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Someone please explain how the system works

Shadowbyte·5/21/2019, 12:31:12 AM·2 votes·2,185 views

I don't seem to understand how this system is meant for reforming players. From what I can see the system is highly ineffective, aggravating and inconsistent. These are my views on the current system. If anyone could clarify or point out what I overlooked/was wrong about that would be appreciated.

Ineffective: Riot told us many times that one report flags a game for review and the number of times you report the person doesn't effect it at all. Their reasoning is that this prevents people from begging others for reports. I think it's safe to say that most of us beg to differ. How many times do you see people asking you to report the inting/griefing/trolling/feeding blah blah blah?

Having one report flag a game for review results in a ton of games needing to be reviewed by either bots or humans. I don't know what the current system uses but it seems to be a mix of both. Either way, as long as there's a human element in it, it will take time to process a case resulting in backlog. This is where a priority system that fast-tracks games with higher report counts against the same player for the same things would come in hand. The priority system would help take action against people that are running it down faster and thus preventing more games from being ruined. The current system isn't able to do that under the equal report system.

Despite riot claiming of not liking the idea of prisoner island they seem to have manufactured one. Once a player finishes their sentence they're placed on a probation list for an undisclosed amount of time. Basically if you're caught doing anything remotely aggro you'll be slapped with a harsher punishment. You're skating on thin ice, the margin of tolerance is smaller. Had a bad game and reported for int? Normally they'd just pass it off but now you're a known criminal they'll look just that much closer. Got flamed and flamed back? Normally it would be within your tolerance meter build up but now that one game just cost you another honor level and an additional punishment. Your best bet of avoiding this is to either just switch accounts for about half a year until the probation wears off or change some files to remove the chatbox entirely from the game. Now you might be saying, "well prisoner island is really only about matchmaking bad people with other bad people" and riot explicitly said they weren't doing that. However from personal experience I can say that playing on a marked account I average about 7-8 game with some form of toxicity out of every 10 games I play whereas on an alt or brand new account I average around 4-5 toxic games out of every 10. This was done all in ranked games and on different computers to see if riot associates account with IP and over the course of about a year. Not only does toxic behavior breed more toxic behavior, throwing people known to be susceptible to toxic behavior into a pit of toxic people seem really counter intuitive to their reforming ideology.

Just looking at the community and comparing the early seasons to now, you can clearly see that toxicity is on the rise and enjoyment is on the decline. Sure there are more people playing the game now but proportionally the number of toxic players is larger. An effective punishment system is supposed to help players reform. It's supposed to encourage players to not go aggro in chat. It's supposed to better the community not worsen it.

Aggravating For a system that's supposedly gear towards reforming players the design certainly doesn't seem like it. Once you get chat restricted, every time you log in you're prompted with logs showing the games you went aggro in chat and prompted to click an "I understand" button to continue. While this serves as a nice reminder that you messed up, paired up with the message in chat at the start of every game and post game notification reminding you of your punishment seems a bit excessive. Moving on to the logs, riot only seems to be very focused on YOU and what YOU did. The logs given to you only contain what you said and nothing else. No context, no event log nothing. This is bad for a couple reasons. One, when players are looking to reform and show their logs to people asking for advice, all people see is what the person said. Seeing just a block of someone going aggro is certainly going to initiate bias against them whereas if the situation was explained people would be a bit more understanding. Two there is no support for a player willing to reform.

"Hey you messed up, you're chat restricted for x games, here's your flame in a log k goodbye".

Well that's certainly helpful.... Well maybe I can go on the forums and see if people have some advice for me -- oh looks like I was wrong and should just mute chat every game. Maybe if I look in the logs for some triggers and see what makes me go aggro in the first place I could look out for them in the future -- oh wait never mind, the logs don't contain any context...

See what the problem is here? All the system is doing is giving you an incremental slap on the wrist without even attempting to help you. Basically they're telling you to straighten up your act without how. Muting chat won't help as it doesn't solve the root problem and as soon as it's unmuted you'll be tempted to go aggro again when your trigger happens. Trying to fix the root cause is impossible because the logs don't include any context to the situation meaning you can't even search for things to look out for next time. Whether it be harassment, racist remarks, flame, someone intentionally feeding etc. that caused you to go aggro you won't know. The system only cares about what you said without context, in a vacuum. You might think why not just report them after if they're being racist/toxic/griefing and you'd be right. Except not really because the system is erratic at best.

