"Riot sucks at catching trolls!" - Let's help them out!

Subdue·8/3/2017, 12:13:36 AM·36 votes·2,610 views

The Premise

Anyone who has spent 5 minutes on the Player Behavior board knows that a pretty consistent complaint is that trolls, or players who intentionally attempt to make their own teams lose, are not caught fast enough by Riot. Maybe they're right. Let's take a look.

In 2014, League of Legends had 27 Million daily players. I think it's safe to assume this number has grown, but we'll use it as a baseline so that we'll have a conservative estimate.

Now, let's assume that each player only played one game each (obviously not the case). That means 2.7 Million games per day.

Now let's assume that a player is reported for trolling in a tiny 1% of games (Again, super conservative). That means 27,000 reports per day.

Trolling rarely can be determined by stats or speech, because anyone with half a brain can pretend to be trying to win, while actually trying to lose. So let's estimate that reviewing a match and exacting punishment takes 5 minutes (Again, it probably takes closer to 30 minutes, but we're being super conservative here.) That means it takes a whopping 2,250 hours per day to review all of the reports.

In order to employ such a team, Riot would need to employ a team of 282 employees full time. At minimum wage of 7.25/hour, that's a cost of $4.25 Million a year.

The Challenge

Given that having a team perform the manual function of reviewing each case is likely a financial impossibility, let's turn to the method which Riot seems to have chosen: Detection via automated system. Now, I think everyone can agree that League is pretty damn good at catching toxic chat - some might even argue too good. But how does it perform at catching other types of trolling? Many would say not very well.

So here's the challenge (No programming knowledge needed): For various types of trolling, define a ruleset that will detect that type of trolling without erroneously punishing players who aren't actually intentionally trolling. Here's an example:

Type of Trolling: AFKing Rule #1: Period of inactivity longer than 5 minutes Rule #2: Average Actions Per Minute Less than 1

Obviously this is a really simple example, and a relatively easy one to detect - most likely why the Leaverbuster is so successful. Below are some other examples of what people consider trolling that you might want to tackle (All ideas I've gotten from various threads on this board):

  1. Intentional Feeding
  2. Stealing CS
  3. Stealing Jungle Camps
  4. Avoiding Teamfights
  5. "AFK" Farming Jungle
  6. Fake accidental deaths
  7. Entering a teamfight but not trying to win it (Intentionally missing skillshots, for example)

If you think of more, please post and I'll add them here.

The Counter-Challenge

As people add their suggestions, I'd challenge the rest of you to try and identify holes in their rules - ways in which their ruleset might fail to catch a troll, ways in which a troll might avoid the ruleset, or ways in which the ruleset might inadvertently catch non-trolls.

Together we'll help Riot build a better mouse troll trap.

103 Comments

Weathered8/3/2017, 1:17:39 AM9 votes

One of the most annoying ones that I personally encounter the most isn't really explicitly listed here. It sort of falls under stealing CS, but I'll add it myself for the purpose of the thread.

Forcing/Stealing Roles in Game -- includes actions like going to and playing mid lane alongside the actual team mid laner when it is not your role, attempting to share farm and XP

Rules are very hard to do for this one, more of an explanation of a solution works a lot better (perhaps someone can help make rules from it).

Some things to consider

  • For ranked queues, sometimes players will trade roles and a player not given a certain lane will lane there in game.
  • Off meta duo lanes are possible, and not always a form of trolling.
  • Things like lane swaps can happen.
  • Eventually players will leave lanes, and later on players may push lanes together as groups or a full team.
  • Extended fights in a certain lane, even during laning phase, could be misinterpreted as trying to force a duo lane.

Some things I've thought of doing

  • Disabling any sort of detection when the team is a five man premade. Strategies and roles are decided within that premade, there is a very low chance that a member will troll and not be expelled from the group afterward, minimizing those sort of cases.
  • The ability to check "switched roles" or "duo lane" in champion select. This would be a system where players could say a word in chat, and if both parties say it the system understands that there is a mutually accepted strategy and not trolling. Or even a check box if you want it to be simpler.
  • A preliminary trigger if a player picks a champion normally played in a role they are not assigned. This isn't triggering any punishment, it is simply a first stage tick box so the system can consider the next possible issue if the player is trolling.

