Is the MOBA culture toxic?

League of Legends, Dota 2 and other MOBA games have a reputation for incurably toxic player culture, but the fallout of a recent high-level ban suggests there’s hope yet.

In a recent pair of rulings detailed on the League of Legends forum, Riot Games elected to hand down bans to two well-known players.

Mithy and Nukeduck have both been “suspended from the League Championship Series and the Challenger Series through the end of 2014″ as a result of “extremely toxic behaviour” including “in game harassment, verbal abuse and continual use of racial slurs” as well as “general toxicity”.

Both players have received punishment for toxicity in the past, and had their accounts chat restricted, but continued to violate the Summoner’s Code. Both have been reported by other players in 30% of their matches of the past month, and Mithy is so notorious as to be one of the top 1% of all EUW players in terms of harrassment score.

Given the behaviour the pair were called out on you might expect them to respond with more abuse, but in fact Mithy issued a pretty classy response on Twitter.