Chat Systems Forecast

Hi,

I am the manager of a 3700 member community (Liga der Gentlemen, LdG) that mainly uses the chatrooms to organize games. We've done this for over 2 years now, so i have a bit of experience with these rooms. Additionally me and the other german emissaries had a project were we tried to help people in a chatroom (why was i banned? How does matchmaking work? This kind of questions) in the client. This project failed, due to the nature of the chatrooms.

Thanks to this experience, i have can give you some feedback:

• Chatrooms need to be variable in size. While a chatroom with 50 people just chatting with each other is spammed with lots of text, a chatroom to find people to play with (like the one we use in the LdG) could easily stand 500 people. Especially at peak hours, a limit to 200 members is just not enough for bigger communities.
• Chatrooms need basic moderation tools. The owner (and chosen moderators) has to be able to kick and ban people temporarily and permanently from the chatroom. These bans have to be revoceable.
• Big chatrooms might profit from an optional tool that limits the messages people can send in a given time (quite similiar to chat-restrictions).
• It would be good to be able to decide whether a chatroom is open for everyone or just for people you invite.
• The open version would need a blacklist, that denies access for people on that list while letting everbody else in (pretty much like bans, but usable before these people even visited the chatroom).
• automated spam-protection

Optional (not as important as the ones above):

• Beeing able to whisper people who are in the same room, but not on your FL
• Hide or even kick people who are inactive for too long

These tools are pretty much necessary for bigger communities, if they want to use Riots chatrooms. My community, the LdG, uses the chatrooms right now. It works, because we are a behavior-focused community. But we are still at the mercy of trolls and flamers. It does not happen very often, but flamers are able to destroy our chatroom completely if they want to. Even one single person can do that. The other project i mentioned, the emissary help channel, had to be shut down because of it. There were a handful of people who were able to destroy this quite liked project completely, which was really frustrating.

I am really looking forward to a chat system rework, because communities like ours desperately need it. Greetings Humpel

PS: If you want further feedback, you can contact me anytime. The european Rioters have all my contact data if you need it.

My only concern is that I will not be able to claim the channel that I started (TFORCE) in game. We sit between 150-200 concurrent users and if it's first come, first serve for the chat rooms (for moderation purposes), I will lose everything that I've worked for.

Hi! I run Factions, a community game mode based on (e.g.) Noxus vs. Demacia matches. Chat is a huge part of our infrastructure, so I'm very interested in this discussion.

Factions Chat

We currently have about 150 people in our chat on average. We use it as a hub for discussion and a place to arrange Factions matches (e.g. "Looking for 3 more for Ionia").

So far, we haven't been seriously spammed or anything, though it is a concern. We also haven't needed "hard" moderation tools yet. Still, it might be nice if we could somehow "claim" a chat and assign mod/admin powers.

This might be rather Factions-specific, but chat tags on the "who" list would be nice for us. Maybe allow us to have little colored dots or icons? It might have some general usefulness; e.g., in Summoner School, new people could select a bright green dot, while experienced "teachers" could have a purple dot. In the case of Factions, we'd use it to indicate faction: e.g. gray for Noxus, blue for Demacia.

Well this is a pleasant surprise! As the Community Manager of The Gentlemen's Club chat room, I have had many first hand experiences with all sorts of troublemakers: Trolls, spammers, flooders, scammers, etc. I would be happy to share some ideas (in no particular order).

Chat Room Registration - The ability to register and claim "ownership" over a private chat room is essential. Existing chat rooms will need help against troll registrations when the system is implemented though. This would allow the chat room owner/admin to assign a team with moderation powers.

Chat Room Moderation - The ability to kick/ban users as the absolute minimum. Additional tools might include warning and muting players, or the ability to use time limited bans/mutes.

Flood Protection - Some basic flood protection or message queue (possibly moderator enabled) would be nice.

Increased User Limit - We have hit the user limit before and with increased chat room visibility in the future I predict many chat rooms will have this issue.

Reporting - The ability to report players from the chat room, similar to the post game screen. This could either be reports sent to Riot, or more likely, reports sent to the channel moderators (in case they aren't around). A report should automatically include recent chat logs, or alternatively, all chat activity could be logged for the moderators to peruse if necessary.

