It's one step forward, and two steps back!
LoL Ping Changes - Combating Toxicity Impacts Disabled Accessibility
It seems Riot are doing everything in their power to combat toxicity in the game, except for banning players of course! And it's having unforeseen consequences!
Toxicity has been a long-term problem for League of Legends, to such an extent that Riot had to remove an innocuous-looking ping due to the connotation the players gave it, so they could flame each other.
Not that it did any good, seeing as it was replaced by the "Push" ping, which, apparently, looks like a guillotine. However, another change they implemented at the time of removing the "Bait" ping, was the ping restriction, to stop ping spam.
What they didn't seem to take into account, is the fact that by doing so, communication for disabled LoL players is now heavily limited! Which is not an issue in something like Nexus Blitz, but is a matter of life and death in ranked!
LoL Ping Restriction Impacts Disabled Accessibility
After the change where players are restricted to a number of consecutive pings in a certain amount of time, which then go on a sort of cooldown before becoming usable again, a post on Reddit surfaced talking about disabled accessibility regarding LoL pings.
The Redditor by the name kizmaus point to their own case as an example. They use a sip/puff controller to play League of Legends with their mouth and rely heavily on pings to communicate since they can't type on the keyboard while playing like most players do.
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Due to this, the change that has been overlooked by most LoL players is impacting the only way of communication for a portion of the LoL player base.
After all, when you get locked out of pings for two minutes after spamming that your laner is missing to warn your teammates of their roam you can just type the usual "ss X lane" in chat. For disabled players like kizmaus, there is no alternative!
Now, an honest mistake is something that happens to the best of us, and Riot do have quite a few disabled accessibility options in LoL, such as the colorblind options and the visual cues for players who are hard of hearing.
- If you think LoL is bad, get yourself the only game that's more infuriating, Monopoly
Thus, as Riot do try to accommodate disabled people, we have no doubt that, once this is brought to their attention, this part of the ping changes will be reverted.
This would be their shot to prove that battling toxicity in their game, does not come at the expense of sacrificing player experience, and that they are not the kind of company that would plagiarize fanart!