Inconsistent Whether this is being caused by bots, humans or a mix of both, the current system is highly Inconsistent. I've had games where I reported people being vehemently racist, tilt then STATE THAT THEY WERE GOING TO RUN IT DOWN and do so, rage quit, grief by reporting our allies locations in /all etc. just to have them ignored. And these cases are on top of the ones for flame and toxicity. Some of those cases I ended up flaming the offender and I was the ONLY one that ended up getting punished. I'm not saying that I didn't deserve the punishment for going aggro, I'm just saying if you punish one guy for flame at least punish the other for what I would assume to be a greater offense.

Final thoughts The human aspect of the punishment system was stripped away long ago when they abolished the tribunal system where players from the community could take a look at circumstances and judge what happened. All of that has been outsourced to machines and overworked humans that probably don't even play the game judging by who riot gives "specialist" badges to on this forum (hint hint, it's those that defend riot's judgement and haven't played the game in years... I wonder why). They took out the ability for the community to self-regulate. What you end up now is some authoritarian state where context means nothing and riot's final word is law. Where frankly, they could care less if your account got perma-banned. I mean why would they? They already have the hundreds of dollars you spent on skins way back when. Riot does little to nothing against smurfs which cause a lot of the toxicity in the first place. Who doesn't get mad when they constantly get steamrolled by a 20/3 jg who's has 80% win rate on their champ? There is no effort that I can see that suggests that riot is interested in helping players reform. They spend more time selling fancy new skins and covering up their discrimination lawsuits through forced arbitration (which funny enough caused another lawsuit) then on the game whether it be on balance issues, revitalizing old champions, or most importantly fixing the community from going even further downhill.

10 Comments

Zombie Gerbil5/21/2019, 12:47:13 AM4 votes

The IFS is a warning system. The end result of the system isn't meant for the reforming but meant to clean up the toxicity in general. Punishing the players from denying them access to all their progress on that account. When a player is unable to reform at the end of the punishment tier, Riot nor does the community wants that player here. We don't care if they're able to reform AFTER the permaban. They want to reform, then they can reform on their new account and have another chance to keep all their progress.

Prisoner Island is not ideal to Riot because that means keeping the toxic players around. No one wants them here. So creating a punishment island is more rewarding than it is punishable. Because they won't learn. Riot nor does the community want these players. So the system is not meant for reforming. The system is meant to WARN. But more people reform from their 14-day ban far more than the ones who do not.

Jamaree5/21/2019, 1:34:41 AM3 votes

{quoted}

I don't seem to understand how this system is meant for reforming players. From what I can see the system is highly ineffective, aggravating and inconsistent. These are my views on the current system. If anyone could clarify or point out what I overlooked/was wrong about that would be appreciated.

It isn’t really meant to reform punishments used to be lighter and more sparse with even warnings being doled out before punishments but they stopped that when they didn’t seem to be working.

Ineffective: Riot told us many times that one report flags a game for review and the number of times you report the person doesn't effect it at all. Their reasoning is that this prevents people from begging others for reports. I think it's safe to say that most of us beg to differ. How many times do you see people asking you to report the inting/griefing/trolling/feeding blah blah blah?

Often, I still ask for reports to blantant trolls, that said bit of misinformation, it isn’t one report is enough to get a review, it is one report is enough to trigger it, 1 report = 9 reports, the system triggers if you get report after report

Having one report flag a game for review results in a ton of games needing to be reviewed by either bots or humans.

Again, one report every blue moon isnt enough to get punished, it is several reports across several games:

I don't know what the current system uses but it seems to be a mix of both. Either way, as long as there's a human element in it, it will take time to process a case resulting in backlog.

That is why it isn’t human based anymore, used to be with the Tribunal but this community showed first hand that it wants to complain about the toxicity, but not fix it.

This is where a priority system that fast-tracks games with higher report counts against the same player for the same things would come in hand. The priority system would help take action against people that are running it down faster and thus preventing more games from being ruined. The current system isn't able to do that under the equal report system.

Would also have scumbag 4 mans lie about what a person did in an attempt to get them 9x punished.

Despite riot claiming of not liking the idea of prisoner island they seem to have manufactured one. Once a player finishes their sentence they're placed on a probation list for an undisclosed amount of time. Basically if you're caught doing anything remotely aggro you'll be slapped with a harsher punishment. You're skating on thin ice, the margin of tolerance is smaller. Had a bad game and reported for int? Normally they'd just pass it off but now you're a known criminal they'll look just that much closer. Got flamed and flamed back? Normally it would be within your tolerance meter build up but now that one game just cost you another honor level and an additional punishment. Your best bet of avoiding this is to either just switch accounts for about half a year until the probation wears off or change some files to remove the chatbox entirely from the game.

