Boards›[ARCHIVED] Miscellaneous

The Future of Player Behavior and the Tribunal

Jefftiffy·11/17/2014, 5:05:35 AM·1 votes·613 views

Please read this to the end, if you don't this may sound like a rant.

My honest opinion Riot. Your banning methods for toxicity are kind of terrible.

If I have a complaint and I say something like "How the fuck did they live through that?". That isn't toxicity and I was banned for stuff like that this season. It may be negative, but in no way is it toxic. Toxic is something that would incite others to act the same. And getting angry and saying something in the chat may be questionable. I don't care how much I may talk and yell in the chat. If it isn't meant to be offensive to anyone, how do I get banned for it. Yet when I try to be super positive it seems like my team always it like "Fuck you, we've lost/you've fed". How is it that I get banned for stupid things yet people like this stay around for multiple seasons (yes some of these people have S2/3 icons).

Point of the matter is I only feel like I have only truly ever been toxic maybe 1 or 2 times but that is nowhere near ban worthy. That is restriction worthy. Upscaling penalties without having a reasonable base line doesn't solve the problem. I will say I did benefit greatly from the ban in my attitude in most games, but if you don't ban consistently and fairly, your system is going to fail. It's the reason I had a person with an average KDA with Zilean of 0/30/0 over 200 games and was around since S2 (looked him up during the pre-game screen when he said he was going to use a macro to feed). Because your system doesn't work.

It only works against people who AFK. There are the massive auto ban waves which have no evidence to support them. You have no tribunal to enforce them. Auto banning for toxicity doesn't work. Quantity doesn't equal quality. Every ban/restriction needs to go to the tribunal. No exceptions. Make the tribunal more rewarding to increase the player count. As it is right now, the tribunal is mostly done by people looking to read other people being stupid and get amused by it. I mean who wants to go and judge cases to get no reward whatsoever.

Give us some in-game rewards for the tribunal. Focus on how accurately people determine cases and make an appeal system that can be used. This would help drop the amount of need for an automated system allowing there to be a record of the cases that were judged. Give the banned player access to those cases. If they argue if you have solid evidence of what happened and then people can't say they were banned unjustly.

There really needs to be an appeal system. Ticketing Riot to get another automated/template message is more infuriating than useful. Allow us to submit appeals to the tribunal. The tribunal would be able to judge it again with new people. Put a limit on how often you can appeal and that all unsuccessful appeals are final.

Riot please listen. I know its really hard to revamp an old system, but the community really needs answers not just vagueness. Putting pre/post-chat logs will help, but it doesn't solve the underlying issue.

  • Make bans clearer
  • Give us the ability to appeal (limited)
  • Give rewards for using the tribunal correctly
  • Stray away from automation, it is the death of trust
  • Make the punishment suit the offense and only increase it if the offense is repeated.
  • Let the tribunal judge more than just simple toxicity cases
  • Have the tribunal judge each game individually and the average of all 5 is the outcome
  • Let the tribunal flag inciters in the case to hopefully pick out people also causing issues

And for the most important part: Make the rules and report options clearer and less broad even if that means making more options Allow for the report of multiple broken rules

8 Comments

Matthias911911/17/2014, 6:20:34 AM3 votes

Just in case you didn't know, right now Tribunal is offline for maintenance and upgrades. Riot's player behavior team is manually handling all reports and bans. So if you got punished any time within the last five months or so, Tribunal had nothing to do with it.

Make bans clearer

Not having reform cards sucks, but they will be back when Tribunal is functional again.

Give us the ability to appeal (limited)

You have always been able to appeal bans or other punishments by opening a ticket with Support, or you can try to get Riot's attention on the forums. Right now, since punishments are being handed out by Riot staff directly, the chances of anything being overturned are extremely low.

"Appealing" to the Tribunal itself again would very rarely return a different verdict. On close cases Riot has additional players vote on it until they're more confident statistically that the case has gotten an accurate vote.

Give rewards for using the tribunal correctly

They used to do this and found that people would just go in and hit "punish" for the rewards. Since a majority of cases are slam-dunk punishes, this would get you a pretty decent accuracy rating. Tribunal functioned a lot better when they stopped giving out rewards.

