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What are the actual rates of action taken based on reports?

Jo0o·3/18/2016, 4:15:49 AM·1 votes·643 views

Hey guys, relatively new player here.

I'm thoroughly enjoying League, but I was aware of the bad reputation its community has when I started playing, and nothing I've seen so far has dispelled me of that notion. I'm at the point where, on average, I think I'm throwing out one report per game.

Now, I played WoW for five years, so I'm not new to online communities and I don't have a thin skin. I'm not going to break down into tears if somebody curses me out. I may take pause when somebody wishes that I and my entire family develop cancer because I gave up first blood, but still, I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

But I'm seeing behavior that, objectively, needs to stop. Players dying once, stating explicitly that they're going to AFK, then doing so. Overt assistance of the enemy team. Automated players having their champion auto-follow one of my teammates, using abilities at random and spamming chat in a variety of languages. And, despite my previous claim of thick skin, I experienced toxicity from a teammate yesterday so monumentally over the line of decency that I was entirely thrown off my game and even considered bailing on the match myself.

Of all my reports, I have gotten exactly one notification from Riot that action was taken.

So, TL;DR: I report people a lot. I believe that I am justified in these reports. Based on the response I get, either the overwhelming majority of toxic players go unpunished, or the system is not adequately communicating these punishments to the players that report. If the former is the case, then I doubt this post will matter at all. But if the latter is the case, I do hope you'll consider being more complete in communicating action taken against reported players. Reinforcement and acknowledgment go a long way, after all. Without it, I'm slowly becoming more resigned to this behavior, because I'm not currently convinced that taking the time to report does anything.

12 Comments

Daen3/18/2016, 4:31:10 AM2 votes

Of all my reports, I have gotten exactly one notification from Riot that action was taken.

The system only sends this notification if your report was part of the case set that directly resulted in action being taken, and isn't sent for reports that led up to that point. I agree with you, I think it comes across as not adequately communicating these punishments to the players that report, but at the same time it's there in part to protect people from identifying Riot's systems more readily and abusing the knowledge gained.

TL;DR, action taken on reports happens far more frequently than those in-client messages might suggest. :)

Zielmann3/18/2016, 4:33:09 AM2 votes

or the system is not adequately communicating these punishments to the players that report

It's this. Currently, you only get notified that somebody has been punished if you reported them in the last game that leads to their punishment. Considering that it takes quite a few games for somebody to get punished, it's actually pretty uncommon to get the message telling you that somebody you recently reported was punished. I've personally never seen one yet.

Though to say it's adequate or not is a matter of personal opinion. I've been around the game since Beta, and have followed the development of all these behavior systems pretty closely. Having all that background, I do believe that they're working. Honestly, compared to several seasons ago (before Tribunal was a thing), the community isn't quite so bad as it once was. Honestly, I'm fine with not getting messages telling me people have been punished. Just need to read this section of the boards regularly to know it's working.

More related to your title question, there's really no rate of action on reports. Every single report submitted is verified by the system if possible. But just because a report was valid, it doesn't mean the person gets punished. Riot isn't trying to police the players in a heavy-handed way. They realize we're human, and built some leniency into the system to allow for one-off bad games. Exceptions can exist, such as personal threats against other players, or excessive hate speech. If it's bad enough, they can be raised to a permaban instantly.

Anyhow, sometimes you might have encountered one player's off game. The report could be completely legit (the person was in the wrong), but since they don't do that regularly, they never actually get punished for anything. Other times, maybe they're still in the early stages of punishments and only get a chat restriction, which wouldn't be potentially visible by checking their match history later on for long breaks in play. The system looks more at frequency of reports over time to issue punishments.

DU Baymax3/18/2016, 4:27:07 AM2 votes

not sure why but the kind of person that has always irritated me the most is the one that will say "gg" less than 5 minutes into a game.

Jo0o3/18/2016, 5:00:01 AM1 votes

Okay, good to know that I'm simply not hearing about everyone being punished from my reports. That gives me more faith in the system.

Still, as I'm sure we're all aware of, the majority of players of any online game do not participate in online discussion of the game. This forum may provide lots of evidence to suggest that the system works, but that evidence is not being shown to the average LoL player. By that logic, wouldn't it make sense to more prominently present such evidence to the average player, to encourage better reporting?

Troll Armada3/18/2016, 4:30:29 AM1 votes

bwahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....

good luck getting that from riot.

Got 2 Dads3/18/2016, 4:30:08 AM1 votes

Yeah the system actually works really well. I used to be pretty skeptical of it, but once you understand how it works there is no denying that it's doing the job. So pretty much it runs off a flag system. When someone is reported the system scans the game; highlighting red flags. so if the person had a really bad score or really low exp (it looks to see if they AFK.Intent fed), it searches chat logs for verbal abuse and spam etc. If someone used a racists or homophobic slur that is very serious, they will probably be punished almost instantly, that's when you get the little notice that the person has been punished. Other cases where a person was just being negative such as flaming you, the system just starts building a case against them. So even if it wasnt extremely offensive, negative behavior reported by teammates will eventually lead to something like a chat ban. The chat ban continues and leads to suspension or perma ban if the behavior is consistent.

Only other thing I can think of is that you are pre 30, the problem with pre 30 games is that people who get banned simply start again and continue the same behavior. This still happens, but less in 30 games. People will still get banned and just buy a new account and hop right back in ranked and act the same, all you can do is report them. If someone is being an ass, they will get punished .

Ladayen3/18/2016, 4:22:16 AM1 votes

You can read these boards for proof the system is in fact doing something. You dont need to know everytime someone gets punished. Thats just being petty.