Room for Improvement; The Reporting System, and Handling of Detrimental Players
Greetings all, and thank you for coming to check out my post! I've been a League player for years now, since 2013/14, whenever Aatrox's original release came about on the NA servers, and after years of using it, there are a few things about the report system as a whole that I feel could be handled differently, hopefully for the better (but then again, these are just opinions, and nobody's perfect, so feel free to comment, or post counter-arguments and such).
We all know there are... less desirable teammates that can end up in a game with you whenever you play League; it's just part of online gaming in general. Riot has made numerous changes to the report system in the time I've been using it, always trying to make it more efficient, but to be honest, the sheer impersonal nature of it often backfires from what I've seen, both from talking to other players online, and talking to friends/players who happen to be playing on a computer in the same room as me in general, as well as using it myself. You can fire off reports until your fingers are sore, rarely does it feel like anything will be done about it, and even if you submit a ticket, requiring you log into their site (which is separate from the client I use, and am betting many others also make use of), you end up waiting for what essentially amounts to; "Thank you for your concern, it will be looked into, but I can't tell you anything about it because of player privacy.". That's fair, but due to lack of seeing the actual consequences (lets face it, it's hard to tell if your reports are actually being seen when whether or not you actually get the "action has been taken message", even if there was a punishment, is completely RNG), more often than not it ends up feeling like the issue has been swept under the rug, so to speak. To that end, I have a few ideas to help the reporter, who takes the time to fill out the info in the first place (assuming it's not a false report made out of spite by one of those less desirable players to begin with), feel empowered, like the report will make a difference, and hopefully help make the community a bit cleaner.
The first idea isn't too extravagant, we already have support tickets, and multiple people on the very boards I'm posting this to that volunteer their time to help filter out nasty/mean-spirited content, so why not try extending a similar concept to reports? When the report system flags a report as legitimate, deserving of a punishment, or even inconclusive, have something like a ticket made, and assign it to one of these "report moderators" (for lack of a better name for it). This both allows the moderator to check, and see if by human standards the system was correct, and reply through the "report ticket" (again for lack of a better name, naming stuff isn't really my strong suit) to the player who filled it out. This opens up a number of possibilities, such as allowing said moderators to help clarify how the reporter might better fill out future tickets to ensure the system flags it correctly (in the event it mislabeled, or was inconclusive), or to reach out to a false reporter and see if maybe they just had the wrong boxes checked (also allows them to point out to actual false reporters that yeah, that isn't gonna work, and it's not funny, BEFORE they get a punishment for it, so they have a chance to improve ahead of time, something any reasonable person is likely to do). On the other hand, if anonymity is the issue, then simply reach out to the reportee (the guy the report was about) in the event the ticket turned out to be legit. This still opens up a whole new level of communication and interaction, allowing for clarification of the summoner's code and such, while showing offenders that yeah, you got caught, before any punishments get handed out (or while they are, either way), improving the odds of any but the most unreasonable people (in my mind anyway), to improve.
The second idea may sound a tad extreme, but if nothing else it could be a place to start, an experiment to hopefully help people find a better solution, it's been suggested before by a number of people from what I've seen, and they may have a point when they say: Create a separate server specifically for players who cross the line; a "Jail of Legends", if you will. Again (and I cannot stress this point enough!) this is not what I see as an end-solution. I see it more as a stepping stone, or a test, for the sake of gathering more data on how to deal with undesirable players. My particular take on this concept is as follows; you land in league's "Jail of legends" you serve your time IN-GAME, not in hours played on some other account while you wait for your penalty to wear off, or hours spent just not going on league for awhile, but in game, on a server full of people who like you, crossed a line (or multiple, depending on the case). There is no report button post-game, and either you get to see for yourself other people acting out/doing things people get reported for doing without the chat bar, or with one (Riot's preference there), either way you're very likely to encounter other nasty players. This both encourages them to play and get the penalty over with, while showing them the kind of things they've been doing, being done by someone else (a subtle way of showing them that yeah, what they did to offend somebody so much they got reported does suck when it happens to you), thus making them want out. Penalties wouldn't have to be too severe, since due to the sentence being matches or time spent in-game, on the rift, they're guaranteed to serve it out unless they stop playing that account altogether. Again, this encourages all but the most stubborn or outright unreasonable people to improve for the sake of not going back. As far as getting put in this server goes, one could approach it a number of ways. One could try a version of the old Tribunal we used to have and let the community vote who does/doesn't go in based on name-omitted tickets. Another option would be to just extend the punishments the current report system hands out to include trips to Meansville. Riot could even try using the first Idea from this post, above, to have a group of moderators decide, so long as it happens, even as a trial period, we should see some data that will help us figure out a better solution.
Much as I'd like to suggest some way of simply encouraging positive behavior, rather than punishing folks who are already in a foul mood (because, why else would you do something mean-spirited with all the measures already in place?), I can't think of anything I feel would work, or even make a difference, that Riot hasn't already tried. I'm not to saying those measures aren't helping in one way or another, but to be frank more is needed, there are still people playing League that become the embodiment of toxic the second something doesn't go their way, and the less we see crap like that, the more we can enjoy the game we made these accounts to play. Out of curiosity, how many folks think we'd need a League jail? I'll put a poll in to see if maybe it's a more popular idea than I'd thought.
Wow that took awhile, but here we are, at the bottom of the post. Without any further ado; COMMENT! TALK! UPVOTE! ALL THAT JAZZ (Seriously though, I look forward to seeing people's responses), and hopefully I see some Rioters in there, nothing would make me happier than to see they themselves read this post and felt it had enough merit to debate.
