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The Future of Player Behavior and the Tribunal

Jefftiffy··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

Matthias91193 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.

Jefftiffy1 votes

Just because it is not fully automatic doesn't mean it isn't being done that way mostly. If you appeal to Riot and thei sole comment is about your recent behavior being "inflammatory" and to refer to the rules then it is quite honestly a template. I mean what human actually types out a paragraph to refer to the rules and visit the forums. I'm pretty sure I'm aware of them. But if you don't show me evidence of how it happened then I don't have any trust behind the person. They didn't even say something specifically about the case when I appealed.

Riot banned my I want to say around 3 months ago for 2 weeks and I had no previous history. Now tell me, if there is no automated system for bans. Why would a person hand out a first time offense 2 week ban. And why would hundreds-thousands of players all be banned at the same time? Why was there no bans consistently until that day?

Jubbinaut3 votes

Your first paragraph confuses me. How does a form-letter response to a common Support query in any way relate to the amount of automation in adjudicating behavioral cases?

I ask, because your statement seems to imply an opinion on your part that the "automation" of the response implies the automation of the judgment. But the two systems are completely separate and unrelated.

In response to your second paragraph: Before the wave your ban was part of, there were at least two more. They were issued in waves because it's actually easier to control Support traffic by handling it that way (and I'm sure other reasons that I haven't worked out). As for why they were handed out at 2 weeks? Well, that's because they're escalated bans intended to act as a last warning for extremely toxic players. In fact, they aren't issuing behavioral bans smaller than 2 weeks right now. It's that or chat restriction, and someone felt you deserved the ban, rather than the restriction.

Matthias91192 votes

Just because it is not fully automatic doesn't mean it isn't being done that way mostly. If you appeal to Riot and thei sole comment is about your recent behavior being "inflammatory" and to refer to the rules then it is quite honestly a template. I mean what human actually types out a paragraph to refer to the rules and visit the forums. I'm pretty sure I'm aware of them. But if you don't show me evidence of how it happened then I don't have any trust behind the person. They didn't even say something specifically about the case when I appealed.

If you want chat logs from a ban you really need to ask clearly and specifically for chat logs. If you send them a giant wall-o-text like this post or generically ask "why was I banned?" you get a form letter back telling you that you violated the summoner's code. (I'm not crazy about this policy, but that seems to be how it works right now.)

Riot banned my I want to say around 3 months ago for 2 weeks and I had no previous history. Now tell me, if there is no automated system for bans. Why would a person hand out a first time offense 2 week ban.

I covered that. Riot is taking cases they consider to involve "extreme" toxicity and escalating them right to a 2-week ban rather than giving those players many chances like they used to.

Riot staff have said repeatedly that all such bans were manually reviewed. If you don't believe the head of Riot's player behavior team, then I'm not sure who you will believe in regard to such things.

And why would hundreds-thousands of players all be banned at the same time? Why was there no bans consistently until that day?

They have been putting out those 2-week bans in "ban waves" over the last few months. Maybe it's easier for them to handle that way, I'm not sure.

I doubt they have handed out hundreds of thousands of such bans; I'm pretty sure Riot said that less than 1% of players in NA got one.

Matthias91192 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.

Eleshakai1 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)

Jefftiffy1 votes

See though. There in lies the problem. You either tolerate swearing or you don't. There is a chat filter in the game for a reason. If you turn it off be prepared for swearing. If you don't like it turn it back on. I have swore completely at myself and at mechanics for one game and my teams like oh you are toxic. You mean you are toxic when I wasn't directing it at anyone and just venting? You are sitting here trying to make me angry at you, and you want me to get reported for being toxic?

You see toxicity in its nature isn't always the person getting mad its the people that egg them on and make the situation worse that are the real problems.

I really think Riot needs to work on making the troll mentality on either side be a bigger factor in reports. I mean when you say QQ moar. That in essence is being toxic.

Eleshakai1 votes

See though. There in lies the problem. You either tolerate swearing or you don't. There is a chat filter in the game for a reason. If you turn it off be prepared for swearing. If you don't like it turn it back on. I have swore completely at myself and at mechanics for one game and my teams like oh you are toxic. You mean you are toxic when I wasn't directing it at anyone and just venting? You are sitting here trying to make me angry at you, and you want me to get reported for being toxic?

You see toxicity in its nature isn't always the person getting mad its the people that egg them on and make the situation worse that are the real problems.

I really think Riot needs to work on making the troll mentality on either side be a bigger factor in reports. I mean when you say QQ moar. That in essence is being toxic.

It's not about the swearing though. It's the tone. You can swear and be fine, but if you direct your swearing at an individual and belittling them, that's not okay.

And, you can belittle people without swearing too and STILL be punished. Swears are perfectly acceptable, but the reason most people use swears - to insult others or belittle them - is what is not okay.

There's also something to be said for being overly negative in general without directing it at anyone, but that's a much finer line. If you're constantly just saying 'this game is over, just surrender' when your team is one kill behind... it might be reportable.

The simple fact is that toxicity IS in the eye of the beholder... people feel offended for different things... and it's about being a decent enough individual that people generally want to play with you.

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