Feedback from a 6 year player

A little backstory of myself. I am currently 21 years old about to be 22 in 2 months, and I have been playing League of Legends since I was 14/15ish. When I first started, I actually uninstalled and quit the game because I hated it. I hated that the community was so toxic, I hated that being a new player I couldn't do well. I just flat out hated it. A few months passed and one of my classmates was talking about it in our 3rd period. I decided to start playing with him, and the game got a lot more enjoyable. Now I wasn't surrounded by toxic players. I had people to play with and skype with and laugh and improve with. We were both HORRIBLE at the game, but over the years we improved. I've even peaked when I was super competitive at Plat 1. So it's safe to say I've improved a lot since that first day.

I have been playing this game for quite some time, and I remember saying to myself that I would NEVER buy skins because "why would someone be stupid enough to spend money to look slightly different in game". Now looking at my account, I have well over $600 worth of skins. While others have spent more than myself, I still hold $600 as a big amount to spend on any video game. But I was starting to fall in love with the game. I enjoyed the depth and strategy that even a simple team composition created. Then you add in item optimizations, runes, masteries, and then the good old fashioned which champion counters who.

Pros

• The concept and design of the champions are incredible. They're memorable, lively, and completely unique. They take their time on their champions now and are even going back into the old school champions and reworking them to bring them in line thematically and kit wise.

• The game provides an immense amount of strategy, but still gives off a casual vibe. Bright colors, jokes, an almost cartoony feel. But definitely in the good way

• You can play with friends and try random and funny team comps without getting yelled at for not following the meta

• Kick ass skin designs once they deviated from the simple recolor/new outfit.

• Huge player base, so there's always a game to be played!

• As toxic as people are online, majority of league players are very cool and interesting to talk to. (Just go to a viewing party and you can see)

• Riot and their employees truly love their creation

• Scholarship opportunities for high level competitive play of League

• Possible career choice if you are the best of the best

• Alongside DOTA, opens the eyes of sports networks recognizing E Sports

• Newly implemented potential for free skins and champions (Kudos to this, Smite was doing this since launch and I always thought you guys should too)

• Newly improved champion select is a god send

Cons

• Sometimes a slow fix towards unbalanced champions or items

• While the champion design is more thorough, it takes time which some people get impatient over

• The champion skin prioritization is a little rocky (For example, Annie gets Hextech Annie, but just recently got Sweetheart Annie last year and Panda Annie, on top of all of her current skins)

• Player behavior punishments is inefficient and counter productive to your cause of ridding toxicity, I would like to touch on this some more:

Let's first start off by saying the obvious. League has, and always will be a competitive game. Like other competitive games, there will always be passionate players. Where there are passionate players, there will be tempers. When there is temper there will be toxicity. This is a common thing for ANY competitive game. Counter Strike, Call of Duty, League of Legends, DotA, Gears of War, and many, many more!

Now, there have been good steps to dealing with the toxic players, and there have been some bad steps. A great step towards improving people's attitude in game is the new Hextech Crafting system. If you're toxic, you don't get access to the free skins and champions. Great implementation to improve player base relations! Having an easily accessible report system is also a good step in cleaning up the toxic players from the environment. Though, where there are good actions, there are also bad actions taken. Chat logs are great in determining if someone needs to punished or not, but the logs do not account for pre and post game chat. A lot of stuff goes on in those pre/post game lobbies. A lot of racial, homophobic, suicide encouraging things go down in post game chat. While this poses a problem, the biggest mistake you at Riot have ever done was remove the Tribunal for an automated bot. I can't stress this enough, I speak for not only myself, but for millions of other people who get unfairly "punished" by this bot. I'm not sure if I was ever even reported enough to go to Tribunal when it was the old system, but I do know that the new system has continuously tilted me ever since it's implementation.

I will give you my personal example for this. I used to play with a decent sized group of 25+ people who were ranged from gold to diamond in skill level. We would do 5v5 custom matches regularly and talk in skype. Now, here's the thing. I have always been a vocal person, and I use curse words interchangeably in my daily life. They are not directed at people 99% of the time, and when they are directed at people it's usually in a joking manner. I also, being raised by my argumentative mother, have grown to be sarcastic and snarky in arguments. The problem with this, is that it doesn't translate well through text. There is no emotion to my key strokes. It is completely possible that one sentence can be read in a multitude of ways depending on the person reading it.

So here I was in a 5v5 custom match with 9 other players who are in a Skype call with me talking and laughing, messing with each other, etc. At this point in time I was complaining to them about the new chat restriction bot that would willy-nilly punish people who even said a cuss word without any context to it. Because, a Bot usually just recognizes the word itself, and punishes it. I recently had a 10 game chat restriction due to me just being a potty mouth sailor like I normally am in person. Here's the kicker, the group of 9 other players thought it would be funny to all report me for verbal abuse just to mess with me. Hardee har har, my friends are great right!? I kid you not, one game after they reported me, I got a 65 game chat restriction. For 9 reports on a game where none of us even typed in game because we're all in Skype. This is when I knew for a fact I hated the new bot that Riot had implemented.

