Boards›Player Behavior

Punishment (the concept)

mlm olo mlm·8/8/2018, 8:14:04 AM·3 votes·4,065 views

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03342351.pdf

The link shows a couple things. First, punishment is not a cure. Second, consistent and timely punishment is necessary or else relapse occurs. If League of Legends is to be a toxic-free environment, it is going to take more than just a punishment system. Especially relevant to this forums where it is a common sight to see requests for punishment.

Relevant to the "reform experiment" as well. Punishment alone is not going to be super effective at "reform". While I think it is great to experiment with reform, the "threat of punishment" strategy has already been tried. That is what got them into the "perma-banned" status to begin with. Try something other than "behave or we will punish you (again)".

Since punishment is a temporary behavior modifier, is tier-based escalating punishments beneficial? My hypothesis is that the repeated issuance of punishment is responsible for "reform". The severity of punishment may affect time between relapse.

75 Comments

Shukr4n8/8/2018, 8:18:14 AM8 votes

toxicity comes from players, not from game.

devs are not parents, neither teachers, neither "policemen", devs are developing the game.

how do u cure a sickness that is caused by players and not by the game? by informing those players that their attitude is not suited for the game .

what do u do if some players decide to not careing about the rules put by devs to have a decent envointment? they create a ladder of punishments that, like a ladder, restrict priviledges of such players the more they break rules.

when u have broke rules enough to be tagged as "non suited at all" they permaba you.

permaban is not a punishment anymore. permaban is a clear sign that states " WE dont wat you to play OUR game. go away".

AeroWaffle8/8/2018, 9:04:39 AM8 votes

The link shows a couple things. First, punishment is not a cure.

It's not meant to be. It's a punishment. Threat or risk of punishment is a deterrent, nothing more. Nothing will prevent everyone from being assholes to each other, the best that can hope to be achieved is deterring people who hold value in their account.

Second, consistent and timely punishment is necessary or else relapse occurs.

The Tribunal was shelved in favor of this mostly automatic system for this very reason.

Try something other than "behave or we will punish you (again)".

Which is what the honor system is.

At some point, it's not worth attempting to get the player to actually follow the rules while still allowing the player access to their account. They've shown that they will continue to behave poorly despite;

Being told not to.
Restricted from chat and also banned for a period of time.
Shown that their behavior is disagreeable
Losing the benefits of honor and end of season rewards.

At that point, why should Riot be interested in still trying to keep this person as a customer?

TrulyBland8/8/2018, 9:16:20 AM8 votes

The paper is on the effect of punishment on instinctive behaviour. And while certain aspects that fuel toxicity might be instinctive, the actual act of exhibiting negative behaviour is not, or at the very least is obviously an instinct that can be supressed without any punishment whatsoever, seeing as how most people are doing fine.

Unless you want to call Riot's statistics fake, there is actually a really small relapse rate, which further debunks your argument. The actual statistics Riot has on relapse rate are precisely how we ended up with the tier-based system to begin with. The older system saw most people reform after the first punishment, with the vast majority of players reforming after getting a 14-day ban or earlier, with only a tiny minority of players who receive a second 14-day ban ever reforming. Most people who do not clean up their act after a 14-day ban never do. And we're not talking about a relapse here, we're talking about absolutely no change in behaviour. And if that's what happens, then that means the punishment in itself doesn't have any effect. Repeatedly applying a punishment that people do not care about doesn't help. This is further backed up by the fact that a lot of permabanned players still do not see any flaw in their behaviour and simply keep getting new accounts permabanned.

Permabans are the ultimate punishment. Riot cannot feasibly impose any stronger punishment. If people don't care about the strongest punishment you can issue all you can do is hope they get bored eventually.

SaberRattler8/9/2018, 6:06:00 AM1 votes

I'd like to think humans have a greater capacity for empathy, social interaction, and overall concern for community well-being as opposed to mice.
If we're going to go down the road of "punishments are clearly not deterring the crime, therefore we shouldn't have punishments" that's really extreme; besides a bit on the nose..... If we're going to apply that as a rule of thumb..... the value we place on social norms is pretty much lost.
We do have more than a punishment system. We have a reward system; it's called the honor system. It's up to players to chose what they want. There's a carrot and stick. For some reason, certain players like getting the stick. >_> It's like they see the carrot and go "naw..... I'm going to not do that.... I'm going to do this other thing that I KNOW is going to get me punished", then cry foul when they get punished.
Come to a devdrinkup. Talk to any community manager from ANY game. They'll tell you that less than 5% of the player base are active on their forums. This rule of thumb includes League. Hell it's only like 1/10th of the player base even pays attention to the lol esports scene if you go by viewership numbers and server pop. That's why Riot perpetually states that while they like engaging with Reddit Lol community, it's also a tiny fraction of the community. It would be crazy to cater any game's punishment system based on what's posted on it's forums.

HalcyonDweller8/10/2018, 6:00:13 PM1 votes

The reason that the punishment doesn't stop [edit: certain kinds of] toxicity in league is because the ultimate punishment just forces the truly malicious actors to start over on a new account. And because there is no barrier to entry they can just do this over and over and over again.

In order to effectively control the types of players who are unrepentant and have every intention of not changing, the best way to do it would probably be not to permaban them, but to instead give them temporary bans. With temporary bans, it's not worth the time and effort to level up a new account, so the person will just wait for their account to become usable again.

This way, when a person gets a ban, they will not simply switch to an alt account and keep going at being a toxic scrub, they will be more likely to wait it out and actually not play for the duration of their ban.