You mean exactly how it is in real life? Don’t want to deal with that stress, don’t get in trouble in the first place.

Now you might be saying, "well prisoner island is really only about matchmaking bad people with other bad people" and riot explicitly said they weren't doing that. However from personal experience I can say that playing on a marked account I average about 7-8 game with some form of toxicity out of every 10 games I play whereas on an alt or brand new account I average around 4-5 toxic games out of every 10. This was done all in ranked games and on different computers to see if riot associates account with IP and over the course of about a year. Not only does toxic behavior breed more toxic behavior, throwing people known to be susceptible to toxic behavior into a pit of toxic people seem really counter intuitive to their reforming ideology.

And do you have anything to prove this, what was your metric, rank in the games, did you have an even split of win and losses because there are a whole lot of factors here that ten games isn’t enough a sample size without all the other factors being the exact same.

Just looking at the community and comparing the early seasons to now, you can clearly see that toxicity is on the rise and enjoyment is on the decline. Sure there are more people playing the game now but proportionally the number of toxic players is larger.

Yeah, that is how numbers work? Of course you are going to see an increase of assholes with an increase in population and you aren’t even including other factors alongside it.

An effective punishment system is supposed to help players reform. It's supposed to encourage players to not go aggro in chat. It's supposed to better the community not worsen it.

This mindset has always confused the fuck out of me, not just in video games but in real life too. Why is it always someone else’s job to clean up your behavior and never on the person in general to control themselves?

Aggravating For a system that's supposedly gear towards reforming players the design certainly doesn't seem like it.

Not really done for the sake of reforming anymore.

Moving on to the logs, riot only seems to be very focused on YOU and what YOU did. The logs given to you only contain what you said and nothing else. No context, no event log nothing. This is bad for a couple reasons. One, when players are looking to reform and show their logs to people asking for advice, all people see is what the person said. Seeing just a block of someone going aggro is certainly going to initiate bias against them whereas if the situation was explained people would be a bit more understanding.

Why do you need more then that? The logs aren’t about them, they are about you, and it is simple to point out what someone is doing wrong to get them to stop.

Two there is no support for a player willing to reform.

"Hey you messed up, you're chat restricted for x games, here's your flame in a log k goodbye".

Well that's certainly helpful.... Well maybe I can go on the forums and see if people have some advice for me -- oh looks like I was wrong and should just mute chat every game. Maybe if I look in the logs for some triggers and see what makes me go aggro in the first place I could look out for them in the future -- oh wait never mind, the logs don't contain any context...

See what the problem is here? All the system is doing is giving you an incremental slap on the wrist without even attempting to help you. Basically they're telling you to straighten up your act without how. Muting chat won't help as it doesn't solve the root problem and as soon as it's unmuted you'll be tempted to go aggro again when your trigger happens. Trying to fix the root cause is impossible because the logs don't include any context to the situation meaning you can't even search for things to look out for next time. The system only cares about what you said without context, in a vacuum. You might think why not just report them after if they're being racist/toxic/griefing and you'd be right. Except not really because the system is erratic at best.

Why do you need someone to hold your hand and say act like an adult, how is that so hard? I don’t get it, do you really need someone going step by step, holding your hand and saying “no no, don’t tell people to kill themselves, don’t tell people to stop sucking shit, no no, don’t be a dick.”

I assumed we all learned that growing up.

Inconsistent I'm just saying if you punish one guy for flame at least punish the other for what I would assume to be a greater offense.

Here is how the system works is why. Unless you are saying any of the zero tolerance phrases or words like homophobic gestures, telling one to kill themselves, or racial slurs, it takes a build up of reports to actually get punished. You have to be reported in a certain amount of games to get start getting flagged for punishment, so the reason you get punished and they don’t is because they haven’t hit it and you have.

Final thoughts The human aspect of the punishment system was stripped away long ago when they abolished the tribunal system where players from the community could take a look at circumstances and judge what happened. All of that has been outsourced to machines and overworked humans that probably don't even play the game judging by who riot gives "specialist" badges to on this forum (hint hint, it's those that defend riot's judgement and haven't played the game in years... I wonder why). They took out the ability for the community to self-regulate.

