Why we need the Tribunal back

There is a tl;dr at the bottom for impatient people. :P

EDIT: Before more people tell me about the new system being tested, I know and I think it's a step in the right direction, but I still think human review of reports is both important and possible to implement.

As many experienced League players know, the peer review system for dealing with reports, known as the Tribunal, was taken down some time ago, and was replaced with an automated system. Riot hasn't said a lot on this topic, but there is a major issue with having an automated system which was brought to my attention recently. As I understand it, the automated system works by examining either the number of reports a player receives or how frequently they are reported (or some combination of the two). When a threshold for reports is reached, a player is punished.

This system may look like a good way of managing all these reports, especially given the sheer number of people playing this game, but it rests on a basic assumption which is not good. The automated system assumes that all reports are made in earnest and with good reason. An automated system can't check to see whether reports were deserved. No computer program can be a good judge of this kind of thing. What this means is that if you just get reported enough, no matter why people are deciding to report you, you will be punished.

For those of you who have read this far, you probably want evidence that the system has indeed punished someone unfairly. I myself didn't think it could happen until about a week ago, when I was on my PBE account.

During a PBE match, I ran into a player who was extremely fun to play with. She was a great team player, always had my back, ganked lanes, and kept the team's morale up. After about 30 minutes, she carried our team to an easy victory. Naturally, I honored her after the match and added her as a friend. We started discussing how broken Ekko is, and eventually the topic of conversation got to her main account.

She told me that she had 5 months' worth of chat restriction on her main account, and I asked her why. She responded that she often plays with platinum players (which wasn't hard to believe, given her skill level) and that people often report her for "breaking the meta," even though she also added that she still wins most of her games. She also told me that when she tried to appeal the ban by contacting player support, she was told that she had a "high level of toxicity" as evidenced by her "high rate of being reported."

After this conversation, we went on to play several more games, during which she displayed a level of positive behavior that I rarely see anywhere. She didn't say or do anything remotely toxic, although some of our opponents did when she started going 10 and 0 on their bot lane (LOL).

From the games I played with this person, I can say that her behavior shows a sharp contrast with the number of reports she allegedly has on her main account. The way she played backed up her statements that she is a highly skilled player who often breaks the meta. It's also not too difficult to imagine frustrated platinum players who want to win, and who go on to report someone out of anger for breaking the meta, especially if they end up losing. (I'm not trying to hate on you plats; I'm sure most of you are fine.)

This is what inspired me to create this thread and hopefully renew interest in restoring the Tribunal. If a non-toxic player is punished because other players are angry, that's not justice.

Some people may argue that "Riot doesn't care about a few players," but if that was true, player support wouldn't exist and the Tribunal would never have been created. I think that Riot wants fairness for as many people as possible, and if any Rioters are reading this, I want to thank you for hearing me out.

The majority of reports are probably made with good reason, but that's not enough. If even 1% of reports are made simply because a player wanted to take out their frustration on someone else, or for some other dumb reason, that's still a very large number of people who could wind up being punished unfairly. This isn't justice. A 99% accuracy rate from a computer program is not enough if we could be doing more as players by analyzing reported matches ourselves. We owe it to each other as a community to provide just verdicts for reports, and given the activity of the previous Tribunal system, I can say with confidence that a lot of players in the community would be willing to put in the extra time and effort to make this happen.

If we are going to provide true justice for the community, we need to use the best method for ensuring fairness that we can, even if it puts additional responsibilities on the community to check the validity of reports. I agree wholeheartedly that an automated system is better than nothing at all. However, to sit back and allow an automated system to make mistakes that we as humans would avoid, no matter how small that number may be, is saying that we're too lazy to carry out real justice. This is something that I personally will not stand for.

TL;DR An automated system can't determine whether reports are really deserved. We need to go the extra mile as human beings and review them to stop undeserved punishments like the one I mentioned.

Please vote below if you believe that the Tribunal should be restored, with whatever improvements are needed. This isn't a petition, and we definitely need to talk with Riot if we want to get the ball rolling on something of this scale. This is just a show of hands to let Riot know that people care about having the Tribunal back, and that an automated system can't give us the justice we deserve.