A different way to deal with people who are toxic in chat

tl;dr: toxic player is automatically muted by everyone in game

Currently we deal with toxic players by chat restricting them, we make them play draft normal games before they can play ranked again and in extreme cases their accounts get banned. As far as I know feel free to correct me on that.

Chat restriction limits the amount a player can write, but players can still be toxic with a few messages. Making people play draft normal games makes no sense to me since the player is problematic in chat not in the game itself so making him play a normal instead of ranked game is a strange punishment. It solves nothing chat related. Banning the players account is the same. This people don't make problems in game, they don't leave or grief in their games. They abuse chat. So the solution for this people should lay in chat. Plus this punishments often invoke anger in these players making them even more toxic.

We already have a solution for flamers. The mute button. But the mute button has 2 big weaknesses. 1st one is that most people don't mute toxic players for some reason and keep listening to them in chat. The second, far more serious weakness is that a player has to be toxic for you to recognize it and then mute him. The toxic player will already deal the damage, and then he will be muted.

A solution I propose is simple: Make it so that the toxic player is automatically muted by his teammates at the start of every game. Yo could also do something similar to honor badges. Something that tells other people that this player is considered toxic by the community so that they can mute him at the start of the game. This would work well for cases where a player is not severely toxic.

If the "toxic" player is automatically muted by everybody every game, he won't be able to flame anybody, plus if you still want to communicate with him, even if he flames, you can unmute him or choose don't automatically mute players in options(which could be added). He can still play the game, he can still release his frustration trough chat(but nobody will hear it), he can never flame you unless you unmute him(but then you can't complain about it because you purposely unmuted him) and if you don't care about flamers you can still communicate with them because you can unmute them. EVERYBODY WINS.

You could punish players like this the same as it used to be done for afk/leavers: Mute a player for a duration and then if the player still keeps being toxic mute him again and increase the duration and eventually you can perma-mute a player.

What you need to understand is that a lot of people either play this game to relieve stress or get frustrated very quickly by this game. And a lot of this people will release stress and frustration via strong language in chat. Instead of just banishing them from our game, we could implement the Mute punishment which would completely stop toxic people from hurting other players. This punishment will still let them play the game and relieve stress/frustration. They will still be able to use chat with friends. And since the punishment does not directly interfere with the way they play and use this game these people will not become even more toxic.