People should have used it then.

What you end up now is some authoritarian state where context means nothing and riot's final word is law. Where frankly, they could care less if your account got perma-banned. I mean why would they? They already have the hundreds of dollars you spent on skins way back when.

You are right, why should they care about a player who has ruined hundreds of not thousands of games for hundreds if not thousands of players?

Who doesn't get mad when they constantly get steamrolled by a 20/3 jg who's has 80% win rate on their champ?

The people being carried by that 20/3 smurf hence why we never see threads about said players when are the ones on the winning team with them.

There is no effort that I can see that suggests that riot is interested in helping players reform.

Why waste time on them anymore, there used to be, all those systems failed as said players continued to be toxic.

Julevi5/21/2019, 1:58:06 AM2 votes

{quoted}

Having one report flag a game for review results in a ton of games needing to be reviewed by either bots or humans. I don't know what the current system uses but it seems to be a mix of both.

In a majority of cases no human will be involved - usually the IFS reviews the game and then gives out a punishment. Requesting an overlook at the Support is probably the fastest way to have a human element.

This is where a priority system that fast-tracks games with higher report counts against the same player for the same things would come in hand. The priority system would help take action against people that are running it down faster and thus preventing more games from being ruined.

The IFS system is based on made experiences (e.g. at the tribunal time) and constantly learning. As soon as it detects negatives behaviour which could warrant a punishment it will give one out in under 15 minutes. The keypoint here is: detected. While it is not rocket-sciene to review a chatlog, the system has a harder time detecting e.g. inting due to various reasons (falsely made reports, soft-inting, etc.).

Despite riot claiming of not liking the idea of prisoner island they seem to have manufactured one.

Real evidence based on shapes and figures here please and not just a claim you made because you see it like that.

Got flamed and flamed back? Normally it would be within your tolerance meter

Riot does not care who started it and doesn't excuse counterflame.

Your best bet of avoiding this is to either just switch accounts for about half a year until the probation wears off or

That is not how it works. Riot measures "time" with games played and not the actual time. Just switching accounts will not reset your status.

Moving on to the logs, riot only seems to be very focused on YOU and what YOU did.

Yeah, because it is your log. They are focusing on YOU because YOU are at the moment the person who gets checked. When you report another player it focuses on THEM as THEY are now relevant. Both parties are involves.

all people see is what the person said.

Because often there is no need in seeing more. You always have an option but you refuse to choose it.

Seeing just a block of someone going aggro is certainly going to initiate bias against them whereas if the situation was explained people would be a bit more understanding.

On the boards you will stumble across threads where OP explains detailed what happened and you know what? The end result is the same - a lot of people dislike seeing flame/harassment/insults regardless of the context.

Maybe if I look in the logs for some triggers and see what makes me go aggro in the first place I could look out for them in the future -- oh wait never mind, the logs don't contains context ...

As long as you don't suffer from a form of memory loss you will probably kinda know what triggered you. It's your personal job to reflect your own behaviour.

See what the problem is here? All the system is doing is giving you an incremental slap on the wrist without even attempting to help you. Basically they're telling you to straighten up your act without how.

Because that is an individual problem which each one of the players has to figure out and solve on their own. Riot doesn't know anything about your full character at the slightest - they could only guess what made you so upset.

Some of those cases I ended up flaming the offender and I was the ONLY one that ended up getting punished

So how do you know so well about the punishments of others given the fact that you only could see a ban and not any Chatrestrictions? Besides that: breaking the rules does not make you immune just because someone did it first.

play the game judging by who riot gives "specialist" badges to on this forum

Yeah, no. Dude, the specialists here are not working for Riot and don't even have more power than you or me - it simply represents that this certain player is well informed and proved themselves at this board.

After reading your essay I would suggest that you inform yourself better the next time and do not give the job to others. Many things here could be cleared up with a quick search at Google. Please make the effort - asking for explanations is always wanted but this took it to quite a new level.

afmghost5/21/2019, 3:17:42 AM2 votes

Now I see where those downvotes came from.: The "specialists" you called out

Jhins Girlfriend5/21/2019, 10:06:39 AM1 votes

Maybe if I look in the logs for some triggers and see what makes me go aggro in the first place I could look out for them in the future -- oh wait never mind, the logs don't contain any context...

You don't need context. YOU control your chat, it's really really easy to not type something. Just don't hit enter, don't be a jerk to people in game and you won't get punished for being toxic.