Boards›Player Behavior

We could do away with Permanent Bans...

Subdue·10/25/2018, 3:03:47 AM·28 votes·10,741 views

Proposal: Instead of permanently banning players for chat based offenses, provide a "Chat Freedom" option for full premade teams and allow players who would be permanently banned to only queue up with full premade teams.

This would allow access to the following queues:

Summoner's Rift - Blind Pick Summoner's Rift - Draft Pick Summoner's Rift - Ranked Flex Twisted Treeline - Blind Pick Twisted Treeline - Ranked Flex ARAM

Notably, it will NOT be available for Ranked Solo Queue (Obviously).

Prior to entering the queue, each player on the premade team should receiving a warning along the lines of:

"(Player) is on restricted access due to poor behavior. Reports of chat based offenses made on any of the players on this premade team will not be considered. In addition, All-Chat will be disabled for the duration of the game. Do you wish to continue?"

As stated in the warning, players on such teams will not be able to report any players on their team for any reason. They opt into this by electing to play with the individual(s) in question.

In addition, include a feature similar to the old teambuilder that performs a "Looking for Game" function, with an option to allow restricted players on the team. This teambuilder will NOT take into account MMR, and will simply group players looking for a full premade together. They will then enter the queue exactly as a normal premade would.

Why it could work:

  1. Players who would otherwise be unable to play on their accounts anymore would once again be able to at little to no risk of offending others.
  2. Since all players will still be able to communicate with their team, there is no degradation of communication and limited risk of resorting to other means of expressing dissatisfaction (trolling).
  3. Only limited development would be required, including minor UI updates, an additional option on premade teams, and minor updates to existing teambuilder code.
  4. Since players choose their teams, and their teams can be their friends, including those who are not penalized in any way, there is no prisoner's island effect.
  5. Since they will still play in the same queues exactly as they might have if they were not penalized, there is no degradation of MMR.
  6. Since Riot can still track their chat despite the "Chat Freedom" option, and would have a history of their chat behavior, Riot would have valuable data should Riot decide to offer restoration of an account to full access later on.
  7. Access to one's main account to play in most game modes would reduce the appeal of creating a new smurf.

Why Punish?

What is the purpose of punishments? Punishments have existed as long as history itself, and probably longer. They can be just and they can be unjust, fair or unfair. They can be a slap on the wrist, or they can be a beheading. However, punishments have always served a common purpose, which is to coerce a desired behavior or to dissuade an undesirable one.

In many legal systems, including that of the United States, the aggrieved are not allowed to participate in the judging of the accused or in the handing down of their punishments, because the belief is that the aggrieved cannot be impartial, and that they would be likely to hand down a judgement that is unfair, or a punishment that is too severe for the crime. The purpose of the punishment is not supposed to be vindication for the aggrieved, but rather deterrence of future crimes. The most severe crimes have the most severe punishments because they require the greatest deterrence.

However, this is one area where the fundamental rules of life do not apply to video games, or to League of Legends specifically. Unlike real life where there is no way to absolutely compartmentalize and control the actions of an individual, in League of Legends, Riot is absolutely able to do exactly those things. If we understand punishments not as a source of vindication or retribution for wrongs, but as tools to deter poor behavior, we would be remiss to ignore this glaring opportunity.

I exaggerated a bit before. Riot is not able to control the actions of an individual, only the actions of an account. We know that some, though likely not all, permanently banned players go on to make smurf accounts, and many of those players continue to behave in the same toxic ways, exposing those most vulnerable, the new players, to the levels of toxicity that earned them a permanent ban in the first place. In fact, we have seen on this very board people coming forward and saying they intentionally do this for their own sick sense of retribution for the banning of their accounts.

If my proposal minimizes the likelihood that players deemed toxic create smurfs and inflict the same toxicity that got them banned on new players, which I firmly believe it does, does it not better serve the purpose of deterring toxic behavior?

108 Comments

ModThe Djinn10/25/2018, 3:10:42 AM24 votes

You know what?

This is the single best suggestion for allowing permanently banned players to play that I have ever seen on the boards. The requirement of a full pre-made team and locking out All-Chat for that team (although I'd suggest just that player) solves many of the issues I've seen.

Now, I'm not fully on board because I would want to see some studies on the suggested impact to the community perception of toxicity, but this is the most actionable suggestion I've seen, and checks most of the boxes I'd say need to be checked for a good alternative to the current system.

Whether it's a good direction or not (and I'm not fully convinced I do want more leniency to banned players), congratulations on a very well thought out and presented thread!

Zombie Gerbil10/25/2018, 3:08:26 AM10 votes

No. Prefer the toxic players who led up to that ban and completely unable to reform to be punished permanently. So, the permaban stays. The toxic players can go.

Krytoric10/25/2018, 11:53:26 AM6 votes

naw if you got punished enough to get perma'd, you deserved it.

PurpleYukari10/25/2018, 4:20:46 AM3 votes
  1. Is this only for chat related bans? I don't think its a good idea to do away with permabans completely. You don't want scripters using this system to continue cheating, for instance.
  2. I'm sure you have seen this article: https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2017/01/ask-riot-banished-to-prisoners-island/ While this is a neat approach that sidesteps some of the issues for prisoner's island, others still remain: -You get longer queue times. This is because you either need to manually find a team to join or wait for a team that will allow you in your game. It might be even worse then a standard prisoner's island system in that regard.
    -Building and operating this service would suck rioters away from other systems. You need support staff to be trained in how this works, programmers to code the logic for it and ensure it doesn't have side effects like breaking matchmaking, as part of the effort needed.
    -Also, riot wants to give players a real shot at reform when they let players back in the game. They still want toxic players to have access to all the features and not have a watered down version of the game. When riot unbanned permabanned accounts in their last experiment, they restored access to every feature.

And I see another reason why this might be unattractive to riot. The system basically announces that someone was banned for toxicity from the outset. This can surely cause unneeded drama, and people will probably leave the system. It will feel like a prisoner's island in the sense that you can't join a match unless you find 4 summoners who want to break you out.

This is a well written suggestion, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was already brainstormed by rioters. These are some likely reasons why such a system would be unattractive to riot, plus there are probably others that I haven't considered.

I Spread Cancer10/25/2018, 1:39:32 PM3 votes

I only agree to this because it will increase the quality experience of new player that is generally more toxic than usual game because of the smurfs. If it was just about the banned people, they had enough warning.

Inkling Commando10/25/2018, 4:06:11 AM2 votes

if a Herald is giving praise to this idea then i see no reason to discourage it.

SonicAF10/25/2018, 5:44:44 AM1 votes

The solo queue. For some reason you didn't include the idea to match them by MMR with longer queue times. Completely removing it is worse than having bad queue times. What am I missing?

Having no solo queue at all will still motivate permabanned players to create a smurf and will, as funny as it sounds, remove their chance to receive one of victorious chromas. It could be fine, but not exactly intuitive.