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How riots punishment system can mentally hurt people

Soul Dealer·4/3/2019, 1:07:42 AM·5 votes·3,349 views

Riots system of zero tolerance to negativity is not only wrong in a moral sense but can also mentally damage people. You are not allowed to defend yourself in chat if you are getting flamed and that is a problem. You don’t always need to defend yourself and most of the time you can mute and move on but if someone starts threading you or your family or is wishing bad things on your family you need to be able to defend yourself in chat.

I’m gonna compete this issue to an issue I had throughout middle school and high school.

In middle school I was bullied by one person non-stop but I couldn’t defend myself because my school didn’t allow that, they also didn’t do anything about the bully as they said that “it does not concern them”, this unfortunately hurt me mentally for years. Eventually I went to a therapist and she helped me through my problems but she told me that my issues stemmed from the fact that I would not stand up for myself due to the fact that I was not allowed to defend myself against my bully in middle school.

Not being able to stand up for yourself or standing up for yourself and getting punished is bad for you mentally and can hurt you in the future. Riot needs to update their punishment system to take things into context and allow us to defend ourselves without getting punished.

65 Comments

rujitra4/3/2019, 1:14:42 AM10 votes

You are permitted to defend yourself with the mute button, which acts as a magic shield to prevent toxicity.

Last I checked, that doesn’t exist in real life for someone punching you.

DuskDaUmbreon4/3/2019, 1:12:52 AM9 votes

You are not allowed to defend yourself in chat if you are getting flamed

False. Flaming them back is not allowed, but actually defending yourself (read: Stating that you did or did not do something they said you didn't/did, or something along those lines) is.

TrulyBland4/3/2019, 2:31:16 AM7 votes

You say that muting feels like giving up a lot in this thread, so I figured I'd do a basic reply to this thread rather than any of those posts in particular.

It seems to me that you see muting as a last resort, the thing you do when all else fails. That's why it feels bad to use it, because it's the acknowledgement that all else has failed, and therefore indirectly it feels like an acknowledgment of your own failure.

But that's just one way to see it. The other way to see it is as a tool of absolute control. It gives you 100% of the control of the situation. Whatever you say, you don't know what they will reply. Maybe they are able to use your own words against you, maybe they will feel like they need to stand up for what they have said and merely escalate the entire thing.

But there is absolutely nothing they can do about you muting them.

Let me share a little story from the time I played WoW: To spare you the convoluted story, some stranger thought I had been unfriendly to them, but I was literally unable to help them due to their own mistake. I even tried to do the exact thing they expected me to do.

And yet, the player just snapped. They started insulting me like crazy... and I blocked them. Shortly thereafter I was messaged by another character about why the fuck I blocked him, and how I was a coward... so I blocked them. This repeated a lot. I'm fairly sure that person went through all their existent characters to insult me before stopping.

Now here's the thing: I tried to stand up for myself, explaining what really had happened, but that just fell on deaf ears. There was literally no reaction to that. But when I blocked that person? That riled them up more than anything I could have ever said to them. My goal when I blocked that person wasn't to win. It was to remove the white noise of having somebody spam your chat with insults. But at the end of the day, blocking made me win: I had absolute control over every step in the "fight", I was evidently more content with the situation and more calm, and I can't help but imagine I was happier about the outcome.

Being muted means you lose control. Muting gives you control. It is not weak, it is not giving up, it is using the tools you have at your disposal to best protect yourself and your mental health. And while it's probably not super healthy to try and get revenge on people: It makes a lot of people really mad when you mute them.

AeroWaffle4/3/2019, 3:44:58 AM7 votes

Something didn't seem right. I vaguely remembered you as one of the people who told others to use the mute feature when confronted with chat that was undesirable.

And I found it;

[{quoted}](name=Soul Dealer,realm=NA,application-id=ZGEFLEUQ,discussion-id=9bOwy4An,comment-id=0000000000000000,timestamp=2019-03-17T16:48:33.834+0000)

That’s why there is a mute button. Use it.

So are you backpedaling on that sentiment?

You're also free to the report feature once the game is over if they made the game unenjoyable for you because of their behavior.

Jamaree4/3/2019, 1:11:25 AM5 votes

While I don’t agree with that notion, the system isn’t so harsh that one set of “defending yourself” will get you punished.

If the language you use isn’t zero tolerance, you can actually be fine for quite sometime because there is a decent size safety net before you actually start receiving punishments.

That said, why do you feel the need to defend yourself anyway? These players can’t actually back up their threats, mute them, they get punished, you move on.

Kei1434/3/2019, 1:36:29 AM5 votes

[{quoted}](name=Soul Dealer,realm=NA,application-id=ZGEFLEUQ,discussion-id=Tb1PgYaP,comment-id=,timestamp=2019-04-03T01:07:42.768+0000)

Riots system of zero tolerance to negativity

Wut? Riot has like a super lenient policy for flamers. Infact, you can flame in multiple games without getting punished. It takes so much flame to get yourself a chat restriction.

Riot needs to update their punishment system to take things into context and allow us to defend ourselves without getting punished.

But you can defend for yourself. Though there is a major difference in defence and a counter-attack.

Zombie Gerbil4/3/2019, 4:19:12 AM3 votes

Bullying the bully isn't standing up for yourself.

You're simply becoming what you're fighting against. Riot's system is to get rid of the problem. Your case on how it hurts the mentality of toxic players and damages them, that's the least of Riot's concern. Players who use their chat to reflect back the negativity is the exact same as the players who are the initiators.

The thing is, fighting the issues with the same tactic is exactly the exact same issue Riot and the community is fighting against. You're here to play a video game. If you choose to use the chat to "defend" yourself, then you're the very thing you hate. Two wrongs do not make a right.

You're either part of the game or part of the problem.

I'd not choose the latter on this one.

KFCeytron4/3/2019, 7:06:10 PM2 votes

[{quoted}](name=Soul Dealer,realm=NA,application-id=ZGEFLEUQ,discussion-id=Tb1PgYaP,comment-id=,timestamp=2019-04-03T01:07:42.768+0000)

Riots system of zero tolerance to negativity is not only wrong in a moral sense but can also mentally damage people. You are not allowed to defend yourself in chat if you are getting flamed and that is a problem. You don’t always need to defend yourself and most of the time you can mute and move on but if someone starts threading you or your family or is wishing bad things on your family you need to be able to defend yourself in chat.

https://i.imgur.com/6VL6OmY.png[]

You are allowed to defend yourself. You do that by muting. You are then no longer affected by the offensive chat.

There is nothing you can say in chat to defend yourself from a threat or wishes of harm. If you think any of those threats are credible, go to the police. Shrieking like a banshee in chat while you stand there and get executed by Gromp has no benefits of any kind, defensive or otherwise.