Is chat penalties that much more strict than game play penalties?
I'm going to address this first and foremost, because this is the biggest misconception in the post;
Chat penalties are not more strict than gameplay penalties. There are two major reasons that this is the case:
- Most chat-related misbehavior takes multiple games worth of offenses to validate a punishment. It's common knowledge on the PB boards that by and large, chat-related punishments are doled out on a basis of consistency & severity - meaning that it's a mixture of how frequently you misbehave and how severely you misbehave that can influence how quickly you get punished for abusive comms. Defeatism and excessive negativity may take you a good few games to get punished, but hardcore flaming and insulting others can get you punished in one game alone.
Gameplay misbehavior, on the other hand, really only needs one match worth of misbehavior to validate punishment. There is of course the unsavory reality of gameplay misbehavior being difficult to detect in the first place, but in comparison to chat misbehavior, you do not have any actual wiggle-room to cool down and shape up.
- Chat-related misbehavior has a much more generous punishment ladder compared to gameplay. Most players who engage in chat misbehavior will run the full punishment ladder; starting with a 10-Game Chat Restriction, a 25-Game Chat Restriction, a 14-Day Suspension, and a Permanent Account Suspension. Of course, using hate speech or encouraging self-harm will immediately escalate you to the 14-day suspension, but such behavior is, to my knowledge, not common.
Now, compare that to the gameplay punishment track: First offense results in a 14-day suspension, and the second offense is a permanent ban. Gameplay misbehavior has much less room to reform over chat-related behavior, which get a whole two extra punishment tiers' worth of leeway.
I think the biggest reason this misconception is even held is that chat misbehavior (and consequently, punishments) are much more common than gameplay misbehavior and punishments. You see a greater number of chat-related cases punished and so misconceive the punishments for chat misbehavior as being more strict than those for gameplay, when in reality it's the other way around.
Yet the game want's to penalize people for singular games, whether its actual hate speech or someone that says one line cause they lost their cool.
As I mentioned above, the IFS punishes chat on a basis of consistency & severity, and while getting punished for a single game of misbehavior isn't off the table, it is still uncommon. More often than not, a punishment is preceded by a history of misbehavior, even if the reform card presents the punished player with just one chat log.
And, again, this comes with hate speech/encouraging self-harm being an exception with regards to chat misbehavior.
Yeah I get its harder to track game play sabotage etc, but if you elect to be as strict as what Riot is with the chat log over game play, you are saying to the community it is more okay to troll/sabotage games.
Explain to me how being generous and more forgiving in regards to chat-related punishments (having some actual leeway before a punishment to cool off and there being more punishment tiers in general to reform from) communicates that message?
In my opinion, the way the system is, it is encouraging players to troll and ruin game play.
Being frank, I feel as though your opinion was formed from an incorrect assumption about the system, as I explained above.
We have the option to mute people, so let us mute people.
So mute people. But don't expect for muting to exempt you from the rules. The rules came before the mute feature, and have no stipulation in them about anything being okay because you can mute.
...so maybe I should start trolling in those games I have because I know ill get away with it.
If you do, don't expect sympathy from others when it comes back around to bite you. I know you're simply making a disingenuous comment here, but all you're achieving from it is giving anyone who reads your post reason to believe you'd all too eagerly jump in and become part of the problem.
So, word of advice; if you actually do care about gameplay misbehavior, don't suggest that you'd jump in and ruin the game too.
