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14 day ban because playing Nunu Support with Smite is "stealing other people's roles"...?

Take the Draw·2/26/2017, 1:31:58 AM·1,086 votes·263,819 views

Hello, I am Take the Draw, I'm a Nunu one trick pony. I'm almost always listed as the #1 Nunu in NA on various champion skill sites, I ended Season 4 in Challenger (rank 176), and after a 2 year break, I peaked this season at Diamond 1 75 LP. Compared to season 4, I noticed that Nunu jungle is far weaker than it used to be. Counterjungling just isn't as effective as before due to changes in jungler experience gain as well as the addition of Gromp/Scuttle and the change to Raptor camp that makes Nunu's single-target counterjungle much worse.

That said, the long camp respawn times have made it a viable strategy still. The problem is there's very little time with Nunu's abysmal clear speeds to counterjungle and clear your own jungle, which is why I've started playing Nunu as a support rather than a solo jungler. This lets you keep Nunu's great counterjungling and insane neutral objective control, while still preserving the map pressure of having a jungler that can actually gank and quickly clear your own jungle. I've spent hundreds of hours honing this strategy and have developed it to the point that I feel confident that I can achieve at least Master tier with it.

The last game of solo queue I played was against Phreak. We won in extremely convincing fashion, the VOD of which can be found on my Twitch page here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/123657437

The next afternoon I get an e-mail saying that my account was flagged for manual audit and issued a two week suspension, with the warning that if my account is audited again that the next penalty will be a permaban. In the 4 years I've had this account, I've never been banned or suspended previously. I try every game I play, even when I have to deal with extremely belligerent teammates.

The first response I got from Player Support (funny enough, the exact same specialist who handled the similar Singed support case) was a boilerplate saying that I was engaging in 'negative behavior' :

http://imgur.com/qAjp3bJ .

The follow up explanation is that I was "stealing other people's roles" and "failing to communicate":
http://imgur.com/U8RLyn7 .

Since I queue Support/Jungle, I get Autofill protection, which means that I am guaranteed one of these two roles. As you can see in my match history: https://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=take+the+draw I've only ever played Ivern Jungle and Support Nunu in my entire two years of play, with the exception of one Veigar game and one Teemo game in which I was in a full premade with friends. Very obviously the specialist is interpreting my Support Nunu with Smite as stealing the Jungle role, despite the contradictory claim that off meta picks were okay.

I'm also not entirely sure where this "failing to communicate" thing is coming from. I have hours of VODs on my Twitch channel dating back to when I first theorycrafted this strategy that you can see here: twitch.tv/itslevi . I type a paragraph long explanation at the beginning of every champion select. I answer questions and give champion recommendations if people ask. I communicate more than almost anyone I've played with in game both with pings and chat since working with my team is essential to my strategy's success.

I compiled data over my last 10 wins and losses (to minimize the effects of correlation), which can be seen here (my na.op.gg is publicly available so anyone can feel free to audit this for accuracy):

http://imgur.com/DrT7lFG

As you can see I place more wards than most of the opponents' supports (and usually in more valuable, deep jungle locations), as well as serving as a kind of mobile ward myself. Quite frankly, I completely dominate neutral objectives, and the counts over my last 10 wins and losses were:

53 Dragons for my team vs 15 for the enemy team 18 Barons for my team vs 5 for the enemy team 11 Rift Heralds for my team vs 0 for the enemy team

How would this be possible if I was "failing to communicate"? The data just doesn't support that ridiculous claim. Further, the data shows that while my bot lane does tend to do worse than the enemy bot lane playing most of the games 1v2, they're on average only 5% behind on gold but the enemy jungler is 6% behind. My bot lanes also get solo experience, and my other solo lanes tend to overperform because their lane opponents have to defend against constant invades and they get ganked way less than they would under traditional play.

I've worked very hard to develop a strategy that's viable at high Elo with a champion that's mostly been forgotten, and Riot has essentially empowered people to reject it just because they don't want to try anything new.

1,525 Comments

Enselus2/26/2017, 3:51:26 AM335 votes

That guy honestly deserves to be fired

Clapper of Asses2/26/2017, 5:13:04 AM216 votes

The funny thing is that Nunu is primary SUPPORT and secondary fighter. Riot intended him to be a support so you're technically playing nunu how they wanted him to be played :D

RiotWookieeCookie2/28/2017, 4:43:04 AM192 votes

Here we are again! The case of_ “Unusual Pick that Throws A Game on Its head”_ vs “The Teammates going WTF Is Going On”.

