Honest question about toxicity

Anthony0603·Nov 16, 2017·1 votes·383 views

So I was thinking, I recently got a chat ban. And the description stated that my communication was below the standards of league. Now, we've all seen the games with the ESRB ratings that state, online experience may differ. And we all know that ALL of those games have a "mute" feature to potentially avoid those situations. So with that said, if someone finds what I'm saying offensive, can they not just mute me? If i find what they are saying offensive, I will absolutely mute them. But what if they are feeding, I can't "mute" their feed. No, I have to sit and waste 15-30 minutes of my life, while being cordial about the whole thing, because for some reason the "real issue" would be me saying something offensive that can with a 1 second click of a button, be muted.

Point I'm trying to make is that is it really the keyboard warriors that are the problem? Not saying I am one, but keeping in mind that text can be muted in half a second, but feeding takes 15-30 minutes to "mute" (aka end game). Are the feeders and trolls not the real problem here? Shouldn't they be the ones we are shunning from our community?

I mean from skimming the boards, the best advice people seem to have is, just mute the trolls and play. So we are supposed to become some kind of glorified masochist to make it through the league ladders? I am happy to mute people who are offensive (that's what mute is there for right?), I won't even report them. I report people who say "F*** you, I'm done" and proceed to run it down mid. Those are the players ruining my league experience. Not the players having a normal human reaction to a team based competitive environment where you are mashed up with a bunch of strangers and pretty heavily reliant on them to work with you to achieve victory. I understand the flame, I don't understand the running it down mid. The running it down mid are the people hurting teamplay, not the people saying a few offensive words that can actually cease to exist with the simple act of using the provided mute button.

Idk call it a rant, or whatever idc. But if you want to keep the system the way it is. Remove the mute feature. Final analogy, imagine you had just spent days and days writing and researching to write a 100+page dissertation for your Doctorate program, and someone came and just deleted all the files. Now imagine another scenario where someone comes up and tells you how shit your dissertation is, but doesn't destroy the files. I mean yea the second one would bother me, but at least they didn't waste my time...

5 Comments

AterpaterNov 16, 20171 votes

I think, one of the problems about this is, that you can easily filter verbal toxicity by automated processes. You just make a huge database with all the offensive phrases and words on many languages and when a guy is reported, jut check how many of these are in the chatlog and if it's enough, automatically apply some punishment. On the other hand, you can't do this with nonverbal toxic behaviour, especially that LoL players just report each other out of anger after every lost match without a real reason (imho it's silly...), like they were thinking it's a proper way to show somebody wasn't good enough to win the match for them or picked some champ what they just don't fancy. So, if it isn't some obvious 0/30/0 feeding or going afk (what is detected) you can't simply rely on the report but you have to go and watch the match to decide was it really toxic behaviour on purpose or somebody just simply bad at the game or had a bad day or made some silly decisions (what you shouldn't ban, obviously). And if you think about how many LoL matches are played in every hour, from the US to Estonia and from Sydney to the PC bangs of Korea, you can see that spectating every single report isn't an option.

What's your idea, how should they filter these kind of toxicity without giving players a tool to just ban each other without real reasons?

Anthony0603Nov 17, 20172 votes

{quoted}

I think, one of the problems about this is, that you can easily filter verbal toxicity by automated processes. You just make a huge database with all the offensive phrases and words on many languages and when a guy is reported, jut check how many of these are in the chatlog and if it's enough, automatically apply some punishment. On the other hand, you can't do this with nonverbal toxic behaviour, especially that LoL players just report each other out of anger after every lost match without a real reason (imho it's silly...), like they were thinking it's a proper way to show somebody wasn't good enough to win the match for them or picked some champ what they just don't fancy. So, if it isn't some obvious 0/30/0 feeding or going afk (what is detected) you can't simply rely on the report but you have to go and watch the match to decide was it really toxic behaviour on purpose or somebody just simply bad at the game or had a bad day or made some silly decisions (what you shouldn't ban, obviously). And if you think about how many LoL matches are played in every hour, from the US to Estonia and from Sydney to the PC bangs of Korea, you can see that spectating every single report isn't an option.

