League of Legends creators Riot Games have never shied away from the fact that some of its players really, really suck. The company's "tribunal" answer to toxic behavior has paid big dividends in the past few years, but it hasn't zeroed out all rude players—which means Riot still had some recent data handy to connect the dots for an intriguing, workplace-related corollary.

The leading question: Does bad in-game behavior carry over to the workplace? Riot was in a position to know, since its staffers are also avid LoL players—and have apparently signed over permissions for their bosses to track their gameplay.

With help from Google's re:Work staff analytics team, Riot picked through the last 12 months of each staffer's LoL gameplay records and chat logs. The analysts found that in the case of fired employees, 25 percent of them exhibited significantly toxic in-game behavior. This wasn't a surface-level search for vulgar and hateful keywords but rather a deeper, context-specific analysis; according to re:Work, the worst behaviors included "passive aggression (snarky comments) and the use of authoritative language, sometimes using their authority as a Riot employee to intimidate or threaten others."

Riot then applied that data to performance reviews for remaining employees. Similar "toxic" gameplay patterns were identified in 30 staffers, which Riot noted were "more junior Rioters, new to the working world," and the company conducted interviews with each of them with LoL chat logs in hand. A few of the interviews ended with employee exits, but most bore fruit. "Pretty much everyone we spoke with was appalled at their own behavior," Riot talent developer Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar told re:Work (who also noted that a few affected employees wrote apologetic essays in response).

The report ended by declaring Riot's intention to request LoL usernames from all future hires for similar chat-log analysis. That means prospective employees should be mindful of a wholly different kind of tribunal before feeding or going AFK.