MY ARGUMENT: Riot doesn't permaban players motivated by actually creating a better community. It's clever marketing that creates the illusion of quality. They permaban players motivated by making more money. Just like every big corporation, all their decisions are based on making more money each year. Thousands of people earn their living working at riot, remember that, and it's easy to be convinced of something when your paycheck depends on you believing it (hence the riot employees on this board who downvote and flame people who complain about the shitty discipline system).
This whole "Riot permabans people to milk more money off of them when they come back to the game" argument is pretty old-hat by now, and no matter how many times it's brought up, it never gets any more believable.
Also, you assume that Riot employees downvote people, but for one, that's only an assumption, and can't even reasonably be proven, and two, Riot employees seldom show up here nowadays. It's rare as hell to see a Riot fist on a thread.
And please, do show any example of a Riot employee flaming someone.
SUPPORT 1: League is a free to play game and most people play it for free. If you ban their account that they've earned tons of champs/skins/etc on over months/years, they're likely to pay at least a little bit of money to not have to spend all that time playing again. The mods on this board argue that players are not forced to spend money here, but dropping $10 to rebuy your favorite champ isn't unreasonable in this situation. Yes, it's the players choice, but they wouldn't have had to make this choice if they didn't get banned, and riot looks the other way at this because it's in their financial favor. Multiply $10 by the number of players that get permabanned each year, and thats a lot of extra money.
This supporting argument is faulty for the simple reason that, for it to be remotely true, the majority of people who get permanently banned would have to have the poor spending habits to actively re-buy anything after Riot tells them to ship out.
Literally nowhere would you find anyone banning people from the store as a business strategy. Wal*Mart won't kick you out with the expectation that you'll just walk right back in and throw down more cash, McDonalds won't put you to the curb expecting you to walk right back in and order a quarter pounder, and all the same, it'd make no sense whatsoever for Riot to permanently ban someone expecting them to come back and repurchase stuff.
SUPPORT 2: I've been playing the game since beta and the community has gotten worse, not better. So this discipline system they advertise as "cleaning up the community" simply isn't working and tons of people can attest to this.
Subjective, anecdotal evidence does not make for a viable supporting argument. You think that the community has gotten worse, but I've been playing for 4~ years, and in my eyes, the community has gotten better.
Neither of our views as to whether or not the community has gotten better or worse should be considered as valid supporting arguments, because our views of the community are subjective.
SUPPORT 3: The smerf account market makes a shit ton of money and riot does nothing to stop it. Go do a google search and you'll see how many sites sell accounts and guarantee satisfaction.
Question: Does Riot get any of the money from those purchased accounts?
If the answer is "no", then this is not a valid supporting argument.
SUPPORT 4: Unless you complain a lot, the support responses you get are clearly copy-paste generic bullshit that helps no one who has been wrongfully punished. Even when you do get a real person, they just repeat what the robot said in different words. Even if you got harassed, flamed, and verbally abused in game, they don't care. If you so much as replied sarcastically to the actual trolls, you get punished the same way they do. In court, you don't get punished equally with the attacker for defending yourself, but in this game you do, and riot mods on this board love pretending like its justice.
Here's the thing. IRL, self-defense is a valid defense in the jurisdiction of law because in IRL scenarios, you can be put under physical harm. It CAN be a life-or-death situation, and self-preservation is a priority.
In League of Legends, however, nobody is physically attacking you. You're not under threat of harm or losing your life - you're playing a videogame. There's no reason to be "defending yourself" (or, really, retaliating and flaming back) in a videogame where there's no risk of physical harm. Hence, why Riot's system doesn't care who started what, just who broke the rules.
SUPPORT 5: Permabanning an account doesn't successfully stop the player from still playing and still being toxic. They just create a new one, or buy a smerf, and they're still the same person they were before they got banned.
The permanent ban is supposed to disincentivize returning to the game by stripping a player of all their progress and investment - and it's a punishment that works surprisingly well, since only a scant few people actually come back.
And if they do come back, and they still misbehave? Riot still ultimately bans them. Eventually, they'll either shape up, or get tired of getting banned.
