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Why is homophobia and by extension hate speech not an instant ban under the no-tolerance policy?

Kalos·2/6/2020, 8:44:27 PM·10 votes·2,954 views

I've had a lot of games like this, but today I had a game where I literally said nothing in the chat (edit: at first), and because I was losing my lane, the enemy top lane started calling me a bad player. I'm okay with this, I don't care. So I don't respond with insults, I just say something neutral and perhaps a little passive aggressive about the game (like the fact that he only ever killed me with his jungler at his side), I don't remember exactly what, but I urge Riot to check the chat logs. For the record, all 5 of the players on the enemy team were premades.

Anyway, after the first instance of the top laner calling me bad, the enemy support player starts being homophobic, presumably because my tag in the game is LGBT. Slurs, insults, everything. The top laner then joins in and keeps it going throughout the game. At this point I decided it was not at all worth it to try to fight back, because Riot would probably ban me instead of them, so it would be best just to tell them that I will report them and that they're being homophobic and that it's hate speech, just to get some key words in there for Riot's system to trigger, if it hadn't already with the fully written correctly spelled slurs the enemies used. Not to mention they were toxic throughout the entire game towards everyone on the team, not just to me, and like true toxic players, spammed "EZ" at the end of the game in the chat. Support player had an arguably inappropriate summoner name as well.

Now, at this point, I am very very sure that Riot's algorithm will deal with this and that attention will be brought to it. Both my premades and I reported them for hate speech and toxicity and all that good stuff. 7 minutes go by. 30 minutes go by. Hours go by. No instant feedback. After being called slurs like f%%%%t and r%%%%%%d in FULLY-WRITTEN CORRECTLY-SPELLED text form, only because my tag says "LGBT", nothing happens to those players.

Meanwhile I once got a 14-day ban, not even a chat restriction but a ban, because I said "kys" to a premade (my best friend) after he said a bad pun in the chat. Riot did not care about my explanation, they just said that "kys" is part of their zero-tolerance policy and that it's an immediate ban. Oh, but homophobic, racist, and other slurs aren't? I can be called a re&&&&ed fa&&ot just fine, but I said "kys" to a premade once for a totally stupid reason and had a non-toxic rest of the game, and got banned automatically and had my Honor locked to 0 for a whole season? I'm still struggling to recover from that, I'm still on Honor 3, let's not touch on how broken the Honor system is right now.

Why are those players not banned? Why can they get away with homophobic slurs and absolute toxicity, but "kys" in any context is zero-tolerance?

Please get your stuff together Riot. And do me a favor, check the chat logs and ban those players? This is the game https://matchhistory.eune.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/EUN1/2374835353/221354979?tab=overview Obviously I did not do very well, but that's no reason to instigate this behavior. I mean, why does he care if I'm bad? It favors him. It's not like I was a sore loser and started insulting him first. The players I reported for hate speech and toxicity are Shen and Leona, and Miss Fortune accidentally (sorry!! I clarified it in my report of Shen). For the record, Miss Fortune, Rengar, and Zed did not say a single word in the chat, and they do not deserve any punishment for having toxic friends, I believe.

Please, justice. If you're going to treat some things with extreme caution and instant automatic 14-day bans without any previous incidents, but you won't stop homophobic, racist, and otherwise totally toxic players unless they do it a multitude of times and receive hundreds of reports, then it's not a fair system whatsoever. I do not agree with the instant 14-day ban for "kys" either, since context matters immensely, but at least if you're going to treat that issue with that high priority, you should treat this one the same as well.

What do you guys think?

Cheers! Kalos

EDIT: I know those players are not banned because they continued playing games, unaffected, after my encounter with them, as is evident by their match history.

18 Comments

zPOOPz2/6/2020, 9:13:17 PM4 votes

I had a game where I literally said nothing in the chat

You prefaced with this and then the rest of your post tells a different story. Anyway, it's irrelevant. I just thought it's funny as a lot of people come on the board to tell us they said nothing (offensive) in chat and then you look at their chat log.....

Is this entire post based on you not receiving a feedback notification? You don't always get those 100% of the time and not getting them is not confirmation that the person you reported is not punished. (personally I wish Rito would just either make it 100% or just remove it altogether). If you feel strongly about it, then shoot support a ticket to report that game https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us.

PinkPowerCoin2/6/2020, 9:37:14 PM3 votes

My clan tag is literally >GAY<, and I'm surprised by the lack of homophobic slurs I get lol. But I also rarely participate in chat. The most I see is things like, "that's gay" or "gay", but usually its a comment towards the state of how the game is going and I just kinda shrug it off. I would suggest just muting everyone on the opposing team at the start of every game, as generally you don't need to communicate with them anyway. So, that could save you a headache, since I'm sure they were being a-holes in all chat to tilt you even more after having a bad early game. BMing is a strategy some people use. As for reports being taken seriously when it comes to those things (racism/homophobia), I don't know how serious RIOT takes those. I've had literally two games where my teammate/opponent was spelling out the N word as a "game" and was asking others to finish the spelling in all chat (which they did). I reported it after the game, and never got any feedback saying they were punished.

ZaFishbone2/6/2020, 11:09:31 PM3 votes

Everyone who says that Rito punishes adequately is complicit. They are toxic the whole game and then come here begging Rito to punish less because they want to be able to be as toxic as they want. And Rito will never ever punish seriously because it would mean less people playing and thus less money.

ViridianEight2/7/2020, 5:25:27 PM3 votes

i honestly agree with you, the honor system is made to punish literally any toxicity without context or reason, I made the mistake of talking back to an offensively toxic ryze who was throwing slurs everywhere and got locked honor 0 for it. nowadays you can do nothing but sit there or mute them while everyone else gets to experience your abuse in chat. u say 1 trigger word and its over.

SweetShiroNeko2/6/2020, 11:10:16 PM2 votes

First thing that should be done is to permaban trolls.

They are the ones who create the toxicity and lures others to flame them for their own amusement.

Boppas2/6/2020, 9:08:21 PM2 votes

Your more likely to get banned for saying something toxic then any other offense in the game

Kalos2/6/2020, 9:04:38 PM2 votes

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a saint myself, obviously. We all have bad days and bad games. Sometimes I engage in passive-aggressive behavior, but I never insult players for their skill level since that 14-day ban. I may try to give advice or something that may come off as me being aggressive with them (example: "You should stick with the team, we lost that fight because we were 4v5").

I'm giving this disclaimer because Riot's system is so broken that it also bans for passive-aggressiveness nowadays. But actual homophobic slurs are still allowed lmao