Dear Riot - View on Toxicity

Blade BathoriXI··1 votes·876 views

Hello Everyone, Recently in the past month or two I've been paying attention to how verbal toxicity works, and how your automated tribunal stuff seems to judge things.

Verbal Toxicity has two sides to it, but everyone always focuses on the only side they want to see, which is the one person shouting obscenities or getting mad at someone. I will admit to doing so myself the past few months and I even received a 5 game chat restriction from your automated system. -I'm not saying i didn't deserve the chat restriction.

The side of some of these verbal toxicity stories that the automated system and other players don't seem to see is somebody for the most part is antagonizing them, this last game I played I went Shyvana top and I was against a Nocturne who was able to easily beat me, and then proceeded to be a sore winner by emote spamming me and zoning me from my minions, i then proceeded to get ganked under tower even though there was no need for it anyways. This Nocturne players responses to anything and his teammates responses were antagonizing, and i was told i was toxic because i got angry in response.

This is my problem with the League of Legends community, and the reporting system. Toxic players can turn other players into toxic players as well, all of the negative attitude messages I've gotten are because i got angry at someone being toxic to me, and they get off the hook Scott free after feeding off my anger, and I'm left there angry.

You can't simply say to turn off your all chat or to block someone, because it doesn't stop you from being angry at someone, and it certainly doesn't stop their in game actions from having an effect on you either.

(There are instances that doing so does prevent future aggravation, but I'm talking about more than just chat.)

Something needs to be done more about the people who start and create the toxicity in the game, rather than the people who are the victims and the people who are affected by others toxicity.

If you actually stopped to read through my rant, thank you

10 Comments

Sdf932 votes

One day, the Ignore button will be used and people will stop using the "I can't be a bitch" excuse :P

Jubbinaut1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Blade Bathori,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=uTiUXjhM,comment-id=,timestamp=2015-03-15T08:10:59.041+0000)

This is my problem with the League of Legends community, and the reporting system. Toxic players can turn other players into toxic players as well, all of the negative attitude messages I've gotten are because i got angry at someone being toxic to me, and they get off the hook Scott free after feeding off my anger, and I'm left there angry.

Before addressing much more, I want to ask about this: How do you know he has not - or will not - receive a sanction?

Something needs to be done more about the people who start and create the toxicity in the game, rather than the people who are the victims and the people who are affected by others toxicity.

Things are done about them. There are systems in place to address multiple forms of non-verbal toxicity, as well as the systems in place to address verbal toxicity.

But that works both ways - if it's not acceptable for them to act in a toxic manner, it is also not acceptable for their target to respond in a toxic manner.

Blade BathoriXI1 votes

If there was a was to deal with nonverbal toxicity other than afking or intentionally feeding, there'd be an option for it in the report menu, i didn't say that victims should just be excused, but they shouldn't just focus on who gets the most reports, because someone can be a toxic jerkwad and antagonize you for one game then not do it again, but if i run into several trolls in several games because i've had that crap luck to run into that, im getting reported several times when its not even the same people that repeatedly anger me.

Jubbinaut1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Blade Bathori,realm=NA,application-id=cIfEodbz,discussion-id=uTiUXjhM,comment-id=00000000,timestamp=2015-03-17T07:51:35.091+0000)

If there was a was to deal with nonverbal toxicity other than afking or intentionally feeding, there'd be an option for it in the report menu,

You mean there's not? I thought Assisting Enemy Team filled most of those. Negative Attitude and Spamming would, I think, cover the rest.

Specifically, from the Support page on the subject, those two are intended to cover:

  • Griefing: Assisting Enemy Team – This category aims at punishing behavior that involves deliberate collaboration with the enemy team, i.e. by providing them with positional/tactical information that they would have no access to otherwise.
  • Negative Attitude -- This category is reserved for unhelpful or self-centered attitudes that go against the principles of a team-based game.
  • Spamming - This category aims at punishing behavior that disrupts the flow of conversation with repeated postings of a similar nature. [Spamming has been noted by Reds as being viable for emote and ping spam as well as chat spam]

i didn't say that victims should just be excused, but they shouldn't just focus on who gets the most reports, because someone can be a toxic jerkwad and antagonize you for one game then not do it again, but if i run into several trolls in several games because i've had that crap luck to run into that, im getting reported several times when its not even the same people that repeatedly anger me.

They focus on who gets reported in the most games. In other words, it's not the number of people that didn't like you in that game that concerns them - it's how many games you display the behavior.

