Riot takes on the quixotic task of policing bad 'Off-Platform' conduct by banning offenders from its games and suspending partner privileges

Earlier this month, Riot Games sent out some information about its terms of service being updated. Most of the changes are pretty uninteresting, except for one, which mostly concerns the content creator community.

"These updates ensure we’re evolving with games and the content ecosystem to make the best possible experience for our players and creators," a Riot Games post says. Now, Riot can punish players who spew hateful language or harmful rhetorics even if they aren't doing so in voice or text chat—you just have to play a Riot game to be liable. This is called Off-Platform conduct.

"Our intention with this update is to help protect players from harmful behaviors they can experience across the various places that touch their gaming experience. This update applies very specifically and only to content where Riot’s games are the background of the content produced."

Theoretically, this could mean that you could bypass the Off-Platform conduct rule by quickly changing over to a different game anytime you wanted to talk shit about someone, but I could be (and probably am) wrong—for such a big change, there's not much detail about what warrants punishment.

"Though we aren’t going to proactively monitor everything that happens across social media, it is now within our rights to issue penalties in-game when that content is brought to our attention," Riot continues. "As an example, if a creator uses hateful slurs about an opposing player or teammate on their stream but not in-game over chat or voice comms, we can still issue a penalty as if that behavior occurred in-game.

"If you say or do things that break our Terms of Service while broadcasting or creating content about our games, we can restrict access to your Riot accounts (and suspend your Partner privileges if you are part of our Partner Program)."

Alongside this rule, players will also be penalised for breaking the terms of service, such as by promoting content about selling/buying accounts. "We take competitive integrity seriously and view these behaviors as a detriment to creating fair, fun play," the blog post says. "If a creator is sponsored by a boosting website, promotes ways for players to buy and sell accounts, or otherwise does anything that encourages players to break our rules, we may suspend access to your Riot accounts."

The act of stream sniping is also getting more attention. This is apparently one of the biggest issues discussed within Riot's community, and like buying/selling accounts also jeopardises competitive integrity. Riot is currently building a policy and a penalty system to combat this problem, although this is still in the early testing phase.

Penalties for stream sniping and buying/selling accounts both sound like excellent changes that will actually work to create a more even playing field in Riot's games. However, I can see some issues arising from policing Off-Platform conduct. The line between what is allowed and what isn't seems a little blurry right now. Obviously hateful comments that are made to incite harm against other players should not be tolerated, but if all it takes to get penalised is being rude to others, then I feel like Riot is going to have its work cut out policing players.

I have, at times, in the heat of battle, wished ill on enemy players, and even sometimes on my own team. I even once got chat banned for a short while in Overwatch 2 after threatening harm on a hamster because some Wrecking Ball player wouldn't leave me alone. But I'd like to meet someone who plays competitive FPS multiplayers who hasn't gone a bit overboard at times. Just last night, I was hounded in text chat by one of my teammates for fumbling a relatively easy one-on-one fight. I could see those messages and couldn't have cared less. So players saying nasty things about me without my knowledge certainly doesn't matter to me.

While the various tiers of punishment may seem unclear right now, the worst one has been specifically reserved for particularly egregious violations. Those who consistently spread hateful rhetoric in Riot games will be met with restricted access to all Riot accounts. So, if that's your business model, you have until January 3, 2025, to change your ways—otherwise, there will be no more Valorant or League of Legends for you.