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Making "offensive" terms illegal, rather than having people be banned for toxicity etc

NightPain123··2 votes·541 views

1st email to Riot support: if riot believes that saying such words as retard and others is detrimental to the play of other players, and that it hampers their experience playing league, then why not make such words unable to be said? League's communication between players being purely chat based, it would be quite simple to make such words illegal to be used, by simply not allowing a player to send a message containing such words. If riot's response to this would be that they believe that people playing the game are responsible enough to say the right thing etc, then they must also believe that the people playing the game are responsible enough to be able to handle such words being said to them, whether that be though muting or ignoring, something that i was told to do by a riot employee when someone is saying such words to me. Thus making the act of banning someone for toxicity or racism/sexism etc, all things that one player can report another for, completely illogical. When such acts can be completely prevented by riot by simply making such words not usable. So why not do that, instead of having people report one another, having toxicity in the game, and spending time and money on such reports, when riot can eliminate all of that by simply making such words illegal? 2nd Email to Riot support proposing idea: Riot could simply compile the words and different combination of letters that people use to insult each other over the course of one patch, and simply add them to a library of terms that would not be aloud by the system. Nearly every possible offensive term would be used and taken out of the game within one patch. And identifying these words and adding them to the library of unacceptable words would be simple. The code necessary to do such a task is simple, much simpler than that which makes LOL run. There is already a system in place for such things, the censored chat option in the settings. One would simply have to make it so that the sentence could not be said when containing an offensive word, rather than replacing the word with *s. With over 27 million people play league every day, even if only a fraction of those people said something toxic in game one time, the number of different terms and combination of letters to resemble offensive terms that could be collected in the matter of a patch are astronomical. There are only so many different combinations of letters that people can use to resemble an offensive word before it becomes recognizable. Implementing such a thing in LOL would be fairly simple, and something that is well within the power of riot to to. There are other online games that have chat systems that have something of the nature in place, and they work well. Riot could most likely even lease the code from a third party and not even have to do any of the work themselves. Also with the preseason coming up, would be quite easy to implement. The simple fact is that if riot cared enough about truly eliminating toxicity, racism, sexism etc from the game, they could. They simply do not care that much.

11 Comments

DariusDemiurge3 votes

Use some paragraph breaks there thought police.

IcyPepper1 votes

BEGONE THOT POLICE

GrievousFetus1 votes

Policing based on vocabulary is a dumb idea. All that happens is you get players being rude to each other, but in a spiteful passive aggressive way where everyone is indirectly insulting each other but tiptoeing around the trigger words that the system auto bans. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather my support who's mad at me just call me a fuck face instead of going AFK for 20 seconds at a time and typing "sigh...this ADC..." In chat over and over.

The second problem is that whenever this happens people begin to "own" otherwise totally inoffensive phrases and words, and they take on an offensive context in the community. When overwatch filtered GGEZ, people just typed what it's filtered to, and it meant the same thing.

Here's how you fix toxicity. You start every match on /mute all by default.

SEKAI1 votes

If you use a chat filter system that filters out any and all combination of the characters that can be perceived in a negative way, welp, half of things we could even say is completely gone, more even.

Not to mention, that's more just about curing the symptom rather than the cause. To treat the cause it requires educating players to know that being a dipshit to another is not okay; while banning isn't the most effective out there, but it's certainly more valid than an extreme chat filter library.

NightPain1231 votes

my preference is that they leave it how it is and simply not ban people. The world is "toxic" people are not nice to each other in general. The idea of reporting someone after a game for saying something mean to you is like a toddler going up to his mom on the playground crying because one of the other kids was mean to him. With a large majority of people who play league being over the age of 16, i think that players should be able to handle in game interactions on their own. And that banning someone for such acts is a shitty solution.

Tenth Leper1 votes

Probably more than 9 out of 10 people I meet are kind to me. Which is saying something, because I am overweight and unimportant.

I do not see the real world as a toxic place, and most certainly less so than the internet. If you are surrounded by people treating you so badly I would consider a move if it is financially feasible, because your life doesn't have to be like that.

