time." Take RuneScape, World of Warcraft, Smite, DOTA 2, Heroes of the Storm, ANY other game in the world (very likely) for example, and I guarantee you the words "Chat-ban" to them mean "Limited or no access to talking in game" - not "Limited or no access to talking in game, also you lose honor on your account as a whole, which we've decided to tie to future rewards that are largely obtained and have largely been obtained in the past as a proving of one's skill and determination, so if they have a few bad games it will take months of catch-up to receive them, regardless of skill." Chat-ban the people more who are toxic. Outright ban the people more who are toxic.
I was playing more and more every day. Now your game is dead to me. My money (for which I spent over $1000+ over my time, which may seem small but every penny counts) will never be yours again. I'd rather be banned for a day. To three days. To seven days. To 2 weeks. To a month to get a point across to me than to have my season rewards (which I worked for) taken away. If it took me a week or two to get back to honor 2 - maybe I'd consider keeping the game around. But months? Months of my work to get Honor 3 taken away in 2 days. Deleted. Told I need to rebuild because of 4 bad games of provoking, horrible people. You taught me nothing but to spit in the face of your game publicly as a sham and a waste of time.
Disgusted.
Good riddance.
