Make a better punishment system for toxic player's. Some ideas to think about.

I've been playing league since season 1 and it's been my most played game out of 100. The game is always changing in very unique ways consistently. League has been one of the top game's to be streamed on twitch, played world wide since like season 1 and has changed Esports into a very mainstream event. Thus bringing very competitive player's into the community trying to get to that number one spot on the ladder. Not saying that's a bad thing, but player's take thing's a bit too far in solo q. For example, 5 minutes into the match the adc gets caught out by the enemy support, first blood happens, well played enemy support. Our support will get tilted off of one good play by the enemy then proceeds to flame in chat and spam ping our adc. Our adc starts to flame back because he or she feels the need to get the last word in. Why? I'm not to sure. The support player doesn't want to let go of one kill that can be easily turned around with the enemy messing up or another play either happening top, jg or mid and working around those lanes. Instead, they both proceed to flame each other, not focus on the game and start falling even more behind because they are wasting time and energy on typing to each other. The rest of the team is trying to bring the game back because anything can happen in league. But our bot lane is so toxic at this point it starts to effect other player's. The game is now a battle of controlling your team's mental state, while trying to make plays against the enemy team. Very hard to do. League is 100% team based and if your team refuses to work together, you can't win. It's like the domino effect, one person loses their cool and the rest follow. You might be thinking to yourself, "Just /mute all" which is a great idea, but I'm giving an example of some one that is a keyboard warrior and feels the NEED to type back. I'm performing well keeping my cool and there is absolutely nothing I can do to win. "Gg ff 15 open go next" is the mindset of these type of players when one mistake happens. We open 10 minutes in, then killing my mood to play league for the rest of the day and sometimes, days. I won't lie, I used to be toxic myself, I'd be passive aggressive in chat and sometimes I'd just straight up call my teammate(s) bad, say they should uninstall and complain how I never get good teammates, not knowing I played a huge part of the loss I received. We are all guilty of doing this at some point playing league. However, that was when I was much younger. I started playing this game when I was 9 years old and what kid doesn't get angry when they try hard at something and don't succeed, especially a kid that loves video games. I didn't start actually flaming till I started to really get into the game and that was around seasons 3-5. During those times, flame and toxicity was still a thing, but not as bad. I remember thinking to my young myself, "It has to get better going up the ranks right? People would take the game more seriously and play it out", which gave me motivation to continue playing. Boy was I wrong, it got worse and worse over the course of years. I'm now 18 years old and comparing these type of players to the very young me, I can't really see any difference when comparing. My point here is, majority of league players have an older age player base and the fact that they can't just grow up and work around the mistakes that happened in game, shows me they aren't mature enough to just ignore what other people think and say. They act like children begging for a new toy and once they get told "no", they complain and complain until they get what they want.

     Other players may have the same motive as I did when playing this game, "it'll get better", but when they see it only gets worse and worse as you go up, that player may lose their motivation to continue playing, then just stop playing as a whole. I got my friend's into league and at one point they really enjoyed playing, they said they loved how in depth the game mechanics were and how much outplay potential there was to come back from a loss. 