[vlad-salute]

SEKAI1 votes

{quoted}

my preference is that they leave it how it is and simply not ban people. The world is "toxic" people are not nice to each other in general. The idea of reporting someone after a game for saying something mean to you is like a toddler going up to his mom on the playground crying because one of the other kids was mean to him. With a large majority of people who play league being over the age of 16, i think that players should be able to handle in game interactions on their own. And that banning someone for such acts is a shitty solution.

Unless you live in the wrong neighbourhoods, otherwise people are in general nice to each other in any reasonable environment, even if they just act it out with a fake smile. Because irl actions have consequences, ones that can be pretty severe which can range from a warnings from some kind of authority such as their manager or even fines or even more severe punishments, depending on the level of misbehaviour. Any organisation and community need some kind of rules to ensure at least a non-hostile and beneficial environment, a playerbase for a game is no different.

It's 1 thing to "toughen up". But It's another to outright excuse shitty behaviours. It's nothing wrong to report someone for spewing offensive shit at others, it's not them "can't handle the interaction" but just that those people are not only not enjoyable to be with but they're also often malicious and harmful to others. Also have you considered the fact many people just don't want to deal with certain individuals' BS, especially in their ENTERTAINMENT AND HOBBY? I mean, to go by the same logic, why can't you just tell the attackers to toughen up and follow the simplest rules of basic decency and respect? That'd be making far more sense, but I guess having a functioning society is for pussies.

And really, if you actually need a video game chat to get your reality check... bruh, I don't think you have the right to tell others to toughen up or get more real.

Though that said, the bottom line is actually far simpler: It has nothing to do with toughen up or whatever. Riot as an private enterprise has a right to its own rules like how you can make your own house rules, and Riot has defined its rule set under the generic term of "toxicity"; if you break it, you go out. It's that simple. It's certainly not "shitty" because considering this happens in anything including but not limited to sports and other physical games, and it's not even like the rules are objectively unfair given that the system is often far too lenient as a matter of fact; if you break the rules, you get the serve, easy.

NightPain1231 votes

I never said nor implied that riot does not have the right to implement whatever rules they see fit. And there is already a simple solution for the people who think that someone else is being toxic and ruining their play, you mute them, and the problem is solved. I simply do not think that banning someone is a solution to the problem, nor necessary since someone can just mute someone that they deem to be toxic.

SEKAI1 votes

{quoted}

I never said nor implied that riot does not have the right to implement whatever rules they see fit. And there is already a simple solution for the people who think that someone else is being toxic and ruining their play, you mute them, and the problem is solved. I simply do not think that banning someone is a solution to the problem, nor necessary since someone can just mute someone that they deem to be toxic.

Being able to cover your ears or walk away do not mean the person is guiltless or not responsible for attacking you with insults. While the boundary of what truly constitutes as an insult can vary, but we should be agreeing on that simplified notion, that the responsibility of a potentially harmful interaction between 2 parties doesn't lie on the receiver to deflect the whatever coming their way, at least not majority and definitely not entirely.

If I try to rob a bank, for example; even if the bank is entirely prepared to resist my rob attempt hence "problem solved" as the robs would fail to strong security, however it obviously doesn't mean I wasn't wrong in trying to rob the said bank or that I should not receive consequences for it just because the robbing has failed. See the flow of this? This is that.

Banning players has many reasons to exist. We can briefly give it a few generic labels for its cause: It's to punish the rule breakers and let them learn the lesson via consequences of some sort, it's to secure the clients and the trust between them and the organisation and subsequently the organisation's market relevance, and it's to send a message on the host's agenda for all latent and future rule breakers within its scope of influence; it's not unnecessary.

NightPain1231 votes

not quite analogous to robbing a bank, but ok lol

Sona Ping1 votes

I would much rather the people who commit the offenses be the ones who feel the repercussions for those offensives over me receiving the repercussions and wondering why my message has been inexplicably changed to "going top after $^#(@"

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