And it's important to remember that your behavior is your responsibility. Learning effective methods to deal with those kinds of players while you're forced to be around them is an important part of the game - not to mention life in general.

bucky1andonly1 votes

No one in the tribunal will ever know if someone is emote spamming just because someone reported it. If the person doesn't get reported for it on a regular basis, and was reported only the one time and that one time ended up in the tribunal, how can those in the tribunal hold that one time against him? They can't say for sure that he was even doing that, perhaps the other player didn't like him doing it 3-4 times during the games and that was enough for his report. People being banned for emote spamming, when Riot themselves put emotes into the game is one of the stupidest things to be banned for.

Every game that I can remember in like the last 20 games before my own ban, there was someone on my team or the enemy team that complained after the match about their teammates. Riot wants to remove all negativity from the game of 20+ million registered accounts, millions playing daily. That's impossible, and quite frankly, never going to happen. What they should do is be more lenient and increase the games rating from teen to mature. Report for racism, report for real threats, report for afk'ing and intentional trolling and feeding. All the really bad stuff that actually ruins games. Oh, non toxic players win 27% more games because blah blah blah. That's a fictitious number because it was only a sample. They would have to take at least 1000 games from 100,000 players to get any reasonable percentage. I bet it's closer to 7% because everyone becomes toxic at some point after playing too many games in a row with people getting on your case or someone else' for no reason game after game.

What Riot needs to do is remove the report system for a while and really monitor games to see what goes on. If there was no way to report a player, I guarantee you there would be far less toxicity in the game. People would realize they can't report toxic players and either they argue back or drop it altogether because they can't do anything after the game now. Sure people would be upset for a while without being able to fall back on that report button, but the trolls would lose interest, those that harass because they have inflated egos might talk less because they can't get a rise out of people any more. Sure you'd get those that would say "what are you going to do, report me, lmao" because there would be no report feature any more. You ignore that person all game and they will give up. There are far too many that say "report XXXXX" (they don't generally give a reason either), but now they have no reason to say that. Those that say that usually end up being reported as well, but now they won't be reported.

Real life. You smell pot, you know it's your neighbour. Your only course of action is to notify the police. You can't just go over there and break inside and confiscate their pot and haul them into court for your peers to judge them. Unfortunately, that is how league is. For the most part, it's people being judged based on what they say too. There are extremes yes, but to say swearing or retaliating against someone is punishable, or for fucks sake people, emote spamming or saying "ez" at the end of a match, you're all nuts. You have every right in the free world to stand up for yourself. If you get attacked, legally, you're allowed to retaliate with equal means. They punch you, you can punch them back. You don't get in trouble for this, the person that started it does. That's how league should work as well, sorry if you disagree, but consider the numbers..

League of Legends now apparently boasts a trio of absolutely astonishing metrics. Riot reports that 27 million people play the game daily, while concurrent players peak at 7.5M. In total, 67 million players play the game every month. All of these are enormous jumps from the already huge numbers from over a year ago.Jan 27, 2014

Canada's population has surpassed 35 million over the past year, a 1.2 per cent increase with growth generally higher in the western provinces, according to Statistics Canada. The information is contained in the agency's population estimates released Thursday morning.Sep 26, 2013

I don't know, but since a lot of Canadians swear and say rude things, despite Canada being one of the friendliest nations on Earth, if overall we can get along, while also overall, the crime rate has decreased in Canada as new lax laws are laws change to be more lax come into place. Instead of jailing everyone that smokes pot, only people with big grow operations are being nailed hard while small town dealers might serve a few months and those that just smoke get fines. They don't make examples out of a few people that smoke pot, the rules say, if he is only doing this, he only gets this punishment. If someone in league rages a bit, even swears a lot even when not raging, that should be fine, it's an online game to begin with. But the rules I think need to be reworked and they too need to be less strict. Make things less strict, and you'll find people don't push the boundaries as much, because they have more freedom. It's like turning the legal age to buy alcohol. Once you reach that age, it's nothing special, especially if you've drank alcohol underage. It's more fun doing something you're not supposed to, but when you're allowed to do it, everyone's allowed, and it becomes less special, less fun.

tl:dr rules need to be more lax, can't push boundaries if the boundaries are so far out of reach, people just stop trying

Jubbinaut1 votes

{quoted}

Every game that I can remember in like the last 20 games before my own ban, there was someone on my team or the enemy team that complained after the match about their teammates. Riot wants to remove all negativity from the game of 20+ million registered accounts, millions playing daily. That's impossible, and quite frankly, never going to happen.

Obviously. Which is why they want to minimize the negativity from the game. It's not about getting rid of it completely, it's about ensuring it affects as few people as little as possible.

