Riot is banning the wrong people.

Kalikain·2/13/2019, 9:46:49 PM·9 votes·3,462 views

I see posts by the 100s a day. "I got banned for being toxic."

Whether you agree with being toxic, being an offense large enough to be bannable, is debatable.

However, what we don't see; and what I don't see by reporting players who afk and players who grief in games (trolls)... are bans for people who actually impact the outcome of the game.

You can mute chat, you can't mute people who follow the jgler to steal camps, run it down mid 0/11 () cough tyler1, rage quitters, etc etc.

Being suspended for leaving a game is a ban for 5-15 minutes which cannot be avoided to everyone else in the game; hurting someones feelings, which could be avoided by muting them, is a perma ban.

Is this because of our political atmosphere right now?

Riot is banning the wrong people.

72 Comments

Jo0o2/13/2019, 9:54:05 PM8 votes

Jesus dude, it's really hard to take you seriously when you jump to a "political atmosphere" excuse.

The discrepancy is easily explained: Chat-based offenses are much easier to catch and punish. Banning for trolling requires evaluating somebody's intent, which is extremely difficult to do. Even the classic "running it down mid" can, in some narrow cases, be an example of lag, inexperience, distraction, a hacked account, etc. The more nefarious trolling such as "soft inting" are even more complex to interpret. If I die ten times in lane, am I a troll or a noob?

As for muting chat toxicity: That only works for protecting your own feelings. If my teammate is tilted by another toxic teamate and it impacts their play, muting is of no value to me.

grarrrg2/13/2019, 10:04:06 PM8 votes

I'm going to assume they do ban them, but the offenders know exactly why they got banned, so don't go complaining about it.

There's also the possibility that the people that like to flame-chat, just like to type. Whereas the feeders/griefers aren't big on words.

AeroWaffle2/13/2019, 10:07:26 PM8 votes

It's not like the automated system that scans for chat is somehow overburdened by that and can't spend any time detecting game related methods of poor behavior.

If you completely stopped the automated system from banning people for poor chat behavior, the trolls would not get banned any faster. Detecting a troll with an automatic system is spotty at best and detecting them with a manual review is slow and time-consuming. In both cases Riot tends to ere on the side of caution because of the desire to never ban someone for just playing poorly with no ill-intent.

So if the options are whether or not to ban for poor chat behavior, with little to no effect on how frequently or consistent Riot detects trolling behavior, why shouldn't Riot be banning for poor chat behavior since that too creates a horrible game experience?