An open letter to Riot concerning ranked behavior

Dear Riot,

I am sure you are receiving thousands of messages such as this one, but I thought I would add my 2 cents, if only because it might help with my mental health. I love LoL and I think playing ranked and trying to improve is a wonderful experience, but the whole process is being spoiled by the number of trolls in games. I understand that you are trying to improve community behavior and that it must be very difficult to differentiate between players having a bad game, players arguing over chat and outright trolls, but the obvious conclusion is that it is not working properly. Verbal abuse is one thing, and is probably inevitable in an online team game, but trolling makes the whole game pointless and an absolute waste of everyone but the trolls' time.

Yet, I think it is possible with more will to prevent the worst of the worst from playing ranked games at anything but the lowest elo. In my opinion, players found guilty of behavior such as ragequitting, intentionnaly feeding or any other behavior where the player is clearly not trying to play the game properly should get a single warning, then be permanently banned from playing ranked games, without any hope of being forgiven, ever. Period. There are no reasons to let players who have had extremely disruptive behavior play ranked games ever again and ruin the experience of players who are simply trying to play the game the way it is meant to be in ranked. Chat restrictions and other "light" sanctions are simply not enough to discourage the real trolls, who probably find some sort of twisted gratification in getting a confirmation that they ruined someone's play time. Preventing them from playing at all with those who want to play seriously is the way forward.

TL:DR: Trolls (people who disrupt the game not only with verbal abuse but by not playing it seriously) should be permabaned from ranked play at second offense. Other approaches are at best inefficient, at worst insulting to the majority of players who try to play properly.

Best regards,

Someone who just wasted 2 hours of his life in three consecutive ranked games with trolls.