How to spot "ninja griefing" in the tribunal?
I don't mind tactics I don't agree with, but sometimes, you're in these games with allies, and you can tell by 20 minutes in that they've likely been banned before for toxic behavior. Not because they're chat is toxic. Oh no, they're not chatting ANYTHING. They've just found systematic ways to be extremely subversive the moment you mute the first person who IS toxic in chat. Clever rage-tactics that won't get them flagged and banned again, but still allow them to be total jerks, deliberately ruining the experience for other players while spiraling the team into defeat.
Example: recently, while I was jungling, our top kalista kept dueling fiora on purpose. Literally, Kalista went in. She didn't get caught out trying to grab cs in a frozen lane or anything. Half the time, I'd be 10 seconds away. All she had to do was wait and not pretend a ranged adc could duel the master duelist melee assassin fighter. THAT'S not where the "clever rage-tactics" comes in. She wasn't griefing. Just bad plays. But after she dies about 5 times, she goes "jungle useless", etc. (again, STILL not what I'm referring to. This is OBVIOUSLY reportable chat behavior. I'm about to get the sticking point.) So I mute, after laying out the truth of the situation in detail... at which point, her, and two other allies start systematically taking all my jungle mobs. Mind you, I'm a devourer jungle, and I need those. They weren't even trying to regain gold/experience, most of them were ahead in their lanes. Especially mid, which had already taken two towers. They could have roamed bot or top and helped the situation. They could have done ANYTHING. Instead, they'd always go straight for jungle mobs as soon as they were up. I didn't get sated that whole game. I can only assume they were grouped with Kalista, and didn't want to say anything directly, once they knew she was getting reported and, most likely, banned. But at the same time, they felt it was time to turn on League-of-Children mode. Not surprisingly, we started incrementally losing from that point onward, as they continued to engage in "anti-teamwork" to no end.
Now, the problem is, how do you interpret that behavior in the tribunal? They're not feeding. They're not raging. They're not afking. They're not doing anything that's overtly GRIEFING BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (other than Kalista in chat). Can you really say in the tribunal, that someone getting a little extra farm is griefing? But at the same time, I KNOW they're griefing. It's like I'm watching a procedural crime drama. Ya know, where a common plot device is to have a high-class criminal get off in court on technicalities.
I'm just wondering, any thoughts on how to ban these suckers? You don't want to ban people for non-meta tactics, or not agreeing with teammates on strategy (welcome to every other League game ever.) But people shouldn't get away with this crap.
Plus, on another note, Riot keeps messing up their report categories. Griefing covers a wide range of behaviors, and yet they can't stop tagging "intentionally feeding" on it. Camping platform is griefing, and it's different from disconnecting/afking. Oh they're not afk. They're spamming dance too much to be afk. CSing in jungle while you actively ignore every objective, enemy champ, teamfight, and literally make no attempts to win the game for 15 minutes straight, is also griefing. If you're Yi early game, sure, you're farming up sometimes that way. But if you're ahead, and you're team is losing, and you have several chances to kill enemies with 2 bars of health nearby, or kill towers that aren't defended for several minutes, heck, the enemy team is pusing your base... you're most certainly griefing.
NONE of the behaviors described in the last paragraph are feeding. But the last one, in particular, is sinister, because it's so hard to definitively characterize. Nasus players do something SIMILAR to that a lot, because they love their Q, not because they're griefing (I still hate Nasus players for that, but if they started getting banned for it, I'd be pissed. Restricting strategies is NOT what the tribunal is for.) So how to you catch this under-the-radar griefing?