"It's so satisfying to completely outplay some one in league". As they started getting more serious about league, they realized something they couldn't outplay, was their own team. No matter how hard they tried to play, certain players were never satisfied with their game play. They were new to league, loved the game but the community pushed them away cause my friends didn't want to deal with people that can't be dealt with. As a result, they no longer play. Now, as I was trying to climb even more, I realized something about this game. You will never not get a toxic player/thrower on your team, that became the challenge for me, was being the bigger person and just having to say "My bad I messed up" after flaming me, knowing my teammate was the one with the miss play. But that even started to tilt me a bit, was the fact that I knew I was right but I just had to say I was wrong so my teammate wouldn't have a mental breakdown during the game. Nowadays, the game league itself isn't even that difficult, the most challenging part is dealing with people that just can't control themselves, and it's been really bothering me because I love this game. I would hate to see this game's own community ruin it for others that are interested in playing. League has such a bad rep now because of it's own community. If the people playing this game can't be mature enough to control themselves from flaming and throwing, this is when riot needs to step in. I don't know about y'all but I hate having to wait for a 4 minute q timer, about a 4-8 minute champion select session with a possible chance of a dodge, then having to wait again, doing it all over just to get into another game that ends in 10 minutes due to other players giving up that early on. It's extremely frustrating, the fact that most of these accounts don't get banned because they know how much they can flame without being detected by the bot that look at the reports is also very frustrating. At least I assume it's a bot doing it because I have had so many people throw games, run it down mid, doing a slight throw so they don't get detected, etc. I'll submit a report and most of the time they don't receive a punishment. Even if they do get banned, most of those type of players probably have another account to fall back on, or either do the same thing on the other alt account, ruining even more games on another account, under a different name, in another rank. I have zero problems with the balance team, development team, and the riot employees. What I do have a big problem with is the punishment team. Is that even a thing? Do y'all ever sit down and discuss how problematic the toxicity in games have become? I think the last thing y'all did to "improve" the punishment system was adding the honor system. "Players that receive more honors in games from players that you aren't q'd up with, will receive more and better rewards! So, people with a lower honor level will be hovered over more when it comes to bans. Also, you gain more honor levels by honoring other players." Y'all do realize people just honor whatever so they can get a higher honor level right? Do y'all really think people in this game care THAT much about rewards? Forreal?!? Have any of you seen the chaos that breaks out when some one is just completely out of control? What about actually being able to play the game how it's supposed to be played. With a team that works together and actually tries to win even though there were some minor setbacks. I could care less about rewards. I'm not trying to start any beef, you know, start anything that could ruin my career with this game. But you gotta understand this from some one that has been playing this game for years and has watched every single lcs game, every major tournament, worlds, msi and just overall loves the game and fully supports it. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels this way. I want to see league still prosper when I'm in my 30's, it's an excellent game that's very well thought out, balanced in every way possible and is very rewarding when you're good at it.

      As I was climbing to the higher ranks in league, I realized I couldn't help myself looking at chat. Every time I heard the little sound it makes when something is typed out in chat, I just had to look. But that was effecting my performance in league drastically as I started to pay more attention to chat, rather than the actual game. When you put more of your energy into looking at chat, paying more attention to what your team says about you rather than improving by yourself and correcting your mistakes, you start to become like those types of toxic players in a different game when one of your teammates in your game is having a bad game. There are a lot of people that care about this game, hence why they get so angry at it. They try their hardest to win but they try SO hard that when the slightest inconvenience happens, they flip out and can't control themselves from flaming. I actually asked a guy in my game that was just so toxic if it made himself feel better to get his anger out on his teammates by bringing them down with him, and he replied "yes actually it does." Which is just unbelievable, isn't it?  So I started to do "/mute all" every time I got into a game. As soon as I load in that's the first thing I do, I think it's kinda silly I have to. If I don't, well you already know what happens, I end up getting distracted and it takes me out of my zone. But, I noticed once I started only paying attention to pings, knowing chat was muted, I started to perform a lot better. I had gotten so used to not typing, not seeing what anyone else has to say about my game play, that when I did mess up in a play, I wouldn't look straight at chat right after I had died just waiting for some guy to flame me. Instead I would immediately start thinking about how I would turn my miss play into a good play. Which you should be doing 100% of the time, but like I said, It's a little hard to focus when some player is typing down your throat, and after every single miss play from that point on, is just more flame. Which tilts you more, then you play worse. It's distracting.




     Now, let's get into the main point of this discussion. The punishment system. Players that I had explained about above. This is how I think they should be punished from now on. A more harsh punishment to reduce it from happening. Also ways to reduce toxicity as a whole.