If you’re just tuning in we previously covered this topic with a similar case in December: “Support Singed isn't bannable, but that's not the point”.

We feel that the situation between these two edge cases are very similar. But it’s obvious we need to keep updating a few processes to smooth out any rare repeats in the future. And rare is what we’d call this; it’s a very unique edge case that seems to only present itself once every few months among thousands of audits that we process.

Let’s re-iterate our stance from before:

Q: Can I get banned for choosing a champion or strategy that is outside the current meta?

A: 100% no. Choosing a champion or strategy outside of the current meta is not a factor we take into account when reviewing accounts. On any given day tens of thousands of players are making unusual picks in the game and they’ll never receive penalties in any form.

Q: So why does this issue keep coming up? What makes it different?

A: Riot Gromp said it best in the previous post when they stated: “...common sense and good sportsmanship say that experimenting players need to clearly communicate intent and win conditions to their teammates.” League of Legends is a team game and sometimes the biggest challenge can be coordinating with 4 other strangers who share a common goal; victory. If a player is going to rewrite the rules for the rest of their team then there is more pressure to properly communicate to everyone what they want the plan to be, and what they think everyone should do to achieve it.

But wait! Communication doesn’t stop after you press the Enter button on your keyboard; and that’s where we saw a problem in this particular case. All of us need to be aware of the difference of communicating “with” someone vs. communicating “at” someone. Telling your team what you’re going to do and then ignoring them isn’t really working with them it’s holding them hostage. Telling your team what you want to do and actually working towards a common plan is a central part to playing any team based game.

In this case what we observed was an expert Nunu counter-jungler throwing the meta on it’s head with a respectable win rate of 53%. While pretty impressive on it’s own, we also found that nearly 50% of their games were reported by teammates as frustrating and unfun. Keep in mind, this isn’t just teammates in losing games, this is teammates across all of his games; victories included.

The message was pretty clear to us, this player is serious about_ Making Nunu Great Again_ but they are leaving a trail of dissatisfaction, frustration, and anger in their wake.

Winning is not the end all be all of League. We want players to have fun but not at the expense of teammates. Ideally this means players will coordinate among themselves in a given match and react to the unique circumstances they end up in. If a player is consistently forcing “their vision” on the rest of the team **and **refusing to adapt to their needs we reserve the right to intervene. That’s what happened here (and before with the Singed case); players cried out how terrible the experience was for them and we intervened.

Moving forward we’re going to keep updating our processes for these edge cases. We will still be on the lookout for situations where a player is creating a really negative experience for everyone else and we will intervene when necessary. In this case it’s undeniable that TakeTheDraw wants to win even if their approach leaves a lot to be desired. The effects on others in his games were enough for us to lock the account and we stand by that. But our agents were not properly prepared with a process to handle this edge case when they wrote in and that is on me. I will be working with the team to clarify an escalation process that emphasizes clearer feedback and opens the door for ban reductions if we believe that someone can make changes to their play style allowing them to continue crushing the meta but not at the expense of their teammates.

Jesus is Savior2/26/2017, 3:38:13 AM155 votes

My smurf got permabanned for playing cinderhulk nunu top with smite.

It took me a year to finally get my account back.

The system is fucked.

BastionKross2/26/2017, 1:47:09 AM54 votes

How would this be possible if I was "failing to communicate"? The data just doesn't support that ridiculous claim. Further, the data shows that while my bot lane does tend to do worse than the enemy bot lane playing most of the games 1v2, they're on average only 5% behind on gold but the enemy jungler is 6% behind. My bot lanes also get solo experience, and my other solo lanes tend to overperform because their lane opponents have to defend against constant invades and they get ganked way less than they would under traditional play.

So you queue up for support, leave your marksman to 2v1, and counterjungle instead? I can't imagine a lot of marksmen are okay with that, especially in SoloQ.

When you copy/paste your paragraph and answer questions in champ select, do you only do this strat when the marksman is cool with being left alone or do you do it regardless of what they want? If it's the latter, then that does count as failing to communicate. There's a huge difference between communication:

"Hey, I'd like to try this off meta strat, but if you're not down I can just normal support"

and dictation:

"I'm going to be doing this off meta strat, and if you're not down with that, too bad."

That is what got Singed Guy in hot water, and as far as we know, he stopped doing his strat outside of premade play and he's golden.