That's all I've got. I considered things like detecting if a player has a certain cs/min from a lane other than their's, however what came to mind is Singed double proxying both top and mid lane and then triggering it by accident. Thoughts to get this further along?

Taeyang738/3/2017, 4:23:48 AM4 votes

"Stealing cs"

Did I miss it somewhere in the ToS that creeps are [only] for designated champions, or are we trying to tell people how they have to play the game now, as well?

League seeming more and more like a police state.

Also, how do you prove that someone is INTENTIONALLY missing skillshots? Lmao

That's the main problem with WHY they have such a hard time dealing with these types of trolls in the first place.

Sorry if you covered that already, btw...I skimmed, but I'll be honest I didn't actually read the entire novel.

seanyen8/3/2017, 7:58:10 AM4 votes

people should get banned when they say some shit like:

<insert excuse>, it's only flex.

why play ranked at all if you only want to troll and not take the match seriously.....

h5LYF41Lam8/3/2017, 12:04:26 PM4 votes

riot has no intention of catching trolls,they never did and they never will,they only put up a bot that finds keywords in your chatlogs to ban flamers.

Squey8/3/2017, 11:22:46 PM3 votes

Is person in support position? yes Did person select gold income item? Does person have any summoner spells besides flash/ignite/exhaust? Does person hit minions more then enemies with abilities? Does person spend at least 50% of there time in proximity with adc? Does person buy sightstone? Does person use sightstone at least once per 10 min? Does person take tower shots lv 1 or 2? Does person chat excessively? Does person chat at all? Does person build Carry only items like deathcap? Does person have lowest or 2nd lowest vision score on team?

Kei1438/3/2017, 4:44:30 AM3 votes

The thing first thing about these systems is defining "troll".

Using "taking CS" in general, let me throw in some arguements / questions.

The hardest part of this category is the community defined META, where the support operates on low budget. There is also a low MMR META and high MMR META.

** Is a person taking a support role trolling if they take CS? **

Excluding the obvious relic shield line here are some extra questions I ask:

  1. If a adc sucks (positioning and ability to CS), can a support (using mage supports as easiest example) take all the CS and become the AP carry? Is the same idea trolling if the support was a Janna and decided to build as marksman?

  2. If the support believes that the macro call should be the shove the wave and the adc disagrees. If the support were to act on their strategic decision and kill all the minions so the wave would shove, is that trolling? Keep in mind that wave management is a higher level MMR macro strategy, so a low MMR players may think it's trolling.

  3. The ADC blames the support for a mistake (it could be the support's mistake, it could be the adc's mistake), the support decides to take CS from that point on, is that trolling?

  4. If 2 of the 3 things mentioned above happen at the same time, is that trolling?

  5. If a support takes the CS that the ADC can't take (either poor AA timing or just not in lane), is that trolling?

Is other flamers / JG taking CS in another lane trolling?

  1. If they failed a gank / roam and decided to tax the lane, is that trolling?

  2. If 2 people arrive at the same lane after laning phase is done to meet with a giant wave, if the person with huge AoE takes the wave, is that trolling?

Alot of what the community thinks is trolling (think top lane soraka) is not really trolling. There may be a higher understanding of strategy required before they understand whether it was trolling (think Singed's unique play style).

Persoanlly, I don't think taking CS is considered trolling.

The King Discord8/3/2017, 4:46:30 AM3 votes

Stealing CS Stealing Jungle Camps is not trolling people need gold too

MUSHROOM MIDGET8/3/2017, 5:08:03 AM3 votes

i like your idea, but many of those things - 'stealing' cs, 'stealing' jungle camps, avoiding teamfights, afk farming jungle are not against any rules for league of legends.

they have a program already to catch afks and intentional feeders, although i have seen the intentional feed one ban innocent players already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOfAT74x2Ls&t=1300s

fake accidental deaths and intentionally missing skillshots.... i know it definitely happens and it would be nice to catch people doing that but i just dont see any way to prove those things are intentional. Especially for a cpu program.