Boards›Player Behavior

"I Don't Like Your Tone" Said The Tone-Deaf Robot

Arakk01·10/13/2017, 1:42:54 AM·3 votes·487 views

In response to all the people confused by their genuine criticism being met with disciplinary action (and those crying 'it's your fault, you disgusting people!')- just a little reminder. There is NO human intervention required for a chat ban. Riot's Player Behavior team is not trained to read logs for context, they're trained to make you feel bad for wanting to enjoy their game. Your greatest chance of being perma-banned is if a Rioter doesn't like your off-meta pick when you play a game with them. In short: Riot is not invested in improving the community and making a great gameplay experience for everyone. They have their robot to mass-discipline on the cheap, and it's not a flawless system. They know that, but instead of clarifying their summoner's code in a way that would make them accountable for improving it, they keep it vague and refuse to acknowledge when players are punished for things outside the Code.

When you ask support what you did wrong, the answer will almost certainly be 'tone' or, in many cases, a copy-pasted text snippet that isn't remotely offensive when the context of the game is considered whatsoever. The real truth is that Riot's robot aggregates the chat logs of reported players for similarities, likely presenting those lists to a technician once in a while for parity checks, like a primitive neural network. There is no human intervention aside from making sure the data isn't corrupted or manipulated, if even that. Basically- if telling other players what to build, making objective calls, or calling out trolls regularly gets you reported by trolls, you WILL be punished for those behaviors, even if it's your first time doing them. Riot is OK with this.

TL;DR: Riot hates you for talking. Just don't.

9 Comments

Chermorg10/13/2017, 2:09:39 AM9 votes

Riot's player behavior team, as in, the one with actual people who study behavior for a living on it, has decided that in a game with a mute function, as well as a report function, context doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if you're defending yourself against a flamer, or a troll, or a feeder... the other people on your (and the enemy) team have to deal with your toxicity. That's why you get punished for toxicity regardless of context - it simply doesn't matter. I don't care if your botlane is 0/10, or if you just died while your jungler was watching.. there is no excuse for toxicity other than ones ego and/or need for toxicity.

The Summoner's Code isn't vague at all - it's easily summed up: Don't be a dick. If you're having some competitive BS/trash talk? Fine. If you start berating your team for their performance, trying to give up, or otherwise not being positive and sportsmanlike, then it's not fine. I don't see what's so bad about wanting a calm, nice, enjoyable game of League.

Further, remember that the system is trained based on reports from players - and was originally trained (given a "baseline" so to say) by player cases in the Tribunal system, where players voted on whether other players' actions were punishable or not. When Riot issues you a punishment, it's a) based on reports in that game, and b) based on reports from many other games showing what players consider acceptable and not. If you are punished, it is Riot and the community telling you you're not being a fun sportsmanlike teammate/player.

The robot is simply doing what it was told to do - and it's extremely successful at that. It's so successful, in fact, that it sometimes issues punishments to players before they've even seen they got a prior punishment (i.e. while they're in a game and get a punishment in that game, then that game is worthy of a further punishment - those are removed on request by the way). Riot does acknowledge the very small (<0.001%) of cases that are wrongly punished, and they will remove such punishments very fast and admit the system messed up. The problem is the majority of the time, the system didn't mess up.

ModDaenrysTargaryen10/13/2017, 1:44:55 AM7 votes

I'm going to need more then a shovel to clean up all this bullcrap i just read

Silent Gravity10/13/2017, 1:46:40 AM5 votes

You can give advice, but telling other players what to build isn't your job. You get to play your character, they get to play theirs.

Calling out trolls is useless. A: Trolls like the attention. Stop giving them attention. B: If they're not trolls, you're just being a dick to someone who's already having a rough game. C: One report is all that's needed. There's no reason to call a troll out.

Zezockary10/13/2017, 2:09:24 AM4 votes

Can we have evidence to back up your claims? Like a link to a case where this has happened? If you are claiming this happened to you can we have your logs as evidence?

ModUlanopo10/13/2017, 2:11:53 AM4 votes

While I agree that most people could be more sympathetic to those who have been punished, I take exception to the following:

In short: Riot is not invested in improving the community and making a great gameplay experience for everyone.

I think it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that different people can have divergent view of what constitutes "community" or a "great gameplay experience."