Boards›Player Behavior

On the "Honor" System and Player Punishments

Hugh Muńgus·5/20/2018, 5:47:55 PM·15 votes·10,984 views

The honor system is something that has been bothering me since it was first reworked after release.

Honorable Opponent

You can no longer honor enemies. This discourages positive all chatting between teams to the point where you might as well turn it off to shield yourself from the negative jabs that might be sent to your team. I'm someone who likes communicating with the players I'm in a match with, both ally and enemy, with a bit of positivity, banter, and humor. It made the game more fun when you could be rewarded for this positive behavior, and reward the occasional player who would also exhibit this.

Honor punishment

I'm someone who is honored multiple times a game on average. On the release of honor, I quickly climbed up to honor 4 and received the honor icon. I was playing a ranked game where I had a troll who was intentionally feeding. Naturally, this player was doing everything he could to annoy and harass his own team, both by trolling in game in every way possible and unleashing flame on everyone in the chat. Now I don't believe in muting players. Quite frankly, it isn't a solution, its just ignoring a problem (Which I'll admit can be preferable and more effective for the term of a game when dealing with many players, especially for ? ping spammers). Instead I try to kill it with kindness because I believe every game is winnable unless your nexus is gone. I also think that players can be talked down from this ledge of toxicity if you remind them enough that we are all on the same team. After all, this was a ranked match. My team didn't share the same views, and engaged in a chat flame war for the rest of the game. Eventually, he got more tilted and started running it down my lane and following me around, baiting me into fights where he would abandon me, broadcasting our locations to the enemy team in all chat, and going for all of my farm. This effectively killed me. This is behavior you can't mute. I held my tongue for almost the entirety of the game, and made a single slip with a curse in chat just out of my frustration, not even directed at this player. I was still trying to hold everyone together. After an eternity, we were able to surrender. This player reported everyone on our team, and I ended up netting a chat restriction for 3 games because of this. For this, I was banished to the abyss of Honor 0. I sit here well over half a year from the incident still on checkpoint 2 of honor 0 after the changes to low honor despite still being honored nearly every game. I couldn't get any good rewards that I knew I deserved. I still can't to this day. I can't participate in clash with my friends because it requires a minimum honor of 2.

Afterthoughts

Chat restrictions are quite useless for me as a player. If someone is going to be toxic, they'll find a way. Capping the messages I can send to my team to communicate and disabling my ability to communicate positively with the enemy tilts me more than anything. You may be saying "Oh but this stops toxic players from chatting". So does the mute button. If someone is spewing nothing but toxicity, you mute them and report them at the end of the game. I'm treated like a war criminal when I know that 99% of the time, I'm a positive force for the community.

The email and notification you receive when punished is quite condescending to players being overly punished. As a player treated well for being of high honor normally, returning to my profile day after day and being called "Dishonorable" is just insulting. I feel that I don't deserve to be treated this way for making a minor slip in chat. I shouldn't have to hit "I Understand" and read through the chat logs of what I said, completely out of context, only to find one single general message with a curse word in it. This is because, quite frankly, I really can't understand why I'm being punished this way. I am glad that I am able to see everything that I said, but maybe highlight the thing(s) that actually gets you the punishment so you can avoid accidentally slipping into what the system will automatically punish you for.

Honestly, the system is broken and hypocritical. Triggering the automated system gets you lumped in with all people who spew curses, causing you to be hit with a massive punishment that is completely unfair and out of context. Meanwhile, I see people in ranked intentionally feeding, afking, and being insanely toxic on the daily. This system is disgustingly broken and we the players have had to suffer long enough. Its time to bring context into reports, separate light offenders from people who truly deserve the severe punishments currently dished out to everyone, increase severity for offenders in ranked modes, and crack down on inting and rage quitting.

31 Comments

This Is Your Dad5/20/2018, 11:41:12 PM11 votes

Chermorg, as a moderator I believe you should get back to moderating and stop engaging in the discussions yourself, as it seems you are having a difficult time moderating anything without turning it into a grossly exaggerated attack on whoever is the poster.

I can't believe you've dissolved into attacking people for being too nice.

Whatever an "Advisor" does, it should be delivered in a better way than this woefully offensive libel that I keep seeing.

SangreDeNoche5/20/2018, 8:11:10 PM5 votes

Exact same thing happened to me. Straight honor 5 and I was top level honor possible whenever it was reset. When I got chat restricted it was full of chat logs that weren't toxic. I even posted them to these boards and told people to go ahead and roast me if I was another delusional toxic player who didn't see what they were doing. 5 or so people responded and none of them could find anything. Some asked how the heck I even got punished. Amazing how this all happens after riot "reworks" something, like balance, it always ends up a worse offender of whatever issues it had before at the cost of the benefits people saw.

