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Criminal Investigators and 10 Ways to Report

St3cK·7/24/2015, 1:45:23 AM·2 votes·370 views
Reporting a Player

Yet there are only 3 ways to give positive feedback. Does anyone else think this is an alarming, or unique statistic? Without diving too much into existential meanings to how people generally seek out bad information and the likes, lets have a discussion with regards to the overall approach to the situation. The situation in this instance, would be violating the ToS in interactions with players, or "being toxic".

The approach I am referring to is how Riot attempts to curb these behaviors with their various penalties system. Chat bans, ranked restrictions, lower priority queue, Wait times for queuing, limited number of messages per set amount of time, leaverbuster, etc.

This approach, is an absolute incredibly perfect approach.

It's the perfect implementation of the data gathering Riot employed to take advantage of fundamental weaknesses in online player interactions by exacerbating the mob/group think mentality that organized itself around "competitive and casual". League has honored traditions like pick order, defined champions/roles, expected builds, etc. The heritage is something to be proud of, and in a way is the unofficially adopted ToS of the player-base. But Riot turned this very thing against everyone beautifully.

Oftentimes I read of complaints that the penalties aren't harsh enough for very abhorrent offenders, and conversely that someone was penalized out of the blue by accident. This is by design, and with purpose. The execution of the penalty system is much like a revolving door for the criminals, it's smart business. Being too harsh on the people that can (and probably will/have) spend money on your product doesn't result in good business, and adversely, having too many criminals in the mix can scare off new customers.

This is the main reason that chat bans are the most prevalent form of penalty. It lets the offenders play and form the good 'ol habit forming patterns that good money spenders exhibit. It also looks good on Riot when they get to tote big numbers of negative behavior towards positive behavior influence via automated systems. They get to keep their players, the players get to silently spend money. Honestly couldn't have thought of something better myself, gets all the birds stoned at once.

Throughout the course of a league career it is quite likely that an alternate account will be created. Whether it was because your router died in a game, you went on a tantrum against your teammates, or you got stuck in bronze, it is probable that not one, but several alternate accounts might be created. This helps circumvent harsher penalties to keep more people playing the game, and also greatly increase expenditure chances. This is a great thing. No matter how toxic or afk you become, you can more than likely still keep playing. Great news.

I feel I could continue on with a few more specific examples of the incredulity of the penalty system and how it is perfectly implemented to keep the product (players) in line by leaving them at the mercy of each other, with automated systems, yet still encourage them to keep playing, and most importantly, increase their time(and money) in game.

Feel free to comment, retort, delete, ban, question.

3 Comments

Matthias91197/24/2015, 2:19:09 AM1 votes

It's kind of nonsensical to say there are "10 ways to report... yet only 3 ways to give positive feedback"; the post-game UI gives equal placement to both 'reporting' and 'honoring'. Riot is also apparently working on an overhaul of the honor system to make it more meaningful. (I will say that I think they could do a lot more to push positivity and the Summoner's Code.)

Oftentimes I read of complaints that the penalties aren't harsh enough for very abhorrent offenders, and conversely that someone was penalized out of the blue by accident. This is by design, and with purpose. The execution of the penalty system is much like a revolving door for the criminals, it's smart business. Being too harsh on the people that can (and probably will/have) spend money on your product doesn't result in good business, and adversely, having too many criminals in the mix can scare off new customers.

They've actually stepped up the speed at which a player can get permanently banned quite a bit compared to the original implementation of the Tribunal. Previously you had to go through the entire Tribunal process at least four times before your account would be considered for a permanent ban (warning, 3-day ban, 7-day ban, 14-day ban), unless Riot happened to manually intervene. Now they can (and will) quickly take players from "warning" to 14-day ban, and it can be a permanent ban after that if their behavior doesn't improve.

Riot does give people second (and even third and fourth) chances. They also have the data that shows that a decent percentage of those players can improve their behavior. IIRC the figure they used to quote with Tribunal was that about half of the players who reached a given punishment level "reformed". At least enough that they stopped being in the top 1-2% of reported players.

Penalizing people by "accident" is hideously bad for your reputation and business. Nobody will spend money if they believe their account could be taken away without good reason. And anybody who does actually get punished without a good reason is extremely unlikely to continue to support your business, and in fact very likely to speak out publicly against it. Riot issued hundreds of thousands of punishments through the Tribunal, and the number of reversals of cases was something like 10. Even if you want to say that 10-20x that number of cases could have been reversed but probably weren't challenged due to only being warnings, the false positive rate was incredibly low (by design). If anything, Tribunal was fairly lenient -- it's just that the worst 1% of the League community at any given time is generally behaving pretty badly.

Throughout the course of a league career it is quite likely that an alternate account will be created. Whether it was because your router died in a game, you went on a tantrum against your teammates, or you got stuck in bronze, it is probable that not one, but several alternate accounts might be created. This helps circumvent harsher penalties to keep more people playing the game, and also greatly increase expenditure chances. This is a great thing. No matter how toxic or afk you become, you can more than likely still keep playing. Great news.

I'll point out that they switched to chat restrictions, ranked restrictions, and low priority queue because people used to avoid the old punishments (time bans) by switching to a smurf, so they never had to actually face the punishment and change their behavior. If Riot wanted to encourage smurfing they would not have done any of those things.

They don't permanently (or even temporarily) ban enough players for people making second/third accounts to be a significant source of revenue. I mean, if someone gets permanently banned, are they really going to spend any significant amount of money buying stuff on another account? You certainly wouldn't count on it, and competing games are only a few mouse clicks away. Riot knows they can make way more money by trying to clean up the community so that the negative players don't drive potential new customers away.