Chat Room Profiles - Give owners the ability to set up a chat room profile similar to summoner profiles. Allow us to add/display a channel description/keywords, list of moderators, URL/Facebook page, VoIP information and similar. You could also add meta information for the channel (founder, age), channel statistics (unique users, user activity/hour, games played). I'm sure you could even come up with some sort of chat room meta “game” if you were so inclined. Allow chat rooms to compete against one another during holiday events? The possibilities are endless.

Chat Room Visibility - In their current state, chat rooms are strictly word of mouth. Promote their use in various ways. A searchable list of chat rooms would be a good start, with one-click-buttons for joining or reading the chat room profile. You could also allow players to list their favorite chat rooms as part of their information on post game screens, as a sort of “guild tag”.

Chat Room Topic - Allow the owners to show a message to all chat room users, either when they join or as a timed broadcast.

Chat Room LFG - A LFG/private game creation tool. Allow users to create community games that are automatically broadcast in the chat room, with one-click-join functionality for other players.

Some requests from our users - Voice in chat rooms. Multiple open (not minimized) chat rooms. Chats detachable from main client window. Chat rooms accessible while in a game. “Children” chat rooms belonging to the main chat room without the need for additional registrations.

I am very excited for this news and very happy that you are requesting our input on the matter. Good job!

I am Clanleader of Visantic and was part of other clans for the last 4 years. The main problems in the past were:

Trolls and kicked Members

They were able to spam the chat and cause way to much drama without any chance to stop it (obvious). When changing the system it could cause a lot of additional troll too with people stealing names of existing communities.

Problems with the change

In the past you changed the Chatroomsystem atleast 3 times. From case sensitve to insensitve and back again. In the clans we had at that time it caused quite a bunch of problems of people staying in the old chatrooms/some in the new ones. For ~2 weeks we had huge problems reaching everyone to get this solved and this was in a clan where we met 1 time a week with most player. Try to get the auto joins from now to work for the new system.

Highlighting

2 Years back the chatrooms showed when someone wrote anything. And while this was extremly annoying in the public chatrooms or with much spam it was worse without it. Atm you have to be in the chatroom and have it open to see if someone wrote anything which results in >5 min respond time for even easy questions. Pls add some options for diffrent highlighting of a certain chatroom (not global).

LFG List

Some options to list yourself as looking for a game so you have a list of people that want to get invited instead of a full list you have to spam with invites.

Maybe add a Community system

Back in 2010 we got the answer that you would add a clan/guild feature in the first half of 2010. Maybe go back and work on it. Give us the option to create clans/communities ingame and have a full list everyone in it with internal chatrooms and mod privilegs for certain ranks inside the group.

It sounds great that you plan do it. (Finally a 2010 Soon™ worked on ;-) )

While having moderators for the various channels sounds like a good idea, it will come with it's own set of issues such as abuse etc. If such a system is implemented an abuse prevention system also needs to be there for users to report such things.

• Higher room capacity

• [QoL] Highlight feature when someone's name is called.

• [QoL] Ability to mute the chat rooms individually, since currently it's done via SFX and a chatty chat room will result in a lot of unnecessary sounds.

• A chat room should also function as an extended friend's list allowing people to spectate you when you're in the room. This should also come with don't spectate option (?)

• Though this might be feature that'll be good for other queue types, ability to join a game if someone is creating a lobby.

• Having frequently visited chatrooms or favourite chatrooms in each users' sidebar(?).

• Make it a mini IRC.

I'm part of the moderation staff for Summoner School, I'm going to bring up a few of our concerns and ideas regarding the chat system.

• First of all, being able to have effective moderation tools is a must. It's important for us to be able to keep our community clean, and it's impossible to do that with the in-game chat as of now.

• Being able to temp/perma ban toxic players, chat emoticons, chat topics to help generate discussion as just a few examples.

• Having a welcome message and description would be helpful so players know who we are before they even enter the chat room.

• Better connectivity with our subreddit and other platforms, we run a lot of community events, and being able to sticky them in our chat would be helpful for keeping our visitors up to date on all our events.

• Being able to have users tag themselves as "LFG" "Teacher" "LF Teacher" and potentially having users be able to sort those tags within chat would be a useful tool for those looking for help.

