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Have you had an account banned for comms that you spent more than 100 dollars on?

Vll5tQL3xS·9/18/2018, 3:37:48 PM·10 votes·5,660 views

Hey all you Hot Headed League players!

If you have had an account banned with more than 100 dollars in RP purchased its time to know the facts

Let me explain.

Within the League of Legends terms of service agreement in fine text it explains how your account, and everything attached to your account is the property of Riot Games Inc. That means that if you purchase RP and buy your account cosmetic skins and other bonuses, you are in fact not the owner of these, or any purchases made in the League of Legends store because they are linked to your account. This means that if your account is banned, all of the purchases you have made are lost in a manner of speaking. The account is never deleted, but it will no longer operate, as many of you may know. Even if you just purchased 100 dollars in RP right before you are banned, and never purchased anything from the store, that money is gone, and you will not be reimbursed.

Riot has stood on this contract they force players to agree to before allowing them to create an account, but what many players who have been put through this do not know, is that there is in fact no legal precedent protecting this kind of legal agreement. For one, many of the players who have had accounts banned are not 16 years of age, and in many states are barred from entering into legally binding contracts. On top of that, Riot uses keywords in their online platform front such as "Store" "Purchase" and "Buy" which all imply ownership, and can be disputed in a court of law. Finally, a large majority of account bans are due to communication violations of the "Summoners Code" only possible through the communication platform Riot provides its players. In other words, Riot is providing players with the means to violate the Summoners Code with a chat system that is not required to play the game itself. Riot even begins punishing players by limiting this chat system, but then escalates the punishment with a one time suspension, followed by a permanent ban. Riot clearly could solve communication violations by limiting or removing a players ability to communicate, but instead they choose to remove accounts from players entirely.

Through independent studies we now know that, of the players who do have accounts banned, over 90% of those players create new accounts, and continue to play League of Legends at a full capacity because Riot does not care if a player remakes an account, but instead "tries to limit toxicity by targeting the problem accounts themselves." Furthermore, of those players over 75% of them rebuy skins on their newly made accounts they have already purchased on their banned account. To put it plainly, Riot has made huge profits banning accounts.

To try to explain this in a real world setting, imagine a venue which allowed people to come and play a team sport like football for free. They make you agree to a set of rules before entering the game, and in order to play you had to receive a plain Jersey from the company with a unique name binding it to you. They then allow you to purchase cosmetics for this Jersey they have given you. If you violated said rules the venue would not remove you, but instead they would just take your jersey, cosmetics and all, but you would be allowed to get yourself a second jersey with a new name, and continue to buy cosmetics for this new jersey. How much sense does that make in keeping unsportsmanlike players out of the venue? How is this stopping the problem? To be frank, this is not a normal business practice.

Riot claims their permabans are to reduce toxicity, but really they are to increase revenue, and this runs along with Racketeering, which is a criminal offense where an individual or party offers a solution to a problem that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the individual or parties existence, in our case it is the chat system provided by Riot Games. Obviously calling 911 if your account gets banned isn't going to get you very far, but that doesn't mean you have no legal rights, or that possible illegal violations are not being made against you. It has been left unchecked for so long because most of their target audience are adolescent and young adults who are not wise to this act, and do not know how to move forward when losing hundreds if not thousands of dollars to this scheme.

If it wasn't about the money Riot would not ban accounts for communication violations. They would simply remove a players ability to communicate through chat, so we recommend looking into your legal options. It would be difficult to do anything alone against a money giant like Riot, but together there is a chance to stop these unfair practices.

163 Comments

Chermorg9/18/2018, 3:44:09 PM21 votes

There is in fact much legal precedent for this.

If you actually think that this is illegal, I encourage you to sue them. I will laugh my ass off watching you fail to even find a lawyer to take the case, or if you do, watch you throw your own money at it just to have yourself laughed out of the courtroom by the judge.

Oh, by the way, your “independent studies” that aren’t referenced or proven in any way don’t exist. Just want to point that out.

usul12029/18/2018, 3:42:53 PM9 votes

Riot bans accounts that have spent money and those that have not. No bias has been found afaik. Also, where are you getting your 'independent studies'? You didn't link anything and I was unable to find those statistics online anywhere.

ModPrandine9/18/2018, 4:04:50 PM9 votes

The TL:DR is that you're just another person who thinks that Riot only cares about money, which is why they permaban people. That couldn't be further from the truth. First of all, Riot tried permamutes in the past and it failed since most people with them just resorted to trolling, inting and griefing. Chat itself is not the issue, the people misusing it are. From Riot Tantram:

It really breaks down into two categories.

1.) Helping players reform 2.) Shielding others from the behavior, at a cost.

We used to issue chat restrictions that essentially scaled indefinitely.

We were able to determine that after a certain point the penalty no longer helped with reform. The 10-game and 25-game counts for chat restrictions are based on data that they were both light enough, and felt strict enough to encourage people to understand their behavior is unacceptable in game and change it.

We also saw that the players in this 'large restriction' category defaulted to gameplay altering means of harassing their team. It caused an increase in feeding and trolling.

The sample size of this population and time frame is huge. Essentially the time spanning from the introduction of chat restrictions to the introduction of IFS.

So my question for you is, would you rather have more feeders and less negative chat?

Second off, not all permabanned players make a new account, and not all that do spend money on that new account. Though Riot does not want permabanned players to make new accounts they cannot stop them from doing so without causing collateral damage. That said though however, they do have ways of determining if multiple accounts are the same person, and not only that but lower leveled accounts are judged much harsher than higher leveled accounts are to help combat this problem. Besides, just like in other businesses toxic customers actually drive AWAY business, which in turn means LESS money for the owners. Because of this it's actually in Riot's best interest to kick out the ones driving away business than to keep them around and risk going out of business. To quote Kei143:

When Riot permabans someone, their philosophy is "the chances of this guy reforming isn't a whole lot, we'd rather not have him in the game". Thus in their eyes, they have already written off the toxic player as a paying client.

From a business standpoint, do they want to remove the toxic guy who has spent $500 but is causing a negative environment for 4-9 other players in every game? Those non-toxics are also spending $500 and probably will spend more, promote the game more when they are enjoying the game AND they won't cause a negative environment.

I personally think it is a fine argument to protect the ones that are paying money and aren't toxic rather than protecting the ones that may pay the same amount but are toxic.

If a player truly valued their account then they should have thought of that before it got to the point where they got permabanned. Spending money =/= immunity to the rules like so many people like to believe foolishly.

Finally Riot isn't committing any felonies here, as you're getting exactly what you payed for: RP equal to the amount of money spent (i.e. $20=$20 worth of RP). The stuff we own on our accounts isn't actually ours, we're just merely renting that space for as long as we abide by the rules, which put simply is "don't be a jerk", aka "don't do or say anything that you know will just tick people off".

TL:DR your argument is flawed and has been debunked many times before. Riot is doing nothing wrong by upholding the rules they've set in place. Get over it.

Vll5tQL3xS9/18/2018, 4:52:48 PM2 votes

I cannot reveal who I am with because we are in the process of creating a class action law suite against Riot games for what we believe are unfair business practices being made by Riot Games. I was told by a moderator that I cannot reveal or direct anyone to our services. From the post in the boards yesterday I revealed who we were with, and asked people to come forward with their stories. I linked an email. I can only say that if you believe you have been violated by this system I think it is in your best interest to look into your legal options.

The independent study is being conducted by students at several universities in the United States, and so far that is the data we have gathered. Since we are members of one of the universities participating in the study, we cannot reveal the names of the universities because that would be revealing ourselves to you.