Boards›Player Behavior

We need to talk about the report system and what I believe to be it's flaws.

Unstoppable Axe·6/5/2017, 6:52:04 AM·2 votes·661 views

Okay riot, I would like to say before I start that I love league of legends, I think the work you guys do is genuinely brilliant but I feel you have taken a misstep in how reporting currently works and making players feel like their reports matter. Now, to get into the heart of the problem, I feel that making failed reports reduce your relevancy in reports so drastically is a mistake. Okay, hear me out, I know that sounds backwards and confusing, but I can give you reasons on why that system is flawed, and maybe what you could do to make players feel like they have more agency.

  1. Reporting mild to moderate toxicity is punished. Okay, so currently when you report someone who was only partly toxic it really hurts to know that if my report wasn't against a severe enough offense, I get punished by having my reports be less relevant.
  2. As a result of #1, people become more afraid to report genuinely toxic people, therefore you end up with a lot of people who just won't report anyone because they feel like it will be pointless.
  3. More genuinely toxic people slip through the cracks and have free reign to ruin games for people.

Okay, so now that we've established some flaws with making failed reports hurt, I'd like to offer some potential ideas or solutions.

  1. Some sort of mild report, like the opposite of an honor that can increase your normal reports relevancy. If the problem is mild toxicity being reported and the offense simply not being harsh enough, a potential solution could be to encourage letting riot know that either the person was rude, or abusive without issuing a report. The flaw I see with doing this is riot will either have to review more chat logs or something like the tribunal needs to be in place for a way to review these mild offenses. I'm not sure what sort of punishment should be in place for these mild reports or anti-honors, but I would like to hear what everyone else thinks about this idea and it's potential pros and cons.
  2. If the instant feedback report system detects some toxicity, but not enough for a punishment to be issued, the player who made the report loses no credibility. I feel like this is the most simple and elegant solution to the problem because to go with idea #1 opens up a whole other can of worms because there will be more reports to deal with. There aren't any cons to this solution that I can see, but who knows, maybe there is a reason why this isn't the case.

I really hope that this post starts some discussion between the league community and riot, and I can only hope we come to the perfect solution that can benefit everybody. Edit: I apparently have had some misinformation in the process of making this post! I'm actually super glad that's the case.

9 Comments

Deep Terror Nami6/5/2017, 6:54:33 AM4 votes

I feel that making failed reports reduce your relevancy in reports so drastically is a mistake

Good news then; they don't! The Instant Feedback System never actually used report weight like the Tribunal did. Every single report triggers a review.

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/9VrUtrJo-being-solo-and-having-a-team-report?comment=00000000000200000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

scazzman6/5/2017, 8:36:41 AM2 votes

report weight no longer exists, however a bigger problem exists that i feel riot NEEDS to address. FLAMEBAITING. or the act of deliberately riling players up for the purpose of getting banned. riot's policy of "context doesnt matter" brings out people who abuse the report system as another tool for bullying. while being just passive aggressive enough to fly under the radar if the player reports them back.

NOW supposedly, the system is designed to ignore the occasional slip up, and supposedly false reports are thrown out. however

lets say hypothetically, the report system filters reports as "valid" or "inconclusive" reports arent considered "false" until a manual review, and therefore stay on a players account until manual review.

the report system takes 5 "toxic" games within 20 games to trigger a punishment. "hypothetical number"

games reported are treated as "toxic" until manually reviewed to be false, and after 5 "inconclusive" reports, a manual review is triggered. OR. the automated system gets a real report. and the "inconclusive' games are treated as toxic. ignoring manual review.

lets say a player gets false reported 4 times. on the 5th game. he gets flamebaited, and takes the bait. he now gets a chat restriction "assuming it was his first punishment, and no hate speech was used" those false reports, actually contributed to that player's ban more then the real report

welovegag6/5/2017, 7:53:41 AM1 votes

The thing is everyone has opinions of the amount of toxicity that person was, but to be honest, its not like people can manually ban or check what that particular players have done in games or typed, the only thing is to see if they have got filtered with foul language or sensitive words? (like an auto-mechanic thing) Honestly, i gave up the report system

Dreampod6/5/2017, 7:42:29 PM1 votes

I would also love to see a button that people could push that indicates that they found someone unpleasant to play with because of their behaviour. I think that it could help give borderline behaviour a way of getting censured before it escalates to punishable (I think most people would respond well to a pop up saying "37% of players you've played with recently wish you hadn't been in their game" to help provide the same sort of social norms in an online space that would occur in the real world with pickup games if someone consistently misbehaved. I've often debated whether to report borderline behaviour that, if it were a one off occurrence would be wrong but tolerable but would be punishment worthy if that low level of harassment of other players were occurring on a regular basis.

The other beneficial thing it might do is reduce false reports by players who are angry at another player who they blame for the loss but didn't actually do anything punishable.