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Is Rito partially to blame for League's toxic community?

gragaaaaaaas·10/7/2018, 8:04:55 PM·7 votes·3,640 views

Circa seasons 3 or 4 (ish) they were doing experiments, specific controlled experiments on us, the players, to see if they could modify negative behavior. PhD and all. On paper they claimed minor statistical improvements but nothing groundbreaking. The results of those experiments led in a very meandering way to the punishment system we have today.

Discounting the a5--kissers that ride high horses around the forums, mocking players that post questions about player behavior and punishments- does anyone think the following scenario is reasonable for punishing Player 3:

""""""""""""""""""""""""" Player 1: you suck, uninstall re--rd Player 2: sorry enemy team that you have to play with player 3, they are trash Player 3: I know you guys are trying to troll, but I have the best score on my team so you can give up """"""""""""""""""""""""""

According to Rito, Player 3 is wrong because referencing scores in chat can be construed as toxic behavior. Almost zero gray area within League. If the trolls on the other team reported, the system could flag it as toxic behavior. I say probably because I'm by no means an expert on it.

Now overlay that abusive chat situation onto thousands of hours of gameplay- trolls like players 1 and 2 are quite common still. You either mute the /all chat and your own team, or learn to live with it. Most of us choose to live with it because a.) you can't mute real life and b.) we enjoy the occasional fun discussions (however rare they are). And trolls will never stop because .. hey it only takes 2 minutes to sign up again, worst case.

That said, when many good players endure verbal abuse constantly, and with zero option to even make an unemotional, rational response (like above) without risk of punishment, is it any surprise players finally blow their top?

You could argue that we are equipped to mute verbally abusive players. But it doesn't erase the original abusive moment, the residual anger, anxiety, etc. The continued taunting in game spamming laugh, dance, emotes, etc. Or the lingering effect it has on your own teammates and collective morale, especially if on your own team. And multiplied over hundreds of games, it will wear on you. It isn't human nature to be a punching bag for others amusement or satisfaction, and most games (in my experience) will forgive a player responding to another abusive player with something relatively fair (obviously nothing like "go kill yourself.")

I still play the game, and I think like most players its a love/hate arrangement with League anymore. I've always run into trolls in all games. Its human nature I'd speculate, that given anonymity, an adolescent or young adult will let slip their poor behavior, insults, childish actions..

But punishing the abused players to such an extent feels like it has cultivated a quietly seething population of usually positive, helpful players.. all waiting for a couple bad games, or just one more jerk of a player before they snap and cross the arbitrary line that Rito drew in the sand. Rito has conditioned them to be victims and nothing more.

This probably won't get much attention, and half of the 3 comments I expect will be negative. But I'm willing to engage in both supportive and counter arguments on the subject.

14 Comments

Add9210/7/2018, 8:34:27 PM4 votes

I think the biggest issue like you said isn't toxicity , you can mute that .

The biggest issue is the lack of punishment for : Griefing / trolling / intentionally feeding .

And for tryharding players , seeing these guys ruin our games without punishment BUILDS an insane amount of frustration and anger , and that causes ( me at least ) to be toxic towards these trolls , which will have ME punished .

I'm not talking about a guy having a bad game going 0-10 , it happens to everybody , if he keeps trying his best it's okay. I'm talking about the guy giving first blood because outplayed , and then just mental booms and throw the entire game , run it down etc .

THIS should be hard , I mean hard punished .

Because if Riot actively punished these behavior that most of the time are very obvious , the toxicity would go down by itself , because we'd know that okay this guy is ruining my game , but he's getting the Riot hammer so no point for me to even say anything

We know there's no hammer , so we get riled up and we start flaming .

it's a vicious circle starting with the trolls , and these guys are legion because never punished

Paroe10/8/2018, 3:56:52 AM2 votes

@thread

LYTE is to blame for the current system of player behaviour in league of legends. That man, who supposedly no longer works for riot, championed and spear headed the automagic system we have today that protects toxic players and punishes non-toxic ones who dare to speak up.

Riot needs to bring the tribunal back. That system might not have been foolproof, but it was a lot better and a thousand times more fair than the secret rules banhammer we have now. Transperency > hidden rules 100%.

Fraggleroc10/7/2018, 8:24:43 PM2 votes

Most definitely.

Pandeonor10/7/2018, 10:42:38 PM1 votes

The obvious answer is: no. Because there is imho no big non-toxic gamer-community around. WoW, Dota, whatever game is the same. So you can´t blame one company not solving this "internet-phenomen" which sticks not to one game but to all such games and the internet as a whole.

