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Stop perma-banning people for words

Butterwood·4/11/2019, 10:06:49 PM·40 votes·9,896 views

To preface this, I've never been banned. Never even had a chat restriction. I enjoy playing League but completely understand that I'm not that great at it, so rarely do I get the impulse to abuse someone else for playing poorly.

However, from a logic perspective, why do people get perma-banned for things they say in chat? Chat restrictions are real - why not just take away their ability to break chat rules for good instead of not letting them play at all? I personally think a ban from the game as a whole should be reserved for people losing on purpose and/or actually ruining the game experience for others.

I've played with so many toxic people who admit they're on their 2nd/3rd account due to their main being perma-banned. Most of them were toxic and awful and I hated their ability to chat with me, but had they played the game without chatting and were actually trying to win I wouldn't think anything bad about them. In fact, assuming they respond to pings and whatnot, that's kind of my ideal teammate.

Am I missing something? Do bans on toxic players really solve more problems than they cause? I'd rather play with a chat-restricted toxic guy who stays on his main account because of all the skins and rune pages and whatnot he's amassed over the years rather than play with that same guy on a new account, especially if he already has a reason (like having wasted hundreds/thousands of dollars on a banned account) to have a negative outlook on League as a whole.

108 Comments

Umbral Regent4/11/2019, 10:13:13 PM22 votes

...why not just take away their ability to break chat rules for good instead of not letting them play at all? I personally think a ban from the game as a whole should be reserved for people losing on purpose and/or actually ruining the game experience for others.

Riot has tried what amounted to a permanent chat restriction before - moreover, indefinitely scaling chat restrictions. Players under those longer-scale restrictions largely resorted to trolling and intentionally feeding as a way to be toxic, and in the cases that they didn't, those players largely still remained toxic with no sign of reform.

So, let me ask you; would you really want a highly probable uptick in gameplay toxicity (trolling, intentionally feeding) for the sake of not permabanning players who go out of their way to be toxic over and over again, despite several punishments and warnings?

Am I missing something? Do bans on toxic players really solve more problems than they cause?

According to Riot, the majority of players who get permanently banned do leave the game (which is the intended result), and the majority of those beside tend to reform (an acceptable, if not intended result), with only a few continuing to be toxic after the fact.

But, this is considering that permanently banned players generally only make up 0.006%~ of the playerbase; typically, the first one or two punishments is enough to prompt reform from players who genuinely want to play the game, and, unfortunately, it has to be said that there are some people who are just beyond fixing.

All Riot can really do in those cases is keep punishing them where applicable in the hopes that they'll tire eventually.

General Esdeath 4/12/2019, 12:03:19 AM7 votes

How did this even make front page? Lmao this has been answered so many times

VoraciousX4/11/2019, 10:11:21 PM6 votes

I dunno why anyone would downvote you, bans don't solve the issue anyways, because they keep coming back, a perma chat restriction though would not only make them better players, it'd reduce the toxicity they could create. I guess people just can't stand to have their feelings hurt for one game and still know that the one who did it is playing the game.

NanoFlameZeroOne4/12/2019, 12:55:52 AM2 votes

{quoted}

To preface this, I've never been banned. Never even had a chat restriction. I enjoy playing League but completely understand that I'm not that great at it, so rarely do I get the impulse to abuse someone else for playing poorly.

However, from a logic perspective, why do people get perma-banned for things they say in chat? Chat restrictions are real - why not just take away their ability to break chat rules for good instead of not letting them play at all? I personally think a ban from the game as a whole should be reserved for people losing on purpose and/or actually ruining the game experience for others.

I've played with so many toxic people who admit they're on their 2nd/3rd account due to their main being perma-banned. Most of them were toxic and awful and I hated their ability to chat with me, but had they played the game without chatting and were actually trying to win I wouldn't think anything bad about them. In fact, assuming they respond to pings and whatnot, that's kind of my ideal teammate.

Am I missing something? Do bans on toxic players really solve more problems than they cause? I'd rather play with a chat-restricted toxic guy who stays on his main account because of all the skins and rune pages and whatnot he's amassed over the years rather than play with that same guy on a new account, especially if he already has a reason (like having wasted hundreds/thousands of dollars on a banned account) to have a negative outlook on League as a whole.

Banning, in essence, is stealing the account from somebody that in part paid for it. Of course they will point to terms of agreement but it is still very unethical regardless of terms.