They are after all, a person just like you, trying to have fun and enjoy a video game.
I believe it's less than 50% (a minority) of cases where people doing the reporting are so innocent.
For example as someone who has played jungle a lot over the years in solo queue, I often get in a situation where, not joking, my 4 team mates will gang up against me and all start flaming me in the chat and making comments criticizing my gameplay because they died to 5 yi ganks in a row before 10 minutes or insulting me and telling me to kms because they went 0/8 in their lane that they pushed 24/7 with no vision. Usually I used to type out an essay over the course of the match trying to reason with them and point out how how they could play a bit safer or put some wards down or wait for me to gank instead of constantly going ham, so I was using civilised language, not swearing, not insulting, and yet often I ended up with chat restricts, naturally, because 4 people reported me and because I typed too much the system just flagged it as toxic; so I just assumed Riot doesn't want us to talk too much and I keep my in-game chat minimal these days.
So many people just assume the majority of people who get chat restricts or bans are just people who go into a game and start being nasty to other players for no reason, like bullies. And that's pretty wrong imho. I can see how someone who just gets flared up by people being abusive to them or trolling them or flaming them could end up with chat restricts or bans simply from having the type of personality that means they'd respond or get angry. And that's sad, it imho sort of promotes a culture of people baiting others so they can get them punished.
I used to express anger in the in-game chat a lot in the past. I eventually stopped because A) I didn't want to lose my account and B) I realised it was completely counter productive.
But I object to this sort of consensus idea in the community that we should be emotionless robots that only have positive emotions, when it's a friggin competitive team based game. I'll play ball and keep quiet or only communicate positively because I don't want to lose my account. But it doesn't mean I'm not frustrated and wanting to scream when some guy ints 0/20/0 and ruins my game because he got tilted by his adc/ supp/ enemy outplay. I usually just scream into a pillow these days. There has to be some outlet for frustration, I'm not gonna let Riot ruin my health!
Anyway for me it was always just against people who were inting or trolling. I got a chat restrict and my reports against them resulted in nothing. I've also noticed an increasing trend of people acting as snarky & passive aggressive as possible (with their chat as well as their actions) trying to bait others into flaming them so that they can report. Riot has encouraged this sort of passive aggressive environment with their chat restrict system.
I think permabans should be limited to hate speech or threatening speech only. Calling someone 'trash' for example shouldn't get people a chat restrict when Riot even has it as an insult in Twitch's taunt line! And for what it's worth that's not something I'd have said myself, I usually just whined about griefers and got chat restricts for it because I spoke too much in the game, heck I wasn't even swearing or using insults. I swear if you just talk too much the system picks it up as toxic if you get a report and punishes you.