So Riot has to draw a line and has to control it. Manually controlling does not work because it is way too much and therefore has to be done automatically. This is imho fact so far and more or less the problem. It is actually not possible for computer (AI) to understand/meant what is written in a bad way or not. So the AI has to ask the (9 other) humans if the written words were bad. Like a parent whitch see 2 kids "discussing" and asking both who is the bad one the result will be that...... yeah, adult does not really know and both were showing bad behavior in the end. What does "adult" have to do? Nothing because it´s just normal that kids show bad behaviour to each other?

What are we talking about? That restrictions happen or that they are too heavy, too fast.... ?

If "I know you guys are going to troll" is really unemotional, idk. The problem is what I wrote before. AI don´t directly know it too but has to adopt what the other players think about. If someone has a better way wich would work really better - just let all know.

Riot has 2500 emlpoyees and the game is 10 years old. It is not that easy to present a proper solution as it is to describe a problem wich sometimes is difficult enough.

Support Position10/8/2018, 3:12:25 AM1 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N75g_c3Xqw

Oh yea, they dont allow people to get out of bad games (Games practically cyber bullying and the owners laugh and say its fine.). Instead if you afk. Have a ban, inters, griefers (runes, items etc that 100% dont worth period especially in this awful season) dont get banned.

the games awful cause you cant escape trash games or que with people that are actually serious and want to win.

HeeroTX10/8/2018, 3:13:04 PM1 votes

"partially"? no "mostly"? yes

Here are two SIMPLE fixes Riot could implement to reduce trolling:

  1. Real, HUMAN review/intervention in trolling behavior. Allow reports to be handled IMMEDIATELY by a human being and you will see a reduction (not elimination) of the problem. A large part of the issue right now is because many trolls know "nothing will happen" Hell, if you can get direct intervention when someone is trolling in pre-game lobby, I'd bet money you'll see a drop in trolling
  2. I don't care if it's MMR or some NEW rank item (call it "personal rank" for all I care) give players a way to track their OWN, personal, specific performance INDEPENDENT OF WIN/LOSS. Yes, League is a team game. But it is frustrating as HELL when you're playing with a bad team (pick definition of "bad": players not good, players trolling, players afk/dc'd, players being toxic, etc) ANY of those things put YOU on tilt and start making YOU toxic because you know you're getting "screwed" (MMR dropping with NO gains for good performance) by that bad team. This game needs SOME kind of reward for "good play" by the individual because otherwise once you feel the game is "unwinnable" you LITERALLY have zero incentive to try anymore. This gives fuel to trolls to amuse themselves screwing you over, and it creates toxicity in innumerable ways by cultivating negative attitudes. As the game exists right now, it is MORE satisfying in the short term to stop playing and yell at my "teammates" for being morons if we're facing a huge deficit, than it is to put my head down and try to climb out of the massive hole that's been dug.
gragaaaaaaas10/9/2018, 10:56:46 PM1 votes

A lot of good comments here. Look I obviously wrote this inclined towards distaste towards the current system, but there is some goodness in it too, just not much. I wish we brought back the manual reviews, at least they felt more fair. The business rules for the first stage of automated punishments is kinda awful. My example above is more than enough evidence of that. .

At least the honor system is nice, and rewards for playing well, though I'd say they didn't go far enough. They are fond of referencing metrics, but maybe make a real push on win rates per player, or win rates in relation to a person's honor.. etc. Show the real correlation.

Also instead of punishing normally good players that respond to trolls, lets find a more productive way to address that. Victim blaming in 2018 seems really, really, really unfair. Walking away isn't exactly a reasonable proposition, especially since we are punished for afks, but are also punished personally if we mute the troll and lose harder because we can't communicate. Its basically a lose/lose proposition for players.

Tr4shB4NSYST3M10/9/2018, 11:06:33 PM1 votes

WIsh i was level 30 so i could upvote because I agree with this 100%. My main account, level 144, with over 100 champs got permabanned for flaming back a hard feeding support viktor who had told me I was "playing and building like a pussy" when i had by far the best score on our team and was trying hard to carry.
(had a 1st offense a LONG time ago, which had in fact been deserved because i was an asshole, but i had stopped typing as much)

But yeah, theres a reason i named this account such.

Anatera10/7/2018, 9:13:22 PM1 votes

Partially, yes. League has been around for how long now? Riot still hasn't figured out a proper punishment system to deter that kind of behavior. Lazy game design always begets this kind of asshole player.

GripaAviara10/7/2018, 9:55:10 PM1 votes

Ofc, it was always half their fault for build up frustration:

  • fast kills: ofc you get frustrated to farm 15 min to be deleted in 1 sec
  • punishing you for having an afk
  • one of the worst matchmaking in recent MP games
  • not punishing troll and griefers
  • promoting toxic/frustrating abilities (ex: Zoe sleep)