Chat bans and you!
Ehem~
For 2 months me and 4 others have decided to take data from ranked games to see how chat bans can affect game play. Honestly at first we all thought it wouldn't really do much to hinder our game play but the results are kinda staggering! So ladies and gents I invite you to my class project for both a social experiment and justification fun and see what you think!
Our data was recorded in different ways with each person taking up a few different parts: two people (myself and my friend Adrian) who enter ranked games with no chat bans and 3 people (My friends Christian, Taylor, and Janis) going into games with chat restrictions. We were (were :P) all diamond division I at the start of this experiment!
At first it was same old same old for the people without chat bans. We both roughly had a 60%-78% win ratio out of 40 games in a month. Not bad! However, my friends with chat restrictions for 40 games had a staggering 22%-51% win ratio sometimes winning no games one week of 10 ranked matches. These were the results of our first month of play which was November 1st - 30th. Our second month the people without chat bans had roughly a 50%-69% win ratio with us advancing to the next rank! Our friends with the chat ban actually stayed the same idk if by pure luck or some ungodly RGN with 20%-49%. This happened between December 1st - 31st. :)
Now then, you'd be able to say this: Well, what if group A isn't as good as group B? Well yea that can play a factor but we weren't exactly testing our win lose ratios, it's still about attitudes here as Riot claims to have a huge part on gameplay. We're here to see if they're right or wrong :)
20 matches of the 80 total, we asked 1 person, my friend Christian, to act as toxic as possible with the chat ban and the others to continue status quote but try and communicate plays as much as possible. For the 20 games Christian played, he only won 5 compared to the normal 8-12 games and which saved chat logs, we saw how bad it could get!
Not surprising that acting that way can bring you down pretty low as a team, so maybe Riot is right! Well...
Not exactly.
Taylor and Janis only won 4-9 games total trying to be productive and communicate. We found that people found it more stressful to execute plays when you can only talk so much. Also it turns out Taylor and Janis were banned more for being quiet compared to counter productive.
Now on record, not counting my friends with the chat ban, we asked and found out who had chat bans or not when we pugged games in ranked. Out of 80 games, we had 97 people in total with chat bans (this is out of 400 people we met in the course of 2 months). Those people, though some were just not talking at all, were very counter productive. A few how ever were actually trying to communicate but we found it REALLY hard to even perform good plays or work together when the guy cant talk to us ultimate losing more games than we won with those kinds of people.
From our data, A LOT of people with the chat ban swear a lot more than the regular trolls we find in games. It's honestly a pretty bad epidemic with those people but chatting with them a few days later they said the chat bans kinda encourage them to swear more just because you want to get out more hate + frustration with the little chats you have been given.
Really, it was NEVER this bad before the chat restrictions came around but wow were we blown away with our results.
[INCASE YOU DIDN'T READ]
Our results did not match our initial hypothesis when we started this test. Both groups, the non chat banned and the chat banned people found games to be a LOT more stressful with the chat bans than without. It punishes the people who actually try to cope with it and still be productive more than the people who still need that ban.
So with our final verdict we consider the chat ban to have an effect on ranked game play given LoL is a team game. It may not be huge, but it's for sure a factor on wins and losses. More importantly, stress levels and enjoyability. Honestly chat restrictions do help, I've seen it help people before, but the permanent ones are really encouraging poor behavior. I've seen people behave really well the first few waves of chat bans but get tired of it after.
What surprised us the most, 2 of my friends with the chat ban had a chat ban and they usually never get banned O_O So when they told me they had a chat ban for a stupid reason, we decided to kick off this experiment.
For those wondering, we got a A- on this report xD