Now, I've really always wondered, why do people get permanently banned for toxicity?
Because toxicity can REALLY fuck up a game. For me, it doesn't happen often. I have only had 1 game ever that truly fucked me up. I was devastated for a week after that. It was a duo that pressed the exact buttons needed to really piss me off. They were doing it deliberately and only to harrass, not to make a point. Luckily, the assholes got punished. I don't know the punishment, but I reeeeaaaally hope it was a permanent suspension.
And before you say it: I did mute them. The worst parts happened in champselect.
That's just me. I have thick skin, so as I mentioned it has only ever happened once. But there are others, who for whatever reason might get ticked off just as badly as I did, and can't just brush it off. Of course they can still just mute them, but what if you have to mute someone it's already too late.
Sure, telling someone to get cancer and kill themselves, or being incredibly racist, definitely could deserve a suspension or a chatban, add in some warnings, and if they don't, you could just keep increasing the severity of their chatban until they lose the ability to chat altogether.
They did that already.
Do you know what happened? Toxic people started inting instead.
And Blizzard has come to the same realisation too: https://www.vg247.com/2017/11/07/overwatch-has-a-strike-team-to-fight-against-toxicity/
But getting permanently banned for it, is a tad bit much in my opinion, I mean, if they're just being toxic with chatting, then remove their ability to chat, no longer toxic in that way. If they aren't actually ruining games for other people, why are they punished like they are?
They DEFINENTLY are ruining games for others. Don't worry about too that part of it, they definently are.
I've also never really understood people getting banned for saying things like "Fuck you" and whatnot. Not saying things that could be construed as encouraging self harm/suicide or shit like that, but still getting penalized for it. The reason I don't understand this, is because there exists in this game, much like many other games, called the mute button. It removes the toxicity from a player of your choosing. So why don't more people use it?
Different punishments for different actions. Saying "fuck you" might be met with a 10 or 25 game chat restriction. Saying "kill yourself" is usually met with an instant 14-day ban. They aren't on the same level, as you say, and Riot accordinly does give the two types of toxicity the exact same punishment.
The mute button is not here so that you have an excuse to be toxic in chat. It's here because the IFS doesn't kick you from a game to punish you. It's a temporary patch so that people don't have to deal with you, before you can be punished for that behaviour. And as I mentioned earlier, if I have to mute you because I don't want to deal with you, it's too late. You've already made the game experience less enjoyable, on purpose.
Opposed to people who afk in games, troll, assist the enemy, give up, grief and/or fuck over your team who seem to get banned significantly less than "toxic" people, this confuses me. Thoughts?
The problem is that, if you are toxic in chat you deliberately made the game less enjoyable. And the proof is right in the chat log. It's not hard for a computer to detect if you were toxic.
The system can't differentiate between someone intentionally rage quitting, or someone who had to leave because of an emergency, and as such it has to punish, but not too harshly.
The hardest problem to solve is the trolling, giving up, and inting part. It's REALLY hard to detect someone inting. You can't guarantee someone is inting just based on their score, so the system has to try to learn what inting looks like, but because players frequently falsely report others for inting even though they just had bad games, the data the system gets is less valid and will mess it up when trying to learn. I won't defend the system that much though. There are the obvious disco nunu's that never see punishment, and that's is not ok.
But, if the system actually manages to correctly catch someone inting, it will deliver them with a 14-day ban. Much harsher than most people get for just being toxic in chat. In that way, the system treats people inting much harsher than it treats toxicity in chat.
