Ban for x days or forever? Riot doesn't care.
For most of us, if we've been banned for even one day we did something that earned us that punishment. You can qq and cry but if you stop and take a second you'd probably admit that all those chat-bans leading up to your hard ban were reasonable.
That being said; Riot relies far too much on their automated system, and has far too much control over our speech. No-one wants to be trolled by harassment in chat, or by silent players intent on ruining games while never saying a word.
Riots system does a great job at parsing chat and dealing out sometimes harsh penalties, ones that they justify by saying every-time that "the system looks at escalating values; the more you get reported the harsher it gets". That's great and all and logical, but it sure as hell isn't infallible and it Does get it wrong on a case by case sometimes. What it gets right is trend. Like a credit report, or the stock market, you can trend up or down, it ignores individual points where it matters usually except for early offenders.
So that's the system, it needs work however.
- For one the system parses text great, nice job blitz-bot! BUT it truly sucks at looking at gameplay. That's probably the only reason outside of a nod to customer-service that the "talk to a human" option even exists after a ban or restriction. They simply can't write an algorithm to see game-play trolling as easily as chat trolling. Which is why outside of timed afks; player feeding and refusal to team-play is rarely complained about as a ban reason. It just doesn't happen much in their system.
2.Their system also fails because it ignores INDIVIDUAL POINTS. Everyone takes for granted that every report and every 'card' only shows YOUR chat. That's a pretty one-sided conversation. It erases all context, and places ALL blame Squarely on a persons ability to Ignore/Pass over/React POSITIVELY to 9 other Peoples Behaviors. I don't know about the rest of you; but I'm decidedly NOT a Zen-Master, the Dali Lama, Mother Teresa, or the Nobel Peace prize laureate of my time. Indeed sometimes I'm BRUCE GODDAMN LEE in my head. Never start a fight, but finish it will I. (yes Yoda).
My point is Their system has been pointed in a direction that puts all the blame on us as individuals. We get Zero chance or option to reply to our situation in games, because the more we reply to our team in chat the more their system builds a case against us; and the case is being metered out by an algorithm first, and a human as a distant second, as the human Almost Always backs the algorithm. (it has too).
Riots game is NOT a Democracy, make no mistake it is a mini-dictatorship that shows us exactly what happens when the people that have control have far too much of it when it relates to freedom of speech.
In the end Riot does have far too much control over our speech, and for good reasons. Justifiable ones, for the 'community' and don't forget also monetarily.
The could Honestly use an independent body to review player suspend-complaints instead of their internal one, or a player based one. They did do a player based "self-check" on themselves while they developed the blitz-bot and auto punish system to fine tune it as they called it. They removed it seasons ago; it needs to come back if only to "CHECK" the accuracy of their current system.
I'm pretty sure that if they do that they will find that their algorithm does Indeed need some fine tuning, or at lest more Human interaction that is actually acted upon.
Until then stay strong my brothers and sisters, spend not a dime on their game, and level those smurfs.
The banstick is hard, and unforgiving.