Chermorg5/20/2018, 5:51:29 PM4 votes

Why should you be able to honor an enemy based on only a portion of their chat/actions? You don't see their team chat or fog of war actions. They could be the most toxic player but you honor them because they put on a face for all chat.

If your "talking down with kindness" is harassing, spammy, or appears sarcastic in nature, then yes, you may get punished for it. Nobody likes having someone with the positivity of 4 Lux's in a game. It gets annoying and is just as bad sometimes as someone being toxic.

If you think someone's being toxic and it annoys you, mute them and report them. Stop trying to take matters in your own hands.

Austin Covello5/20/2018, 7:30:34 PM4 votes

Dude, you realize you're arguing with a glorified e-mail spam filter run by subcontractors who couldn't give a shit, right? And also, take what the "advisor" says with a grain of salt. That individual works for riot and therefore is paid to assume that the system is completely flawless. Anyone criticizing the system has the problem and is the problem.

My advice to you is when you see a troll in the champ select (and you can usually tell who is going to troll in the champ select), dodge. It's not worth the hassle or the stress. Riot doesn't want to do anything about the trolls, since the people they get to rage get punished, and have to actually buy the stuff they would be getting for free, otherwise. Not to mention if an account gets permabanned, they have to buy everything from the previous account. CA-CHING!

RacoonHunter5/21/2018, 3:12:18 AM2 votes

Same thing happened to me. It was even worse that I contacted support, only to have them tell me from one of their personal emails some very toxic stuff, worse than anything I've ever said (including to "end my existence" ) .

What makes matters worse, is they keep promoting this "clash" system that requires honor 2, yet, for those of us who are working their ass off getting back up, and who WERE honor 4 (me before the 2 week ban that was lifted after a week after they admitted they were wrong, but refused to restore the honor). Almost 3/4 of my games i get honored, or the whole team is honored, and yet, I'm still at level 1 rank 0 after 3 months.

I have been saying this system is broken for a while. people are having offensive names referencing body parts, curse words, hate speech etc, and riot doesn't make them change it. it's kinda pathetic.

Hyquiem5/22/2018, 2:22:23 AM2 votes

It’s a pain really, the honor system doesn’t sperate kindness from ignorance it in courages it. I find it really horrible that I can’t honor my laner for giving me a fun 15mims of the game. Then I can’t participate in clash that many of my friends ask for since I can adapt to many of their situations because my honor is one lvl down for the average.

LogicalThinkTank5/21/2018, 5:56:52 AM1 votes

I got a two week ban for intentionally proving riots system is flawed by baiting people into saying certain slurs, and flagged words that get them banned if they get reported (those people never got unbanned, and riot didnt even send me chat logs or anything just an email saying I was banned for it, even though its not against the rules to bait somebody into getting banned, or wasnt at the time. I was never toxic or anything didnt feed didnt use any slurs wasnt toxic, just tried to show riot how flawed their system was and got punished for it.

I guess riot doesnt take kindly to people pointing out how flawed the system is and giving them concrete proof of it because even my posts were hidden deleted that I posted on the forums with proof.

PLS GÓD NÓ5/21/2018, 9:12:53 AM1 votes

Riot is about quantity not quality. They don't care about pleasing a small group of players. You are absolutely right about the system being stupid AF. It's a stupid solution to a big problem, but the sad truth there is no one right way to handle the volume of toxicity and player comments without being automated.

Best advice, play another game.

SangreDeNoche5/22/2018, 7:08:53 PM1 votes

Oh yeah OP, I forgot to mention something that always bugs me when chat restrictions are brought up. The argument riot and pro-chat restriction players always make when there isn't anything toxic for them to point to in a report. "Well you probably talked too much and that's just as bad." If that were true why isn't everyone capped at the number of things they can type at any given time? If I shouldn't be saying any more than 1 thing per 3-5 min. anyway why isn't there a limit like that automatically in place?

C9 oWolf5/21/2018, 2:50:37 AM1 votes

Please help I don't know what I did wrong I was adc playing tristana won lane with support encouraged my teammates and eventually we won the game. I never said anything toxic but when I supposedly intentionally fed twice even though both times I got at least two kills and got one or two more low for my team to finish them off and get free towers a baron or a drake etc... After the game everyone reported me and I went straight to honor level 0. I still haven't recovored from it and I still don't understand what I did wrong. I was honor level 4 btw. Now I am only back to honor lv 1.item 3070