Unreliable rules enforcement

Odreiw··1 votes·335 views

The way it works is this:

Most of the penalties are automated, AFAIK, and support tickets usually don't accomplish anything even if merited (although, to be fair, people who successfully appeal something are less likely to post about it, so it could just be that I only see the negative results).

The issue with this is the following:

If a player spends the first 10 or so minutes trolling or griefing, and then starts legitimately trying to cooperate with the team and win, that player virtually never gets reported by anyone other than the immediate victim (eg the person runs to lane, shoves the waves to steal xp, feeds the laner, and puts the other mid at level 6 while you're at 3. Yes, this is specific for a reason).

That is, this player gets away with both ruining the enjoyment and ruining the chances of winning the game, with no penalty. The problem with this result is that it enforces a rather unfortunate dichotomy. You can then do one of two things:

  1. Ignore it and play on. Mostly better, but then the player gets off with no penalty for ruining the game. Plus you're almost certainly going to lose anyway, so sportsmanship doesn't affect the outcome of the game.
  2. Vigilante-esque self-enforcement of the rules by flaming the person. Not a good option, but it happens. The main issue is that the other player still has no penalty.

For the love of god, riot, please at least have human review on these things. I'm usually pretty calm and supportive - I know mistakes happen; they're annoying, but I make them too, and I don't hold them against people. However, active griefing in a single game rarely carries a penalty, so I flamed people twice for the exact behavior described above and now I'm chat restricted and they got literally nothing.

I'm not arguing against the chat restriction; yes, I broke the rules. But so did they, and it's incredibly frustrating that the only recourse available to me is to be toxic, when they never get punished. Reviewing cases is used to determine if the penalty was merited, but has no option to see if someone else also deserved punishment. Please add a way to do this. I don't like flaming; it's not fun, but neither is the fact that your report system actively enforces doing nothing when someone goes from trolling to pretending to try.

4 Comments

TrulyBland1 votes

that player virtually never gets reported by anyone other than the immediate victim

Doesn't matter. One report is enough to trigger the automated review

Generally, the problem is that even for a human, even when watching a replay, it's not exactly an easy task to determine whether somebody is feeding or just having a bad game. That might not apply to your case in particular, but now think about what it would mean to manually review every single case where somebody reported another person for intentional feeding. It's simply not feasible to have every report for intentional feeding handled by a human. What supports this point is that despite what you apparently assume, Riot does still do manual reviews, both for verbal toxicity and griefing. But it's simply not enough by far to deal with the huge amount of games that are played every day.

Odreiw1 votes

Well, thanks for the information. At least now I know that my reports count toward something, even if it's unlikely anything will actually come of them. Also, if I recall correctly, the Tribunal was specifically to have human review without forcing Riot to spend millions on outsourced employees, but then they got rid of it.

TrulyBland2 votes

Well... the problem was that Tribunal was extremely slow... and with that I mean literally too slow to keep up with the reports. Tribunal had cases that were months old still being voted on. It's why sometimes cases would show up with only one game in which they were not even remotely toxic... because they were toxic a few months ago, but those games were removed due to being too old.

Tribunal was straight-up brilliant when it came to transparency and the feeling that something was being done about all the toxic assholes out there. And I really hope that Riot will improve on that in the future. But it was neither efficient nor really effective.

Not saying the current system for detecting feeders is good, but Tribunal was honestly not that different. Both systems really only caught the worst of the worst.

Odreiw1 votes

Honestly, like I said in the original post, I'm not put out by the chat restriction, per se, as I did violate the rules. It's just really frustrating that I'm in a typical game, where I'm actively trying to communicate with my teammates to coordinate ganks/roams what-have-you, and a single game (I got the actual notification today, so I know it was only the one game, rather than the two I previously thought) is keeping me from doing that.

Also, the original point of the post was that, in this particular instance, the other player only griefed for a short period of the game (he ganked at level 2 and dove a mid with flash/barrier, died and didn't get the kill, then started shoving waves, leeching xp, and intentionally gave another kill+blue buff to that aforementioned mid, and then proceeded to grief much more passively - ie ignoring opportunities for free kills where he literally had to walk mid and alpha strike to secure a kill on the person with no sums). Since he stopped doing anything except refusing to gank (I'm not kidding - their mid laner was between 200-300 hp constantly pushed up for several minutes, with no flash for all of it and no ult most of the time), which is normally just a dick move, and is only griefing in the context of our earlier interactions, my teammates disagreed with me about reporting him.

That's when I got toxic about it, since there was no expectation that anything would happen to him otherwise. Hence I got automatically restricted because someone reported me and the system completely ignored context and didn't punish him, because he didn't die a bunch of times - he actively inted exactly one time, which the system will not catch, and the rest of his griefing was in a manner that the system will not flag (oh, he's just csing/spending a lot of time focusing on a single lane; nothing to see here). My problem isn't being punished for my behavior, it's that the griefer didn't get anything, since he didn't rack up 11 or 12 deaths or something equally ridiculous.

To reiterate, although I now know that reporting him has at least the potential to do something, he didn't grief in a way the system will catch, so even a game flagged by a player report will just be ignored by the system. It sucks dick.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with you about the problems with the Tribunal. I'm just saying that the current system, as I understand it (system considers games flagged by player reports, then decides whether or not they are actionable, without further human input), sucks and almost certainly doesn't catch anything but the most blatant violations (ie leaves too many people unpunished when they should receive something).

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