Why would someone, who's never done anything aside from being a bit too aggressive with their communication, turn to something that they've never done before? Is it a logical assumption that someone who argues a lot will turn to physical abuse if they suddenly can't speak?
Anger is a gnawing type of emotion. It's not something you can sit idly with and let creep out like sadness or relish like joy - anger bites, and holding it back in any fashion tends to compound it more than restrain it. And surely, we've all heard the line somewhere before; "they were such a nice person, I didn't expect they'd do that".
Sure, "I've never fed/trolled and would never feed/troll" are easy enough arguments to fall back on when it's asserted that permanently-chat-restricted players just resorted to trolling/feeding, but the fact of the matter is, we can't account for whether or not someone would be able to keep their cool under extreme duress.
Which is why we have to point out; closing off one method of toxicity (chat) doesn't magically prevent the player from being toxic. They just have less options (trolling, feeding) with which to express their misguided anger.
What actually makes that claim a solid counter-point? There are rules in place for whatever form of toxicity they present, so why is it really an issue? "I can't chat so I'll just feed" Then you'll be permabanned for feeding...okay? And then?
Look at it this way: Why would you want someone to have the extra opportunity to ruin games - in a way that's much more tangible and less arguable than chat-related toxicity? Why give them the option to break the rules again, when - after 3-4 punishments, they've gone out of their way to prove they don't care about the rules?
Cutting out the middle-man gives them, ultimately, less opportunities to break the rules, and less potential incentive to turn to harder-to-detect and unequivocally worse methods of doing so.
This isn't 2011, so let's not look at the situation as if it's 2011 players on a 2011 game using 2011's faulted system. Times change. The player base has changed. The game has changed. The punishment system has changed. Shouldn't the way punishments are addressed change too?
That depends. The goal of a punishment is to deter further misbehavior, and issuing a permanent ban is meant to prevent further misbehavior. How do you think punishments should be addressed, then, if not to meet those two goals?
"They'll find ways to soft-grief so they're not punished" but, people already do this. Is it really an argument?
Point, but the prior argument (cutting out the middle-man) remains. Why should we give them the extra opportunity to break the rules?
From what I've experienced, if ever a player is intentionally griefing it's because they're on a smurf account or were permabanned. If ever a player is on chat restriction, I've never seen them act or speak in a toxic manner. That means, experience considered, 100% of increased toxicity as a result of punishment has not come from muted players but from permabanned players. Definitely a counter-claim to the "Muted players would do other things to grief so perma-ban is the best option" argument, since perma-ban is what's caused people in my games to do other things to grief, not chat restriction.
There's a slight issue with this counterargument, though; Chat Restrictions are not chat mutes. You still have (albeit limited) ability to use the chat feature, so players who are chat restricted aren't completely stifled from using what they previously abused.
So, since chat mutes aren't a thing at present, of course the increase of toxicity will be 100% attributed to permabanned players maliciously lashing out against the game that kicked them out, so your counterargument is kind of flawed.
I could also make a point about anecdotal evidence, but, frankly, the distinction between chat restrictions and chat muting is enough.
"Players that don't learn from warnings should be banned" but, learn...what? This isn't a school, and this isn't some new form of knowledge; it's personality-control.
Personality-control is still a thing that can be learned. I swear like a sailor, personally, but when I'm with decent company, I restrain myself against swearing, either out of respect, or - in one case - because I learned that someone didn't like when I swore.
All the same, players can learn to not chew out and flame their teammates. Players who don't learn, whether by ignorance or a deliberate decision to break the rules, get their just desserts.
"We don't want certain personality traits in our game, therefor we punish it" is the general idea behind this. Another way of saying it, "Even if your intentions are well-meaning and your words are justified, we don't allow it".
Those two lines are pretty different. Not mutually exclusive, but pointedly different.
"We don't want certain personality traits in our game, therefor we punish it" is accurate. Riot doesn't want people being toxic jerks to everyone - hence, they punish people who flame and act out against other players.
But the line "even if your intentions are well-meaning and your words are justified..." - that's adding a whole new layer of subjectivity, and also ignores the fact that toxicity is never well-meaning.
Show me someone saying "go fuck yourself, you're trash, uninstall" who meant well. And more than that - "justified" can be wholly different for some people. Some people justify their behavior solely on the basis of "they did poorly, therefor they deserved to be flamed". Should we consider the "I was just stating facts" argument a valid defense for a chatlog that's 90% flaming and 10% calling for reports or claiming that a player was muted?
All told, the first line is the one that should be stuck with for point of argument. It's the most holistically accurate, and doesn't present more topics to argue on.
If Riot refuses to create a "Prison Island", believes that every player can be occasionally toxic and every player is capable of reform and deserves the opportunity, and that punished players shouldn't be so generally grouped, why is every situation of being punished treated the same specifically within the group of "Toxicity"? Not every player punished for harrassment are negative, nor mean, nor overall toxic. Why are they all treated as such?
The thing is, the Prisoner's Island concept is fundamentally different from applying punishments equally. Prisoner's Island lumps punished players together in their own queue so as to block them away from well-behaved players, solely for the benefit of said well-behaved players - and it generally only serves to further make toxic players toxic, since they get numerous issues that arise from their own misbehavior.
Longer queue times, more frequent toxicity, trolling, feeding, etc. - it's unfun, and it disincentivizes reform.
Applying punishments equally is not an issue of branding all players who get punished as "toxic". You can misbehave and not be toxic - but that doesn't exempt you from punishment for misbehaving.
The only real way to distinguish toxic players from non-toxic players is to see how they come out after the punishment. (Ignoring, of course, whether or not they receive a punishment in the first place.) Those who actually reform are non-toxic, while those who continue to break the rules, either out of ignorance that they're in the wrong, or out of a decided malice, are toxic.
Guidelines regarding chat are just too broad and generalized. Therefor, shouldn't the system surrounding punishment be assessed?
There is enough specificity in the rules that staying at/above the line of acceptable behavior should be easy. It should be enough to be able to describe the rules in those four simple words; "don't be a dick".
Making narrowed down, super-specific rulesets would be both needlessly taxing, and also lead to a higher likelihood of abuse cases, as, if all the specific punishable behaviors are known, people will generally try to skirt the lines of punishable behavior, making it much more difficult to actually punish toxicity.
I feel as if the arguments within this discussion have been less about sensibility and more about "That's just the way it is because Riot said so" and that's just not the way we should address it.
Riot's study on permanent chat mutes is largely just the groundwork. The supporting arguments (which I have a hard time as seeing as "not sensible") were raised in response to arguments against the system.
