My friend had a recent encounter with the player behavior support team, after being banned on his main account for about 4 months. Sadly support wasn't able to assist him in a more direct way besides thanking him for being better on his new account.
Well, of course they're not going to do more than congratulate him for his better behavior on his new account. They don't unban accounts that weren't banned in error. It's not that they weren't able to assist him, it's that the way he wanted to be assisted goes against protocol.
And this goes out to all people who where suspended. Yes, my friend was given warnings, but is it fair he gets the same amount of warnings as someone who just insults with racial slurs? Is it fair he gets the same punishment as someone who tells everyone to "kill themselves?," just because he had tilt cause games were going poorly?
Skipping over the previous paragraph because this one has some big misconceptions.
He got more warnings than people who use racial slurs, and he ultimately had more leniency than people who encourage self-harm. The standard punishment track - which your friend went through - goes as follows:
- 10-game Chat Restriction
- 25-game Chat Restriction
- 14-day Suspension
- Permanent Suspension
Whereas the punishment track for players who use hate speech or tell others to kill themselves is much, much shorter;
- 14-day Suspension
- Permanent Suspension
Egregious behavior gets much, much less in the way of warnings and leniency, and is punished much, much harsher than general toxicity and excessive negativity. So, don't try to compare his punishments and warnings with offenses way worse than he committed; 'cause whether you think so or not, he had more warnings and more opportunities to reform than those other players do.
I was talking with him and he brought up the question, "why not just mute my in game chat?" And that's what brought me to make this post. We have the power to mute other's in game, and Riot has the power to mute all chat. So why not just take away his ability to chat in game? Why a permanent suspension?
Riot employs a permanent suspension because at some point, they just flat-out give up on a player's ability to reform. In your friend's case, he went through three separate punishments, one of which was a full-blown two-week ban from the game with the warning "if you misbehave again, you're getting permanently banned." If someone's not going to listen to that, then what are the odds that they'll ever listen?
As for permanent chat muting/restricting, there's a pretty big issue with that, and that's that Riot previously employed what amounted to such a punishment. People used to be able to get indefinitely scaling chat restrictions, and players under those longer-scale restrictions simply used all of their allotted chat for extreme toxicity, or - worse - resorted to intentionally feeding/trolling to "prove a point".
And that's just with chat restrictions. A full blown chat mute doubtless would be worse. And hell, your friend resorted to intentionally feeding in response to getting his account banned, so who's to say whether or not he'd be likely to int-feed or troll if he couldn't be negative in chat?
At the end of the day, while it would theoretically be a punishment fitting the crime if a player who abused chat would be disallowed from using the chat altogether, but the fact of the matter is, permanent chat mutes are more of a risk than a legitimate solution. And with ample warnings and opportunities to reform, I think it's more than okay that Riot employs something more along the lines of "shape up or ship out".
But that's part of the problem, people can just make new accounts, they feel bitter about their punishments and then make the player experience feel awful for new players.
Those players are almost certainly a small subset of an already small subset of players. For most, the permanent ban is a solid enough deterrent to give players pause when considering coming back, especially if they're just planning on continuing to be toxic.
People feel like a ban is a harsh punishment for some of the offenses.
Those people need to ask themselves "how many times was I warned about this? How many times did I ignore those warnings?"
They need to sit back and realize that their behavior can add up, and that they had ample time to change before getting the permanent ban.
If people are inting, put them in a low priority queue and block them from ranked.
Or...We could just use the regular punishment for intentional feeding, which is a 14-day ban from the gate? Why let intentional feeders ruin more games without punishment by straight-up telling them "hey, we see that you're deliberately trying to ruin people's games, so we're just going to push you over here to ruin Normals/ARAMs/RGMQ's instead of Ranked, because Ranked is the only gamemode that legitimately matters - oh and here's a low prio queue."?
And, yeah, I know I'm being a tiny bit hyperbolic with that, but that is the message you'd be sending with that kind of a punishment. Ranked restrictions in general are a bad idea for a punishment, because they only actually affect one section of the playerbase, and leave players outside of that section feeling awful because their games are still getting ruined.
If people are being toxic (without being super offensive) take away their chat.
Why? If they ignore the 10-game CR and 25-game CR, which are both punishments fitting for chat violations and forgiving enough that players should know that they may need to change their behavior, why ultimately let them off the hook if they continue ignoring warnings and punishments?
Especially considering that, as mentioned above, permanent chat muting is a risk, since those players could just turn to intentionally feeding and trolling because they can't bleed their negativity into chat.
"One punishment fits all" isn't a good system, make punishments more fitting for the crime, and it'll help support-player interactions.
Ignoring the suggested punishment for intentionally feeding, making punishments fit the offense probably wouldn't help Support-Player interactions all that greatly. It'd be scarcely different for a player to complain "I'll never be able to x again because I was a little negative?" - with "x" being either "play" or "talk".