Let's fast forward a year from that incident. I ended up taking a break from League to play Xbox and other things. I came back eventually and started getting back into the hang of things. I was going through a lot in real life at the time and I ended up being pretty emotional and I remember constantly getting mad at people in game for little things. I do remember cussing and insulting a few, and I own up to that. I was quickly dealt a 2 week suspension to my account. Which I understand. I opened a support ticket and talked to a representative of my case and got more information on it. I waited my 2 weeks and came back to league and I had calmed down quite a bit from last time I played League. Life was smoothing itself out and I wasn't so emotional anymore. I regularly play ranked because my family, and myself, are very competitive in nature. I may not be challenger level, but I still love to win and try my hardest.

Some time passed and I was paired in a game with a person who just legit was trying to lose the game on purpose. They had gotten mad at our adc for something in laning phase and she ended up going afk. At this point I was tilted and I said "don't be a f***** b**** Morgana, just play". This was the only verbally abusive thing I said in game, and I do believe that the rest of my team was equally as upset with her for going afk. At the end of the game I reported her for afk and I moved on to my next game. While in champ select I got a notification, and at first glance, I thought it was one of those "due to your reports someone has been punished", but it wasn't. It was a ban notification for my account. Not even 30 seconds had passed from the last game I was in with the afk Morgana and I was banned on my account. It's late at night and there's no possible way a Riot employee could accurately determine and punish a case based off of one game in 30 seconds. When I logged into my client to review the ban report. The game in question was just the one. The one game with afk Morgana. I immediately opened a support ticket, and am still actually in communications with a support employee to work this out.

I messed up and let my emotions get the better of me, for that I understand. But here's what I don't understand. The way Riot handles Toxicity in this game is ludicrous. If you go through the forums, or reddit, or chat rooms even. There are multiple stories of people getting banned and chat restricted for the tiniest of tiny things.

When you removed the Tribunal Riot, you removed the human aspect of punishments. You let a bot determine punishments based on number of reports and key phrases. This isn't a logical way of thinking. Every human has interactions unique to them, and every human has a real life outside of League of Legends. When you let a bot determine things like this you end up making people more angry/sad and you discredit their emotions by not hearing them out in a real tribunal. In the court of law, there is not a machine that looks at the "evidence" and makes a decision. It is a jury of your peers, they see the emotion in your facial expressions, in your words, in your eyes, as well as the evidence. This is what you need for League. It's a huge game and I understand where you think a bot would add a more efficient way of handling the problems, but the brutal and honest truth is that it causes more problems than it solves.

Here's why: As a player in your community we accept a terms and conditions, we also accept the Summoner's Code. When a player breaks these rules, they do deserve to be punished, but a permanent ban, is not the solution. A ban of an account should be reserved for players hacking the game or it's databases, for players trying to modify the game and client to give an unfair advantage to themselves or a disadvantage to the enemies, for players trying to DDOS the enemy team. These players are the one's who need the bans. Not the players who have a bad day and cuss out one person in one game. My biggest gripe is that you have the ability to remove someone's chat abilities. This should always be the option for someone who is verbally abusive or offensive. You also have a chat filter that people can turn on if they'd like. You also have a bot programmed to distinguish verbally abusive or offensive language. I know in other games if you even try to type a cuss word, it won't let you send the message. But here's the kicker, you don't even have to do that, because you already give every player the option to MUTE and BLOCK a player who is being toxic. In any competitive game people should be prepared to run into people they don't get along with. Don't get me wrong, I am in no way endorsing toxic behavior, but I don't believe that banning verbally abusive/offensive players is the way to go. The reasoning behind this is that League has, and always will be a toxic game. The game creates passion and intense moments between 10 human players. 10 unique humans who all have different personalities, different religions, different sexualities, different races, different social classes, different skill levels, there are bound to be games where people disagree with each other or even get a little hostile towards each other. You know what stops me from blowing my steam on my smurf account? The fact that I won't be able to receive hextech rewards. Positive reinforcement is much stronger than negative reinforcement. In terms of video games, and in terms of raising your children. When you're threatened with a ban, it doesn't hold weight because let's face it, when people get banned, they make a smurf and since they lost everything they don't care about the game and will troll or be even more toxic. BUT, when you have a good thing like hextech crafting, the possibility of free skins and champions, and you're at risk of losing that for being toxic, you think twice. I've been an online gamer for even longer than I've played League. You're the only game I've ever played that throws out bans and punishments so quickly over the tiniest of things. You can get a chat restriction in this game for messing with your real life friend in game and someone else reads it as verbal abuse. This isn't an efficient way of ridding the toxicity from the community. You took a huge step backwards by removing the old Tribunal, but now you've taken a great step forward with hextech crafting. I urge you to look into a better way of punishing players and not just letting a bot do it. People who afk and intentionally feed and troll their teammates, need to be punished more than someone who calls someone a name over the internet.

TL;DR - Bring back old Tribunal, get rid of the current punishment system, focus on positive reinforcement and not negative. It'll greatly improve the game's community.