Why League of Legends developer Riot Games is disabling official public chat rooms

Riot is shutting down the current version of League of Legends' official public chat rooms, the company announced on its website, explaining that the rooms are riddled with undesirables and actively create negative experiences for players.

"The official public chat rooms have grown rife with RP sellers, scammers and Elo-boost spam," the post states. "The default four rooms we established can be used by a tiny fraction of our players at a time. Given the number of League players, most conversation spills into private, community-created rooms."

Riot is temporarily disabling the public chat rooms and will bring them back online once they are deemed "useful and accessible." Private chat rooms and messaging will remain available to the community.

According to Riot, while the experience in private chat rooms is better than the public versions, it plans to introduce a deeper set of moderation tools to the private channels "to address unwelcome drop-ins and toxic behavior."

Riot is also aiming to provide players with a solid set of tools for them to more easily create, own and manage various social environments as they see fit. This includes creating a persistent hangout for players, like-minded friends and invited community members where they can easily jump into games without having to send individual game invites.

"At the end of the day, when you log in you should feel like you're surrounded by active players that like to play League the way you do," the announcement reads. "Whether we call them chat rooms, hangouts or communities, they could grow to serve many purposes. Players could build a community for junglers, a mentoring group, a champion theory-crafting channel, or casual ARAM or Team Ranked LFGs. Some great communities like these already exist in League but it's not easy to manage them well."

You can learn more about Riot and its multiplayer online battle arena game by reading why there will never be a League sequel and why the developer is offering new hires cash to quit.