1. Less LP gain, More LP drop.

• I had thought about this one for a while now and it could be tricky to actually implement, but if you care about your game, you should probably listen to a player that has put lots of money into this game, and has pretty much played it almost every single day for the past 8 years. Players that are reported for any kind of serious toxicity like, throwing on purpose, constantly flaming in chat and won't leave whoever is being flamed alone. Should receive as what I like to call it, "Hell". For an example, now that plenty of reports have been sent about this specific player, for the reasons listed above. For the next 20 games of ranked play, will gain only 10 LP (maximum) and will lose 30 LP (maximum) for punishment. You're probably thinking "what's gonna stop him from making another account and doing the same thing then?" To prevent something like this happening, all accounts that are registered to the same email of that account, will also receive the same penalty even tho it was recorded on that account. Now you're probably thinking "He can do the same thing just on a different email" Which is true, but to prevent something like this from happening you gotta take a couple extra steps. Every email that's registered for a new account must be connected with a phone number, kinda like what steam did with csgo to prevent hackers from having multiple accounts. An SMS code will be sent to that number to confirm the email address. So even if this type of player wanted to use multiple different emails, they would all be connected to that number, which would cancel out chances of that player getting away with it on a different account.

2. Taking chat out of the game.

• You might be thinking, "What if I want to let my team know when the enemy has his or hers flash back up?" I'll explain. You know how in the settings you can either turn on or off chat time stamps? Well there you go. Time stamps would no longer be an option to turn on and off. They are permanent, so if you ping someones flash or any other summoner spell, they would look at the time stamp and do the simple math of 5+5=10. Meaning the enemies flash is going to be back up at 10 minutes in if you are 5 minutes into the match. This could also help players be more independent when trying to keep track of summoner spells. Of course the chat box will still be there, but instead of a chat box it would be more like a notification box. You might be thinking, "What about people that spam ping me as an act of flame? That still gets me tilted." Simple, you can no longer ping an ally champion. If they spam ping you with missing pings, or whatever ping it might be, well then just mute em.

3. Instead of banning (not perma ban) the players account, ban ranked play on that account.

• So most people playing league of legends are most likely playing ranked most of the time. There's more reward, more interactive game play and overall better practice. Person gets reported so many times and ends up with a ban, no big deal for that player, they'll just go on another account and do it there. Banning ranked play from a certain account will limit how many times this player can do this over and over again. Instead of giving the account just a normal 14 day ban from even using the account, give that player a 30-50 ranked play ban instead. Trust me, It'll be more painful. If this player is going to continue trolling even in normal matches or if he or she is so toxic it doesn't deserve just the ranked play ban, perma ban is still very amazing.

4. Limiting smurf accounts/alt accounts.

• I recently read this thread of a player that was playing in silver and had a "diamond smurf" on his team and I've seen this happen in every rank. He explained how the start of the match was amazing with a successful invade getting the "smurf" player that was on adc a kill or two. An amazing lead for a "diamond smurf" to completely run that game. But then the "smurf" started to do really dumb things like go into fights alone, 1v3's 1v4's and even 1v5's trying to be the hotshot. The "smurf" started to I guess flame his team (no surprise there) and started to just throw. The person that wrote this thread said he or she was tired of getting people that don't care about the account they are currently playing on so they decide to throw because "It's fun" and quite frankly, I am too. The reason why I quotation marked the word "smurf" is because you don't actually know if they're smurfing, or just tilted and hopped on another account to get their anger out on that account by throwing? I'm not very sure of that myself because people that do stuff like that, never made a lot of sense to me, and I still don't know why players do stuff like that, it's just a waste of time. My point here is players make accounts to purposely throw, but don't always play on that account because they want to avoid the ban. For an example, I'm not sure if this is true but every csgo player said it was. Apparently you were able to hack one game every 24 hours without getting banned, because if you got 13 or more reports within the span of a day, you would get overwatched and most likely banned. Not saying that's how league's report system is, just trying to help you understand. So, how to make it so a player is limited only 1-2 accounts. Well going back to number 1. at the top. A phone number is needed when signing up an account with that email address, once you get the SMS verification code, you're all set. But if one account gets punished due to toxicity, both accounts will receive the same punishment that was issued.

    These are my ideas to try and help reduce toxicity/throwers as a whole. The ideas I gave above don't have to be exactly identical to what I said, It's just some ideas for the league community and even riot to brainstorm on. I love this game and I wanna help in anyway I can. I want people to be able to enjoy this game like how I do because it is so fun when people aren't being assholes. I didn't write this to tell riot how to do their job. But from what I remember back in the day, riot would always want to hear what the community has to say about certain topics/ideas. Hope this can help improve league of legends as a whole. 
  

Thanks -BillBobBilly