The essential tools this game NEEDS to adjust player behavior and keep PAYING customers like me.

I have spent $150 in total on the game. That's fine, I am a professional geek and can afford it but the way the community is now I don't want to play. I am firmly convinced that most of the jerks, the people who intentionally feed the other team, those with bad sportsmanship, those who verbally abuse others, are in fact free to play customers but their toxicity is driving away paying customers. The report system doesn't help because it is just abused to grief others and I doubt Riot has the manpower to investigate. I wanted to make some suggestions on how this can turn around.

All of these suggestions revolve around allowing the player to exclude matches with those that are not desirable to play with. The really nasty people will accumulate enough of these that they will be punished with longer queue times. This gives a player choices to avoid those he finds offensive and as a result the game would get immeasurably better.

1. Get rid of the report feature. It's only used to grief players who have a bad game or just to grief players in general. In addition, Riot doesnt have the manpower to manage the report system so it just means the system is useless. Replace it with the suggestions below.

2. Introduce a dishonor feature that is available on the match summary. It blocks a player from matching with you on the same team for a set period of time. Note that the player could still be in the match on the other team. Block only affects them being on your team. The more times you block the player the longer the timeout gets until after some number of times, the player wont match with you again ever. The player should be required to pick a reason such as bad sportsmanship, nasty language or so on and that reason should be displayed to the player. Make sure to include "poor play" so I know which idiots think a video game is National Security. :)

3. Weight Match ups with player you have honored as opponents or for teamwork on your own team. This should be a prioritization, not a total "play with list". I would implement it as a points system where the points factor into whether you are matched with that player or not. It would also match you with some random players you don't have any match history with.

4. Add another option to honor system where if you blow a game you can "apologize" and allow the players to honor you back for doing so.

5. Improve the matching code so that really good players don't get consistently matched with not so good players even in blind picks or non ranked draft mode.

6. Remove the blind pick mode and introduce an "Normal" mode. This mode would be like draft mode with the following differences. First of all if you want you would be able to chose the same lane twice. That might mess with your queue times but that is kind of your fault. Those who opt for fill will get in games faster. Second of all no bans would happen in this mode so you could play your desired champ. Third of all you could choose the same champ that is on another team. This is probably worthy of being in its own thread. :)

These would be simple changes to implement and the timeout on the block would give a jerk some time to recover his senses and become a good guy.

Some might make the following objections but i have answers.

Objection: Won't people will just honor people that carry them and block those that they perceive as bad. Answer: Perhaps, but personally I don't want to be matched with such people anyway so I don't care. But honoring a player wouldn't be a 100% included in match up, just a greater likelihood. Furthermore if the player plays badly or behaves badly those players will probably block him as well so that would be neutralized.

Objection: This could increase queue times. Answer: The simple solution to that is be a nice person then people wont block you. In fact, if you cant wait 5 min for a game you might already be someone in need of some extra patience. But at any rate i don't mind waiting to be matched. If you are that impatient don't block anyone, be chill if someone blows a game, and try to be a nice person to others.

Objection: Cheaters will continue to be able to disrupt by intentionally feeding and so on. Answer: Because of the people blocking them, they would rapidly be sanctioned and not get a game. Furthermore, Riot could investigate people with a large number of blocks for possible further punitive action. This wouldn't be as easily abusable because the metrics of real cheating players would be very obvious.