Any psychology book will show you that punishment merely exacerbates the issues.
The more you punish people, the worse their behavior becomes.
Just try smacking a child upside the head with bricks and see how great of a person they turn out to be. Common sense tells you that the harsher the punishment people receive, the harsher they become as people.
There are several hundreds of books that speak on this matter verbosely.
People learn the best from positive reinforcement. If you want to teach people, you reward them for good behavior. Riot is well aware of this, as they have staffed psychologists in the past, and probably currently do. THE ISSUE IS, rewarding people in a F2P game, cuts out from profit. The more RP, IP, or just free skins/champs/etc, you hand out, the less likely they will be to hand over $$$ for those items.
(this is why you see rewards being issued yearly, and only the past 3 years.)
People learn second best from negative reinforcement. This is akin to, making a persons life a living hell, but alleviating that hell, when they act in the way which you want. The difference between this and punishment, is punishment is in response. Negative reinforcement is a constant.
People learn the least from punishment, and it often has negative consequences.
The same is true for most other intelligent animals as well. You can easily train a dog by giving it treats when it performs the way you want it to. However, if you beat your dog when it acts up, it learns that aggressive behavior is normal. Once you have normalized that aggressive behavior, that dog is much more likely to think, "Well I'm in the right, I should bite my owner to show him that his behavior is bad".
The fact that the community is so fixated on punishment, when it has ONLY MADE THE COMMUNITY WORSE in the past 4-5 years, is mind boggling. Esp given how common knowledge this should all be these days.
