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We don't need the tribunal anymore

telkie·11/19/2014, 6:35:55 PM·3 votes·1,517 views

I'm not going to argue about the the merits, flaws, ups, downs, or sidewayness of the tribunal. I'm instead going to argue that it is very likely that it is no longer necessary.

Reason: big data.

Simply, after the tribunal has made a few million judgements - one can have a computer act (very nearly exactly) like the tribunal using all of the data they generated. Seeing as people are restricted and banned based on what they say in games, I am guessing this is what Riot is doing. If you want to learn about learn one of the methods to do this, have a youtube link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6iqI2GIllI - for your perusing/nerding pleasure. With this and similar methods you can teach a computer to recognize many things - from cat videos (very hard) to new exploits or new abuses (medium difficulty, and much, much easier than cat videos - http://xkcd.com/1425/ ), and common abuses are super easy to catch. With this, Riot can eliminate the need for the Tribunal in (reasonable geustimate based on experience, likely higher, but admittedly entirely made up) >95% of cases.

Edit: I'm also going to add that false reports are easy to detect as well. So if people are like "I'm not the #$%^& toxic bro, you are the %^&* ...[All] Report telkie for toxic/feeding/etc GG". The systems could (likely does) easily handle this as well. It could also easily handle people who are not reported for being toxic/feeding/etc as well.

Edit 2: I am in no way associated with Riot (other than playing their game) and know nothing about their actual detection methods. What I do know is a thing or two about how those methods work.

10 Comments

Sir ArmaMalum11/19/2014, 6:42:58 PM4 votes

I like the thought behind this, good subject.

However, I'll argue we do need the Tribunal, but not for the results towards the punished. For the perspective brings to a reviewer. Simply put, when I first started the Tribunal, I thought I had seen it all. Boy was I wrong. What I saw on some Tribunal cases was downright repulsive, and I was reassured by the rest of community also feeling it was bannable.

Honestly I agree that I believe your explanantion is where Riot is heading. As the tribunal will simply not be able to keep up with the traffic. But for the extremes, for the perma-ban level cases, the tribunal can be a great teaching tool for both the punished and the reviewers.

OhBoyItsaMegaman11/19/2014, 7:36:26 PM3 votes

Yes and no.

Community participation is a real advantage to the Tribunal approach. If someone receives a ban and it is clear that their peers were the ones tying the noose, that should theoretically have a greater impact than a ban that came from (or seemed to come from) a single Riot employee. If you disagree with the ban, it is easier to say "the person who banned me made a mistake" than "ALL these people who voted on my case made a mistake." Which incidently is how we got the Tribunal Punish Vote Spammers rumor rolling around — it's a desperate attempt to discredit a huge group of people.

Go to the opposite extreme and you see the problem. If you completely remove the element of human judgment, then you give the offending player the world's easiest excuse: Riot's dumb robot messed up and banned me by mistake. Even if upon review the program clearly makes fewer mistakes than Riot or the Tribunal, it doesn't matter. The fact that it comes from a computer absolves the player from taking the punishment seriously.

And besides, judging human intent is not necessarily on par with cat videos. There are numerous ways that a statement could be toxic or fine depending on the context, beyond the capabilities of a learning algorithm.

The solution I'd like to see is to run that algorithm alongside the Tribunal, so Riot can automatically resolve the cases where the Tribunal and the Bantron 3000 agree, and then take a closer look at any cases where they disagree. (And in all likelihood, Riot was already doing something like this from the start. Don't tell anyone!)

Fury and Emperor11/19/2014, 6:51:02 PM2 votes

In Dota 2, banishment to low priority queue is automated after receiving 2 reports in a certain amount of time. However, you only get a few reports and therefore save them for actual trolls.

The only way to get punished is if people in two separate matches in a short period of time feel that you are ruining the game worse than anyone else they have met or will meet in a while. This is a much better system because it greatly reduces the number of incoming reports.

It may occasionally catch a very bad player, but if you are playing so bad that people consider you the worst thing that happened to them in an entire week, maybe you deserve some time to practice.

Saelani11/19/2014, 9:39:13 PM1 votes

By this logic we don't need a judical system anymore or evolving laws. Because you know, our ideas as human beings and our attitudes towards things never change. Also, different people in different parts of the world all think the same right? A computer can just homogenize our ideas and use the data from the thousands of people who hit tribunal just to spam the punish button because "They made it there, so they must be guilty."

Horrible idea.

Rainbowgasm11/19/2014, 10:54:14 PM1 votes

I didn't know we still had a tribunal.