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Suggestion: Revamping the Report System - More Functional Mute Button

Side7Citizen·4/5/2015, 12:53:24 AM·4 votes·1,105 views

Suggestion: Revamping the Report System - More Functional Mute Button

League of Legends is a game that is meant to be enjoyed by its players. The behaviors some can have negative effects on both the enjoyment of others and their play in current and future matches. I wish to present some issues with the current Player Reporting System and suggest some potential improvements to the system.

What is a player report really? It is meant to be a way for players to communicate their dissatisfaction with another player's actions in-game to support staff. It is really just a way that helps players feel like they are significantly impacting the player that wronged them with the possibility of them being banned/chat-restricted/put in low-priority queue in the future. There are no benefits to the player submitting the report. Why is this an issue? For use of third party programs, intentional feeding, ragequitting, AFKing in fountain, and other similar behavior there is not much else that can be done to improve player experience during the game itself. However, for behavior such as racism, sexism, homophobia, verbal abuse, etc there are actions a player can take in-game to improve their experience. That is through the use of the mute button, but many players simply do not use it.

How do we make the mute function more useful and promote its usage? Get rid of post-game reports for "verbal abuse", "negative attitude" and introduce a passive reporting system where mutes/ignores count against a player. When a player has reached a certain threshold (#/(x games) or total#) of mutes/ignores, their account is flagged and a report is automatically forwarded to support staff. Some features a mute report could contain:

  1. A Word Cloud generated from all games which the player was muted. Players are consistent in their behavior. It would take too much effort to make an exhaustive list of all the ways to represent a single word. The use of racial, sexist, and homophobic slurs is more common than it should be in-game, but a system designed to specifically catch variants of the word "faggot" may catch some, but miss others if someone types it in a strange way like "f4gg0t". A word cloud would allow staff at a glance to immediately identify specific behaviors.

  2. Clicking on a word on the word cloud would bring up all instances in context, so "sorry guys my bad"/"Shit mb guys" can be distinguished from "OMG this sona is so bad/Ashe you are a piece of shit". Again, this feature would speed up the processing of these types of reports, and not require the reading of a player written description of events.

  3. A graph of mute frequency and games played over time. Do they have the occasional bad day? Or is this an on-going consistent issue. Would help in determining punishments.

  4. In-game mutes vs post-game lobby mutes. Still catch players who wait until the post game lobby to harass other players.

Why use mutes instead of active reports? Reports take time to accumulate before punishments are handed out. They effectively do nothing to improve player experience in the moment. Mutes/Ignores silence the offenders and allow players to play without their negative influence on the game. That Sona will play better without having to hear how bad a player she is for 20 minutes. Sure by muting the Teemo jungle she may miss a verbal call he makes later in the game, but she has played better for the rest of the game not having to listen to his abuse. The Mute button says "I don't have to put up with this." Reporting for verbal abuse says "I have to put myself through this so that I can report them after the game." There is no reason players should not be able to avoid exposure to this type of behavior while at the same time knowing that this behavior can be punished.

TLDR; Remove reports for chat related offenses and allow the mute/ignore function to flag accounts who are muted often. Save reports for offenses that cannot be represented by the chatlog alone.

6 Comments

vettan4/5/2015, 1:27:21 AM3 votes

Interesting idea. At the same time you've mentioned that the mute button is underused. My issue is that for the sake of the game many players would not use the mute button. Without the option to report verbal abuse after the game they will have no means to communicate to staff that the abuse has occurred. Another issue is potential rate of false positives. For example when I'm not doing well I tend to mute everybody to help me concentrate. Now, you have mentioned is use of statistics to minimize that; however, there is still a real potential for a significant number of false positives. What would be interesting though is to have along side the mute button a downvote button. So a person can TAB as usual and chose to downvote a person. An d then Riot can use what you have outlined based on that downvote button. At 3 downvote the person's chat will be banned for the duration of the game. This way it applies pressure to the abuser to behave as he/she can see the number of downvotes. Does not necessitate immediate mute and works perfectly with your idea. So in summary. Removing abuse report at the end of the game will not, in my opinion, encourage the use of mute button. It will strip a player ability to report the abuse and result in significant number of false positives. Alternative idea is to have a downvote button which can be used to downvote a player. After 3 downvotes that player's chat is banned for duration of the game and use the statistics you mentioned to monitor users who are frequently downvoted. It does not require users to effectively mute another player, and helps teammates help the abused player. When a player is abused on my team I feel helpless to help them besides suggesting to mute the other player. Downvote button would help me help the player being abused.

It Hertz When IP4/5/2015, 1:09:22 AM2 votes

You know, you CAN mute after their first blast of toxicity, AND report after game, right? You're not required to listen to them all game.

Poro x Poro4/5/2015, 12:54:40 AM1 votes

bump and by bump i mean its a really good idea

Leylaani4/5/2015, 4:28:42 AM1 votes

I think this is a great idea! There are way too many people displaying unsportsmanlike behavior in games and a lot of racial slurs being thrown around. I have definitely been on the side of the verbal abuse where someone kept shouting at me from the very beginning of a game and my performance suffered because of it. On another note, it would also help in toning down the language coming from some of the younger crowd who either aren't old enough to understand proper etiquette when communicating with others or were not taught by their parents how to interact appropriately with other human beings. I'd love to see Riot incorporate such a brilliant idea!