• We consistently have 150+ members in our chat room, so a rise in the chat room cap would be welcomed as well.

These are just a few ideas off the top of our heads

Member of DominateDominion here, This community has been growing and dying for the past year. The reason? Riot not providing enough support, We have been getting some awesome cash prize tournaments through LoLpro and Azubu. If there was a way to make the DominateDominion chat more visible by adding it to most popular/most visited etc. that would really help us and a lot of other communities like us out!

3 things on my end:

The character limit. It's not even that it's too small, but can we have an indication of where our current typed message stands? I'm thinking along the lines of Imgur's sytem for comments. provided the limit stays in of course.

Once the public rooms come back up, advertise them more within the client. I flat out had no idea about those rooms until well after 30.

Some form of color coding or differential to help with 3 or more people typing at the same time. It can get really confusing in a very active conversation.

Beyond that I personally haven;t had any problems, but I understand the need for better moderation and general tools. Thanks for the heads up!

I was wondering about the possibility of borrowing the current team lobby hierarchy for moderation of public chats that are created.

• There is the creator/owner, who is able to decide whether the room is open or invite-only. This allows people some control when building a community up and what kind of players they want in the community(A community for junglers only or a friend network) without hurting those who use them for large scale purposes where open joiners is a good idea (ie. Factions Community events).

• Below the Owner/Creator, you have mods that they've selected to help them in management. This would run parallel to players who've been given invite rights in the team lobby. Of course, they'd be the ones with the right to invite players (if the owner has selected invite-only option), but they also have the power to kick players (with a feature that calls for a reason to be submitted to the owner)

• The last group, players who are simply in the community.

This was my initial thought, and it also opens a door for a method where players (owners likely) can report excessive toxicity that occurs outside of the game but within Riot's jurisdiction, but it may be a bit much.

In a chat room, I'd love to see things you'd expect in a normal chatroom. Including, but not limited to:

• Emoticons (Albeit with spam-blocking tech)
• Description tools to let people know what a chat room is for.
• As you mentioned, moderation tools.
• Increased notification of rooms. Maybe tags or keywords that you can search rooms by.

Along with that, perhaps some ways to keep the community going outside of the client. Including "websites" that match the chat channels, extra help in making more unique chat channels (Font color, backround, just some personalization tools). I'm sure I'm missing some stuff but I'm sure others will pick up what I'm missing.

THANK YOU RIOT <3. I always hang out in the Dominate Dominion chat channel and most of the time it is nice, but like all communities, issues arise sometimes (cough GoT spoiler spam cough), and it is frustrating that there is really nothing you can do about said issues, but I am glad that you are addressing this issue :)

RITO, THX for recognizing Dominate Dominion. Well, we have some trolls who spam spoilers and sometimes flooders go there to rage about the game they just lost, so it would be good to have some control about that. I believe that it would be nice if a group of players could be the "admins" of the chatroom and then be able to ban/unban players from it. Anyway, I feel concerned about the possibility of those admins are hacked by a troll and then the troll bans everyone out, or something like that. This way, i think that we should have some way of defending our chatroom in case of hacking/troll, but something that does not put in risk the chatroom (DD chat has been used since dominion started, and a lot of players would lose contact with community if it was disabled, mainly the older ones who wish to come back into play).

I would look to the starcraft system of chat rooms for what you want. My issue with the chat rooms is that you can't find them unless you now it's name, which is frankly ridiculous. I would love to find a room full of people who want to theory craft, or talk about jungling, but I can't just look for a tag, like I can in starcraft, instead I have to know the name of the chat room with these kinds of people.

1: invite a whole chat room to a game

2: owener can kick

Now's your chance riot: http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=4285778

I really wish you'd be able to build an actual community via a channel (think of a clan). With an hierarchy, mods and sub channels. Right now there's really no tool to create a durable community within league and that's kinda sad.

Mini-suggestion; public chat rooms, if they are going to be brought back, should have a function to automatically kick people who've been inactive for hours. This should also be an option in private rooms, even if the max number in those rooms goes up.

Another mini-suggestion: Perhaps there can be a function to make chat rooms publicly visible to accounts with preselected qualities - "lowelo" be visible to accounts gold and below, or "noob" available to players 29 and below.