Stray away from automation, it is the death of trust

At the scale of League's playerbase there has to be some level of automation. Riot has said that there is a great deal of manual oversight right now, and have confirmed that all of the 2-week bans they've handed out for "extreme" toxicity were manually reviewed.

Even when Tribunal was up, an automated system analyzed the incoming reports and decided when to build a case and which games to include in it. It's not feasible to manually process millions of reports daily.

Make the punishment suit the offense and only increase it if the offense is repeated.

Riot used to do this. However, their statistics showed that players who exhibited "extreme" toxicity generally did not change their behavior until they were close to getting a permanent ban. So they started escalating those "extreme" cases up to a 2-week ban immediately.

It's unknown whether they will continue doing this when Tribunal is available again. One thing I think might improve on the old Tribunal system is having an "escalate this case to Riot" button that voters can hit, and if enough voters hit it then the case gets sent to a Support staffer for manual review and possible escalation.

Let the tribunal judge more than just simple toxicity cases

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. They have said they are working on a "positive Tribunal" to let you vote to reward frequently-honored players. Not sure if you mean this sort of thing or something else.

Have the tribunal judge each game individually and the average of all 5 is the outcome

I'm skeptical that this would improve the system. Some behavior is so awful that doing it even rarely is completely unacceptable IMO. If you went to this kind of system I think you'd need to do something like having voters rank the player's behavior from 1-10 or something rather than just "punish/pardon" to capture that sort of information. A case that rates 5/2/2/2/2 might not need to be punished, but one that rates 10/10/1/1/1 probably should be, even though only 2/5 of the games were "bad".

Of course, individual voters are free to use this critera for punishing cases if they want to. In informal polling of Tribunal users on the old forums, many players favored 'innocent until proven guilty' standards, usually either "you get punished if I see something really bad", or some variant on "three strikes and you're out".

Let the tribunal flag inciters in the case to hopefully pick out people also causing issues

This was suggested a lot when Tribunal was up. It is extremely likely that those players were reported as well. And if those players are actually causing problems in a lot of games they will get their own case that should be judged on its own merits.

Matthias911911/17/2014, 6:28:08 AM2 votes

I didn't see your last two points and was running out of space:

Make the rules and report options clearer and less broad...

The "rules" (other than reporting people for things like botting/scripting/DDOSing/etc.) basically boil down to "don't be a jerk". They are deliberately vague because Riot wants the community to define the behavioral standards, and they can change over time. It's not really helpful to try to draw lines for verbal abuse, like whether it's okay to call someone a "noob" but not a "scrub". If you do, trolls will just toe the line and say "you can't punish me, you said calling people noobs wasn't bad enough to punish!"

even if that means making more options

I would like to see an overhaul of the report categories. Hopefully that's happening right now as part of the Tribunal overhaul.

Allow for the report of multiple broken rules

TBH, the report reason in Tribunal cases was rarely all that useful unless it was something very specific like accusing the player of AFKing or reporting someone's name as offensive. I wouldn't mind seeing this, but it would rarely make a difference -- and you can always type in a more detailed report saying what was going on if you feel the need to.

Eleshakai11/17/2014, 4:52:12 PM1 votes

Matthias has said everything I was going to say about your 'suggestions' but I just wanted to say that you'll never get punished for saying 'how the <beep> did they survive that?'. Punishments are almost exclusively handed out for slurs(racial/sexist/etc.) and for things targeted at others. They even highlighted a few positive players who used swears and made statements fairly similar to the one you used as an example. That is not considered punishable. If you said, on the other hand 'how the <beep> did you not see that?' then you're getting closer to being reportable.

Directed statements meant to belittle your allies are not acceptable, general statements over something that just happened usually are. "Well that <beep>ing sucked" is fine. "Why the <beep> do you suck so much" is not. "Holy <beep> that didn't go well" - fine "Holy <beep> that move sucked" probably not. Get the difference?

(edited to remove the stars, forgot the forum treats stars as formatting rather than just a character)