Concerns About Permanent Ban

Good afternoon,

I would like to speak to a RIOT specialist that with answers specifically related to the issues that my account faced.

I genuinely feel that I did not deserve the ban that you gave me almost 2 years ago, nor did I deserve the majority of punishments that I was given prior to that point. As previously mentioned, I did indeed have some moments of frustration where I let my intentionally trolling teammates push me to response, though it is hard for most people to not get frustrated at that kind of behavior to some extent or another. However, I want to address how that has nothing to do with breaking the Summoner’s Code of Conduct that we agree to in League of Legends. First, I will discuss the times that I was punished prior to the permanent ban. 90% of these bans were based on the idea that I was doing something wrong by pointing out and not liking or agreeing with my teammates who were openly intentionally throwing or trolling. I am not a negative person, and as far as negative attitude and verbal abuse I know that I am less of both than the majority of players that play the game, including those that still play. I never swear at anyone, I do not use verbal abuse or hate speech against anyone, I do not intentionally feed or throw, I do my best to stay calm and supportive and encouraging to my teammates, and I try my hardest to use persuasion to help my team to do their best. However, it is well known how toxic this community has become, as it was voted to be the most toxic online game for multiple years in a row. Along with this, it is well known how many people consistently intentionally troll and throw, and who act as if this does matter because they have never and will never get punished for it. Unfortunately as far as I have seen, those players have been more correct than incorrect. I am unsure as to why this is the case, since their intentionally feeding and trolling is so blatantly clear that it should be easy to hone in on them and make sure that they understand that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.

However, it seems that instead of taking the initiative to remove those players, you instead focused your efforts on the positive players such as myself that were not ok with those verbally abusive and trolling players having free reign in the game. I received a temporary ban every time that I pointed out to my team that one of our teammates was intentionally trolling (but that we should just ignore them and keep trying), or pointed out to the enemy team that someone on my team is intentionally trolling, or said to the enemy team that they should consider reporting someone who intentionally trolled in order to hopefully get them out of the community. None of this is against the Summoner's Code of Conduct, yet it was used as a backboard for the punishment of my profile. It is sad to think that RIOT games would think that it is more important to punish the players that are frustrated with the number of trolls that RIOT has allowed to stay in the game, instead of punishing the trolls themselves to actually improve the community of this game.

In fact, it is worth noting that the final permanent ban on my account was marked as due to “witch hunting”. I had to submit a support ticket just to ask what that meant. In short, my 4 teammates were all queued together, and were verbally abusive against me, and intentionally trolling me, and I chose to mute them and not respond to their insults. When the enemy team asked me in all chat if my teammates were intentionally trolling me, and I responded saying that yes they were, that earned me the “witch hunting” permanent ban.

Next, I will discuss the other 10% of the punishments that came to my profile, namely, errors in RIOT’s report system as well as openly fraudulent actions by RIOT employees in the punishment of my account. To start, I am unsure if your automated punishment algorithm has improved in the last 2 years, but it became very clear to me that it did not work well during the time that I was getting account punishments. There were multiple times where I was punished after not doing or saying anything, and I contacted RIOT about it in a support ticket, and the refreshingly honest RIOT employee told me that after looking at my account and the punishment ticket, that I did not deserve the punishment that I was given. He apologized profusely to me, saying that the fairly new automated system (“temporarily” replacing the Tribunal system which was currently in “extended maintenance”) still had many flaws in it, and that unfortunately he did not have the power to remove the temporary ban, but that luckily the ban was almost half way over and that hopefully it would not happen to my account again (which it did one more time afterwards).

