Reddit mods sign League of Legends NDA with Riot

It has emerged that most of the moderation team of the League of Legends subreddit have signed up to a non-disclosure agreement with developer Riot Games.

The Daily Dot reports that while Reddit has told mods that signing the NDA is not mandatory, doing so will grant them direct access to a Skype connection to Riot to keep up to date with the MOBA’s latest happening.

The price that is paid for that, of course, is that the supposedly anarchistic world of free information that is Reddit is compromised, with the product creator having an element (the extent of which is still being debated) of control over what information is delivered to the community.

The process is being handled by Jordon Triggs, a former mod of the subreddit who now works at Riot. It is believed that this is the only existing agreement between an eSports subreddit and a developer.

"It takes a community to create a healthy live service for League of Legends, so we have a channel with mods where they can report emergency issues: from players threatening to harm themselves or others, to service outages that can be directed to the team with little delay,” Riot said in a statement.

The NDAs are in place so we can protect player privacy and have meaningful conversations around security. Riot has a clear internal policy that Reddit is a channel for players by players and we are guests there."

The initial reaction from many of the subreddit’s users was one of hostility, although overnight there has been an increasing tendency for users to come out in defence of the move and downplay any potential effects it may have on user freedom.