Riot Brightmoon makes enemies of League of Legends players worldwide.

Riot Brightmoon, lead developer for League of Legends’s balance team, recently shook up the community with a controversial sweep of game changes. Among the most contentious were the removal of /ALL chat, Teemo buffs, and Quinn buffs.

/ALL chat

Riot Brightmoon decided to remove /ALL chat in an attempt to lower player toxicity in-game. The change was meant to be temporary; it was a two-patch experiment, so League of Legends players would have a month without being able to type to the enemy team. After the experiment, League developers would review report records to see if removing /ALL chat lowered incidents of toxicity significantly.

This change saw huge backlash before it had the chance to go live. Most players cited that toxicity didn’t lie in cross-team chat but in team chat; players’ own teammates were their worst enemies in most games. Teammates tend to be far toxic than enemies; it’s much harder to work with a team than against an enemy. In many cases, cross-team chat allows for an environment of positivity, and in a select few cases, it can even help protect players against their own teammates. With these arguments, players forced Brightmoon to only disable in a select few (undisclosed) regions rather than all of them.

Controversial champion balancing

In a twist no player wanted to see, Teemo received a massive buff. Teemo, widely considered the most hated champion in the game, was almost never seen before the patch; now, he is one of the best characters in the game and has almost 100% presence in the ranked ladder. Rather than modernizing his kit, Brightmoon overtuned Teemo’s numbers to make him oppressive at all stages of the game.

In a counter-intuitive move, one of the least popular champions in the game, Quinn, received a significant nerf. Quinn was a niche pick played by less than 1% of top matchups (<.2% overall,) yet her strongest asset was nerfed. The few top players who played Quinn called out Riot Brightmoon for his incompetence and lack of game knowledge overall, but the nerf went through.

Everyone picks tanks. And Quinn is [bad] against tanks.

-Tyler1