League of Legends is a great game. What ruins it is the community. Riot Games has already taken several steps to ensure players act appropriately. They've introduced things like the Tribunal where the community can vote on the fate of reported players by reading over the chat log and looking at game details, but the fact remains that there is still a very active community of players that look to ruin the game experience for everyone. We call them trolls, and we don't like them.
But while we attempt to punish those who create a poor game environment, Riot Games has also attempted to create a system that rewards those who compete compete honorably, but aren't di*ks about it. Riot yesterday introduced the new League of Legends Honor System, which you can use to "acknowledge summoners who helped make your game awesome."
After each game, a simple "thumbs up" icon will be next to the summoner name in the post-game lobby. You can use it to grant honor to those who are helpful, friendly, display good teamwork, and an "honorable opponent" in the face of victory. Honor can be granted in all matchmade games, not including Custom games.
"The amount of Honor you receive will depend on who honors you," Riot explained. "We designed Honor to reward you for being consistently awesome with a large number of players. As such, being honored by someone that you just met in a matchmade game will always award the most Honor."
While you're stocked with a good amount of Honor to hand out to fellow summoners, the amount is limited based on the number of games you play. This is to prevent trading or spamming Honor.
"Your total Honor represents your ongoing commitment to making games better for your fellow summoners. It’s not a currency, and you can’t spend it – we’re going to experiment with some potential bonuses to being an honorable summoner in the future," Riot added.
What they should do for a reward, rather than hand out IP, is create two separate matchmaking queues depending on a players honor. In other words, put all of the players with good Honor in one queue while sending all the bad apples in another.
