Riot doesn't know how to fight toxicity

The current reporting system doesn't actually target the most toxic players. Hear me out.

I've been playing league for 2 years now and despite all the changes to the game the community is no less toxic than when I started. In fact, it might actually be worse. I just got out of a game today where a Varus chat-spammed me for missing my Q as Lee Sin... the WHOLE game. Yesterday a Twitch on my team ran it down top lane because the enemy team's Nasus got 2 kills in the first 5 minutes. If you play league regularly I'm sure you have your own examples that are even worse than that.

I think the reason league is so toxic is because Riot punishes the wrong players for toxic behavior. For example. Here's how 9/10 of my games go:

• Ten minutes into the game an angry player on the losing team starts blaming someone who isn't doing well
• The player who was blamed starts talking back wayyyy too much and now it's a 3v5 with two people in a chat war
• That team goes on to lose (of course) and everyone else just reports the player who annoyed them the most.

THIS SYSTEM DOESN'T FIGHT TOXICITY.

All Riot is doing by having players constantly report each other is fueling negativity and giving incentives to "win" the chat battle in front of everyone. The player who the rest of the team calls toxic only gets angrier, and the player who proved their point only goes on to try to do the same in more games later on. In fact, it actually pays in a way to be more toxic.

What Riot needs to do is come up with a system that more intelligently targets the confrontational players: i.e. the first players to say something toxic in a game and start all the fighting. Riot could do this in any number of ways. Look at the players who type toxic remarks most frequently from game to game, look at the players who see the most overall reports in their games, etc. _The point is not to target players for being toxic once but to find which players are making the community toxic as a whole. _

I predict that if Riot does this correctly they will find WAYYY LESS toxic players playing league than they expected. It's really only one person who starts the arguments in each game, then a bunch of random people respond. Giving incentives for "good behavior" was a good idea but the honors system hasn't cured toxicity so much as it has solidified the players who already weren't being toxic in the first place. I don't think Riot should throw out reports altogether, but as anyone who plays the game knows this system isn't enough to get the community to where it needs to be.

It's important to remember that not all games have toxic communities. Not even all competitive games. League would be way more fun for players in low elo especially if it figured this out.