Along with this, it was made known to me exactly how the RIOT automated ban system works (or worked at that point), including its errors. I understand that this is apparently sensitive information that RIOT did not want to be made public information due to the fear that players would find loopholes to exploit the system in their favor. However, an honest and very helpful RIOT employee in a support ticket made the system very clear to me, detailing that the automated system was designed to track the amount of reports against a player within a certain number of games, and that if the number of report received within that set number of games exceeded what was considered to be an average number of reports, the player was automatically marked for punishment. Unfortunately, as stated openly by this RIOT employee, this system was not very effective (at least yet) at dealing with teammates who are all queued together and all report me, and convince the enemy team to all report me, giving the automated system a false marker of punishment.

Next, unfortunately, is the issue of fraudulent and abusive actions done by RIOT employees against my account. There were multiple times where I submitted either a support ticket or a public forum board's topic asking for a RIOT employee to explain to me how my actions of pointing out trolls violated anything within the Summoner's Code. In more than a handful of these situations, a RIOT employee eventually responded and escalated to being openly verbally abusive against me, often using hate speech and threats to deter me from responding any further.

With this, there was at least one horribly illegal situation where I played with a certain player that was verbally abusive and intentionally trolling the team for the whole game. I stood up to him, defending my teammates whom he was harassing (to the level of trying to convince them to commit suicide) and trying to boost their motivation to keep trying to win even though this player was being toxic and trolling. The player continued to verbally harass and swear at me in every profane way imaginable, and then at the end of the game commented to me that his brother in law had been spectating our entire game and was posting it to his Twitch account. He then said that this brother in law (whose account he named) was also a RIOT employee who made sure that he would never get banned no matter what he did, and who was working on putting in a permanent ban punishment for me as we spoke. I logged out of the post game chat, and instantly got a notification of a temporary ban. I then submitted a support ticket outlining the details of what had happened, and I received a response from a RIOT employee that had essentially the same name as the brother in law's account that had been cited by the verbally abusive player. This RIOT employee then said that I deserved my punishment and that no further response would be allowed, and terminated the support ticket. I then submitted another support ticket asking for another RIOT employee, this time focusing on a legitimate concern of a fraudulent action by a RIOT employee. The response that I got was unhelpful at best, essentially saying "we cannot confirm or deny the actions of any RIOT employee, we don't think that this RIOT employee is the brother in law of that player, and your ban will not be removed". After being unbanned, I checked the profile and match history of the verbally abusive and trolling player, and he had not received any temporary ban over the course of the month (visible due to him playing games at least once every day).

It is also worth noting that upon trying to locate many of these support tickets and board posts that have the information that I have referenced, in order to provide screenshots of them for verification on board posts on the same topic, I found that all of those tickets and board posts had been manually deleted by RIOT. The instances showing RIOT employee hate speech and threats against me, the instances where RIOT employees shared information with me about the automated ban system and apologized for me receiving an undeserved ban from it, as well as other tickets were all permanently deleted.

Finally, I will address some of the statements made previously to this comment by the RIOT employee who responded to my support ticket. You say that you cannot turn a blind eye to the “negative impact” that I was having on my games. As mentioned, I did not have a negative impact in my games. I was honored in many of them for being the teammate willing to stand up to the verbally abusive and trolling teammates, and defending my other teammates and encouraging them to keep trying even though we were stuck with someone who was trying their hardest to throw the game. I did indeed invest a lot of time and effort into this account, which ironically caused RIOT to send an email to this account stating that me as an important part of our community and as a long-time Nautilus player should respond with my insights into the champion’s lore, abilities, and overall game appeal to help RIOT games improve him as a champion. You say that the banning of my account was in order to “maintain a positive game environment”. Unfortunately, you banned the wrong person if that was your goal. That is like watching while a concerned citizen stops an armed robber that you let through the door, then swooping in, arresting the concerned citizen, and letting the robber walk free, because the citizen was “not maintaining a positive environment”.

Again, I would ask for a RIOT employee to address this matter personally. I plan on pushing this as far up the chain as need be until I can find answers to the very concerning things that I have had to deal with in this account. I plan on posting this to a discussion board to hopefully get some insight and support from the community as well.

Eternal Colossus Tanky Support Specialist "Your blade appears quite dull"