What's your idea, how should they filter these kind of toxicity without giving players a tool to just ban each other without real reasons?

You bring up some really great points. We currently have a system where the game can give you a rating based on how you played. It takes things like skill shot hit percentage, farm, kda, etc. and mashes them up to give you a rating. If you score a D (I actually don't even know if D exists, never scored below C-), it should be a warning. With multiple warnings you could be demoted a full rank or something like that. Rather than "chat banning" just make their rank suffer. If they are consistently scoring less than C there is something wrong (trust me, the games I have got a C or C- I was either wasted drunk, or so ridiculously tilted that I probably shouldn't have been within 100 feet of a competitive game). Either they don't belong in the elo they are at, or they are trolling/feeding. Tanking their rating would help with either one. Also, having 6 tears in your inventory, or having not a single item in your inventory, should be an auto ban/lp drop. That's just one idea, I'm sure there are other possible solutions as well.

Loki NaelosNov 16, 20171 votes

sadly muting your team is considered refusing to communicate and can get you reported as well... i agree 100% that riot needs to change the way they handle toxic behavior and the best way to do this IMO is to stop having a computer decide punishments and have a real person read chatlogs and issue punishments to the ones in the game that deserve it.. no point in punishing someone for being toxic in a game when their whole team is flaming them from the get go and than proceed to report them for something they said while not recieving any punishment for the things they said

ZephyrDrakeNov 17, 20171 votes

[{quoted}](name=Loki Naelos,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=vgx9aNE5,comment-id=0001,timestamp=2017-11-16T22:35:09.317+0000)

sadly muting your team is considered refusing to communicate and can get you reported as well... i agree 100% that riot needs to change the way they handle toxic behavior and the best way to do this IMO is to stop having a computer decide punishments and have a real person read chatlogs and issue punishments to the ones in the game that deserve it.. no point in punishing someone for being toxic in a game when their whole team is flaming them from the get go and than proceed to report them for something they said while not recieving any punishment for the things they said

yeah, let's have a few dozen or hundred people deal with thousands upon thousands of reports that come DAILY and have them read each chatlog and then look at every single piece of data regarding said player and do everything that a computer does and then hope to god that the game doesn't explode in flames due to how much things would just spiral out of control with how slow punishing anyone would get due to the huge amounts of backlog that will accumulate. There is a point where you just cannot handle things manually and with how many games are played every single day and the amount of reports that should come every single day due to that, you just cannot do it.

Anthony0603Nov 17, 20171 votes

[{quoted}](name=Loki Naelos,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=vgx9aNE5,comment-id=0001,timestamp=2017-11-16T22:35:09.317+0000)

sadly muting your team is considered refusing to communicate and can get you reported as well... i agree 100% that riot needs to change the way they handle toxic behavior and the best way to do this IMO is to stop having a computer decide punishments and have a real person read chatlogs and issue punishments to the ones in the game that deserve it.. no point in punishing someone for being toxic in a game when their whole team is flaming them from the get go and than proceed to report them for something they said while not recieving any punishment for the things they said

I'm pretty sure trolls/feeders have already expressed their lack of desire to communicate. And honestly this is a game, I don't log on league to teach angry spoiled 12 year old kids how to communicate properly. I do find it hard to believe that riot would give us a mute option then issue bans over using said mute button. I can maybe understand if someone was insta-muting their entire team at the beginning of every match, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm saying that if someone says something offensive or undesirable, you hit the mute button and the problem is gone. If someone is feeding excessively, you hit your head against the wall for 15-30 minutes waiting for the punishment to be over. I'm saying one has a simple quick solution, while the other doesn't. And yea as someone else said, I think having a human read each and every report is a little unrealistic, though as an alternative I presented an idea in my above comment about allowing the computer to use your letter rankings after each match to possible auto-warning/auto-drop your rating.