My unpopular opinion on player behavior and punishments

I believe that punishments should fit the category of the offense. Actions in League (or really any game) fall into two broad categories: social and gameplay. Social is interacting with other players. Gameplay is strictly interacting with the game. They aren't perfect definitions, but I think they work, especially for MMOs. I know a lot of you played WoW and Runescape back in the day. Hurling offensive and rude speech incessantly would be a social thing whereas exploiting a glitch or griefing players (except for very specific circumstances) would be a gameplay thing. It's pretty cut and dry there.

In League, it's slightly more complicated. Sure, there are glitches like the 0 cooldown flash hack or the glitch that allowed one to leave a game and avoid loss of mmr and LP. That's pretty obvious. It's cheating. But what about griefing? Well, except in specific situations like 0/30/0, it's hard to tell if someone is just bad or intentionally feeding. There are actions in MMOs where the analogous thing in League is very murky. I firmly believe in innocent until proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, so this restricts the gameplay abuses to things that are basically just cheating.

Think about it. Any time you confront a toxic person, what are they doing? 9:1 says verbally abusing you. Even if you want to punish them for that, it's clearly different from gameplay abuses. Now the crux of this point: in my humble opinion, gameplay abuses should be met with and only with gameplay restrictions, and social abuses should be met with and only with social restrictions.

What that amounts to is that I believe that a 14 day game ban for hurling gratuitous amounts of verbal filth at people is inappropriate. Instead, a mute is in order. This is different from chat restrictions. There, you CAN talk but only for a limited amount per game. A mute means you can't speak at all. And if they continue to abuse social systems after the mute is lifted? Scale it to a permanent mute. Don't ban them. If no one can hear their shit, does it make a sound? What does it matter if the person would call their teammates every slur under the sun for missing 3 cs if they can't actually say it to them?

Permanent bans imo be should saved only for cheaters and blatant griefers.

Riot, you have a mute system in place. If someone is muted several standard deviations greater than the mean, why not just start them muted for their 4 allies and 5 opponents? Chat restrictions are like the mother saying, 'ok, if you're good today, we'll go to Chucky Cheese's'. If the child has proven they are little brats, then the mother shouldn't even entertain the idea. Likewise, if someone has shown they don't care about chat restrictions, just mute them.

This could also expand into other social systems. For example, if they are auto-muted, they cannot add people first, only accept requests. They cannot initiate a conversation via pm, only respond one. These things need not automatically apply, but if someone adds people just to berate them, it's a great thing to have.

My opinion is born from a trend I've seen over the seasons: players are encouraged to report, not necessarily mute people. That's bonkers. In fact, a mute should be in the same category (not necessarily same strength though) as a report. Actually, I'll go a step further: the option to report a player for verbal abuse should be removed and instead, Riot should hammer in muting into players heads and treat mutes similar to verbal abuse reports.

I can't count on my hands the number of times people have posted on the forums over the years that they don't mute because then they don't have evidence to punish the person. That's ridiculous. It's also stupid. You want to report this person for your abuse but don't take steps to block him? That doesn't justify his behavior, but why would you willingly subject yourself to abuse for no good reason? Players need to take more responsibility for dealing with situations of verbal abuse instead of putting on Riot to vindicate them when Riot has already given us all the tools we need to deal with these cases as they happen.

TL;DR

1. In my opinion, verbal abuse should lead only to chat restrictions, time/#game based mutes, and permanent mutes, not bans of any kind. Cheating and griefing should lead to bans and not CR/mutes.
2. Riot should have more systems in place to facilitate social restrictions for the outliers.
3. Muting players should be the go-to answer for dealing with toxic players, not reporting them.
4. Mutes should be treated as report, but not necessarily as powerful as reports (sometimes you just don't want to see their messages, whether they are toxic or not.)