The second suggestion assumes that privately made chat rooms will have an option to become public, which I think is important for having an active, dynamic chat room system that is readily accessible to the general LoL playerbase, instead of having 4 rooms of 200 people try to serve for the needs of 4mil+ people. If a player wants to find mentoring, he should be able to search and find a room for him. Same for someone who might want to find a LoL fanart group, or find people to premade with who are also basketball fans, etc.

I think that player moderators could function well in chat rooms so that Riot can keep working on super-duper Riot stuff and chat rooms could be cleaner.

Hello, Please don't bring back RiotChatBot or RiotChatAdmins 1-4 as they were horrible and had many false positives. Overall, you should change the way chat-rooms work fundamentally as having a locked chat room and have chat officers/moderators that can be assigned by the chat-room owner. As a regular in the "PlaywithRiot" chatroom and most of the public chats you generally ignore 20-30 people daily maybe more dependent if my ignore list bugs out due to randomness.

I'm pretty sure the 200 cap may be a limitation of adobe air but I'm not sure about this.

I would like to see Moderators from the community itself that can tell the difference between joking, cyber bullying, and spam. Spam of course consists of people begging for a team to RP scams. People who can have the authority to ban them from a chatroom for a certain amount of time, etc.

I never realized how popular these chatrooms were i'll be looking into joining one!

It's a little off topic but any chance at getting the friends list cap raised?

Thoughts about a Clan system in game?

It would be a cool way for groups of like minded people to create and build something together. There would also then be the awesome chance for inter-clan rivalries!

A simple remedy to the problem would be getting admins to monitor the chats daily while removing anyone posting anything that shouldn't be posted.

( I realise people make alts but it's longer to make one than ban one )

This was posted a month ago, and I think its amazing that this is finally being looked at. I am curious to know, just for the sake of knowing, what made chatrooms and that functionality so low on the priority list when compared to the bigger issues (design, balance, etc) this seems like really small picking. I remember doing chat systems for a basic programming clan and adding moderator authority and bans and such was fairly easy and when stored took up an negligible amount of space, even for larger rooms. Is there a reason Riot has waited this long to address the issue, or are they addressing it because the amount of spam in their own rooms is getting out of hand?

I hope this is implemented soon so we wont have the of having to listen to more bots. I also hope my comment doesn't the chances of this coming sooner than Soon (TM). Thanks for the work Meta!

This game is just god awful because of the immature players in it. They have a low self esteem and have absolutely no respect for the enemy team especially when they are winning or have won the game. You point out a flaw after losing and they verbally harass you to an extreme that just makes you want to quit the game altogether. Despite all of the unskilled and troll players in this game, the players that i hate the most are the ones who have no honor for the enemy team or respect at all. They also brag like crazy about winning like it's something that they strive and excel in for life, which most players don't become actual pro's. I feel that i am just going to quit playing this game for this exact reason. It makes me want to win games so i end up becoming obsessed with trying to win game after game and only end up with 60 to 70% losses if not 50% so you really never climb at all. These type of players cause me to abuse the game. They just have to constantly say ignorant things like QQ for example and i find that very immature. I should not have to mute players like this all of the time, otherwise i might as well be muting the entire team. So please riot, make a better effort when monitoring or taking a closer look at players who are reported for verbal harassment, because i can guarantee you these are the type of players that I am talking about. Not all of them are like this, but a HUGE amount of them are. I would have to guess at least 20 to 30% of them, which is a very large percentage if you have played the game in ranked or 5v5.

At least it's not gone for good, but is there any news on when this is coming back? Public chat is still gone...

With the upcoming rework of the chat system I'd really like to see voice chat implemented, but restricted to fully premade teams to stop non inclined players being forced into using it.

It could remove much of the fragmentation of players among different voice clients, and act as a testing ground to see if there's any widespread interest in the idea of game integrated voice chat and how it would effect player interaction on a greater scale.

PLS RIOT IM VIP333 and i have been banned forever pls take off my ban i have put 25 euro in this game i swear i will not spam again [zombie-brand-clap]

What I really hate is that the popular and useful chat rooms are always filled with AFK people, so that the people who really have something to do there can't get in.. I spend 20 minutes a day just trying to get into 3v3.. it's really really stupid. There should be an AFK check once in a while