@Davin snowballing bad behavior and ranked

I was thinking about one thing for a while since the panel at PAX and it really did hit me hard because I have experienced it.

Snowballing bad behavior.

I am affected by the snowball of negativity and that spike in reports and badness all around influences me for sure. So while I've thought about that I have been utterly stumped on how to fix that issue on a massive scale, and I was sad.

However I was thinking about ranked and about how especially vile the people are there, and realized how much people were more readily willing to be terrible people. Suddenly I realized that maybe...just maybe there is something about ranked that could be done.

I've always been an advocate of my own cause to make ranked reflect its true purpose better via player behavior. Ranked is supposed to be where we bring our A game, work with our team as best we can, and make victory the goal yet that isn't the case. Why? It for sure has, in part to do with stress trying to win and get a higher rating and in part due to arguing over picks, bans and counterpicks in a small time frame.

Overall what I notice is that ranked is hostile because there is more at stake which causes people to naturally be more irritable.

My solution was always to reinforce that ranked was a place for real sportsmanship, and that relatively there was no downside to getting a bit more upset in ranked outside of its own consequence, it feels like normal draft pick mode. I always just really wanted there to be more reward for being positive in ranked, and more consequence for being negative in ranked. I advocated hard punishment and a system to strip people of some of their score if they were being negative in game to reflect how they bring others down with them.

However in re-evaluation I think this just wouldn't work and is too focused on hurting people for their actions. I thought maybe a few more gentle things could be done to encourage cooperation and prevent teams from collapsing in on themselves due to player behavior.

I think one thing that really irks people is losing score due to leavers and afkers, trolls and feeders. So far no system has made it possible to make people feel better about this without making a system that can be abused. One solution was to simply keep a person's MMR intact but remove LP from them. This would work to prevent people from leaving. MMR determines skill match up and LP gains/losses, thus they would still be paired at their skill level, but they'd have to work harder again to climb. However this could lead to the same people dealing with the same jerks. Another system would be to flag players who are toxic in ranked, not reporting, just flagging. If a player is flagged enough, the system will automaticly given a flagged status for their behavior(not visible to anyone in game). This is good for subtle trolls and people who are otherwise hard to determine as bad people. Flags can come in one of a few specific reasons so that we know what they are being flagged for. A person with a flagged status could perhaps have all their pre-post game chats recorded while they are flagged, and then if they end up in tribunal, the voters have access to that info and why they were flagged and how many flags per game average with the average flags per person per game as a comparison. Another thought is that after a while a flagged person has an easier chance to end up in tribunal if reported and they are absolved of their flag status if forgiven.

Honor is in short supply too. People tend to be stingy even when a gem example of goodness is set before them. Honor is a huge issue of its own with lots more to improve on, but in ranked I think more can be done to help those who are good people to make them know their goodness isn't in vain, and to encourage others to act nicely as well.

So again, I don't know WHAT to do exactly, but I've been thinking about it, and what I do know is that ranked needs special help to get people acting more civilized.