Oh, non toxic players win 27% more games because blah blah blah. That's a fictitious number because it was only a sample. They would have to take at least 1000 games from 100,000 players to get any reasonable percentage.

a) Using samples doesn't negate statistics, so long as they're large representative samples. b) Riot records information on every game played, including chat logs and "state-of-game" snapshots every few seconds. They have approximately all the data on approximately every game ever. To assume they're using less than all the data is... odd. Why wouldn't you use every bit of data available to you?

You have every right in the free world to stand up for yourself. If you get attacked, legally, you're allowed to retaliate with equal means. They punch you, you can punch them back. You don't get in trouble for this, the person that started it does. That's how league should work as well, sorry if you disagree, but consider the numbers..

Sorry, but that's not actually accurate. If some guy starts a fight in a bar - and you fight back - you're both getting kicked out. And you're probably both spending a night in jail. If somebody starts yelling at you in a grocery store, and you start yelling back, you'll both be asked to leave.

In the real world, if you do something that goes against the rules of the place you're at, you'll suffer consequences for doing so - regardless of whether someone else started it. The only conceivable exception is the self-defense argument for various types of assault and manslaughter, and that only works if you can genuinely demonstrate that you had reason to fear for your life.

The thing to remember here is that the rules are pretty lax. They're very open to interpretation. And Riot's enforcement of them now is based pretty heavily on information they have from the Tribunal - in other words, they're using the community's decisions on what's acceptable and what's not to determine whether current behaviors should be acceptable.

bucky1andonly1 votes

My favourite part is how kids can take part in the tribunal. If the community can take the rules as they judge people and interpret them how they want, then the rules themselves mean nothing. No one should be getting punished except for extreme cases, such as racial slurs constantly, prejudice, real life threats, sexist comments. Someone swearing a lot, or just raging because they are being attacked for having a bad game or they are using a build that may not be normal or what everyone else uses, these people should not be punished with bans. The ones attacking, no ban either, just chat restrict them for a very long time. Remove their chat altogether maybe, make them rely on smart pings to communicate. Adding a few more different pings into the game would help in this matter as well. There are far too many people to try and manage with such a small amount of employees, and letting your community decide who is punished and who is not. People can be in a bad mood when deciding on cases that day, maybe they got out of a bunch of games that just went horribly bad and people were raging at each and so on. How is this acceptable? This is what can and does happen too.

Jubbinaut2 votes

The Tribunal isn't active right now, so it's pretty inaccurate to say that such things do happen. What concerns me, though, is that you seem to believe that this concept hasn't been accounted for.

The thing about the Tribunal is that it was crowdsourced - meaning that multiple people viewed the same cases. In part, this means that such concerns as you bring up weren't particularly common - even when players did go in and vote to punish things they shouldn't, other voters would simply out-vote them on that case, and nothing would happen.

bucky1andonly1 votes

I dunno, considering how many trolls a person can run into over the course of say 20 games, you would have to imagine there are going to be a lot of trolls in the tribunal as well. I don't and can't trust a system when we can't get exact specifications as to how it works. At best, they would give us a generalization. They don't let people know who voted to punish or pardon, and to see their own personal record if any.

Jubbinaut1 votes

{quoted}

I dunno, considering how many trolls a person can run into over the course of say 20 games, you would have to imagine there are going to be a lot of trolls in the tribunal as well.

Honestly, I think you're likely seeing trolling where it isn't. Even so, the proportion of trolls is relatively low.

I don't and can't trust a system when we can't get exact specifications as to how it works.

You can get exact specifications as to how the Tribunal works. I can give you a longer write-up if you want, but the short-form goes like this:

  1. Player is reported in a lot of games.
  2. The system builds a case and sends it to the Tribunal.
  3. The Tribunal semi-randomly selects between 3 and 5 games from that case to be displayed for Tribunal voters.
  4. A fairly significant number of people view the case - with no knowledge of whose case it is - and determine if the behavior included is, by their individual estimations, worthy of sanction.
  5. The case is determined by consensus. It required a greater-than-majority vote to actually punish, in fact.
  6. A Reform Card was sent to the player. Specifically, they'd receive an email with a link to their Reform Card, so they could see a rough estimate of what ratio of people voted to punish, as well as the exact same games that the voters did - to show exactly what behaviors were determined unacceptable.

At best, they would give us a generalization. They don't let people know who voted to punish or pardon, and to see their own personal record if any.

Displaying the names of those who voted would be a very bad idea - among other things, it opens them up to harassment. There are very good reasons to not show that. However, it's a moot point, because the current system is not the Tribunal, nor is it related to the Tribunal. And it has some severe limitations because of that, particularly relating to communicating specific behavioral concerns to punished players.

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