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4 mans are not inherently toxic & Addressing the Tribunal

CytheGuy·3/22/2018, 11:20:54 PM·2 votes·326 views

I just read this post and found some comments talking about how 4 man premades shouldn't be allowed and all that jazz, which really concerned me about the mindsets of these players, and not even just as players but as people. Just because I'm in a 4 man doesn't mean I want to hurt you. I have been in many a 4-man and not once have I ever wanted to make the 5th's life miserable. Taking away 4-man premades from all gamemodes won't solve your problems, there will just be 3 mans who troll. Advocating for the easy solution has never worked, because it only surfaced a "copycat problem."

"Well how do we fix this then?" My answer to you- Push Riot to either a) Be more watchful of/considerate to reports of trolling or b) Reinstate the Tribunal. With the new replay system it wouldn't be too hard (assuming Riot has competent programmers, which I am sure they do) to incorporate replays into the Tribunal so that players can have more to look at when judging an accused person. >For those who don't know what the Tribunal is: The Tribunal was an old "community court" where all player reports were sent to in order for the community to issue punishments to toxic players.

Some of it's previous problems even had/now have some (theoretically) easy fixes. Here are some:

  1. Backlog: Fix by requiring players to participate in the tribunal, let's say once a week, and instead of incentivizing participation you give player compensation for the "trouble" of participating in the community, perhaps with some BE or maybe a small boost to Honor. If a player doesn't participate, they are prevented from playing, given a pop up of "You have not completed [your] Tribunal review[s] for the week. Please complete [it] them before queuing up for a game." Riot could even make a Tribunal App that allows players to complete their cases on their phones in case they aren't at their PC or Laptop and want to make sure they can jump straight into a game when they have some downtime. Players can also choose to participate more than once if they choose, but are only required to submit one and have a limit to prevent players from constantly voting to punish or sanction people.
  2. Incentive Failure: he problem before with incentives was that people just hit "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" for the rewards and didn't care at all for the actual report or problem people had. Riot can just write an algorithm that takes into account average time spent reviewing and from here whether or not to make the system actually count a player's vote, and if it gets too out of hand force them to spend a set amount of time on a review before allowing them to cast a vote, or because that might fail make the player type some reasons for their vote before allowing them to submit it.
  3. Systems for Judgement: The Tribunal used to be the only place where people could be judged for their behavior. Riot now automatically issues punishments for toxicity based on keywords and phrases, which is probably the #1 reason for reports being issued. People also have never been entirely afraid of being banned for trolling because of how bad the system for punishing these players is. If a player is aware of their reports being up to the community, which is more diligent when they are required to participate and more harsh when they know they themselves have to put up with these things, that player is less likely to troll or grief.

TL;Dr 4 mans aren't all bad; It's time to bring back Tribunal with solutions to its problems.

Thoughts?

2 Comments

Arammus3/22/2018, 11:40:02 PM1 votes

whats the tribunal and why do you want it back lul.

no seriously the tribunal was cool and all but slow and meh

Umbral Regent3/22/2018, 11:43:46 PM1 votes

I can agree on the 4-man premade thing - it's easy to get paranoid when you're the one man out from your team, but, in my experience, a fair amount of the 4-man premades I've dealt with were fairly amicable groups - sometimes they'd pal around, sometimes they'd encourage me, assuage my paranoia, etc., and sometimes they'd just silently play the match without any negativity towards me.

Hell, even recently with the Honor rework, I've at least twice gotten 4-man premades who voted me Most Honorable on the team (albeit likely for the fact that Honoring amongst themselves wouldn't do much), which is always amazing.

But, with the idea of the Tribunal being reinstated, I'm personally inclined to say "no". Sure, it was a fun little thing, and it was endearing to feel like I was making a difference in the community first-hand, but, altogether, the Tribunal system was pretty heavily flawed, and I don't think that the proposed changes to it would help, either.

First off, let's get the biggest issue out of the way - if your suggestion to fix the issue of a large backlog of cases is to make the Tribunal mandatory for all players just to play League of Legends, then the issue is clearly something that cannot be fixed well, if at all.

Mandating a Tribunal review before playing League of Legends would put an unnecessary block on people, whether they want to crack down and play several matches in a row, or get that one-off for their First Win of the Day. People come to play League of Legends to play...Well, League of Legends, not the Tribunal. Preventing people from playing League until they perform at least one Tribunal review would detract from the game they came to play, for, what? A band-aid fix to a larger problem with the Tribunal?

And, ironically, that would lead straight into the problem you proposed a fix for next; people just clicking "Guilty"/"Not Guilty" without actual regard for the case itself. Because, why should I care about the case, if I just need to click this button to be allowed to play League like I wanted to in the first place?

Naturally, forcing people to do something they don't want to do is going to result in them not care about what it is you're making them do. And, in somewhat of a cyclical fashion, if people are ignoring the actual case and just clicking "Guilty"/"Not Guilty" as quickly as they can, but their verdicts are being disregarded on the case because of how quickly they place it, and this is only assuming that everyone's only doing the one case they're assigned per day...

Well, we're right back to square one, with a massive backlog of cases that don't get looked at, let alone weighed on.

And, lastly, addressing the third point, Systems for Judgement, it carries some misconceptions about the IFS that I feel aught to be cleared up.

  1. I can't remember quite who said it, but I do recall one of the Forum Moderators saying that the IFS uses, or rather, is a neural network/complex algorithm to read and decipher chat, which allows it to understand some level of tone and intent. People often get punished for insulting other players or being consistently negative/passive-aggressive, and, in the same turn, you'll seldom ever see someone get punished for insulting themselves.
  2. The only keywords/phrases I know of that the IFS searches for fall into zero-tolerance chat, like hate speech or encouragements of self-harm.
  3. The only reason trolls/griefers and so on are confident is because they know it's much harder to determine the intent of actions than it is to determine the intent of chat. Regardless, they do ultimately get punished, and I don't think participating in a Tribunal case involving other trolls would put a dent in their confidence.

All said, I don't personally see a whole lot of reason to bring back the Tribunal, nor a whole lot of good to come of it coming back, assuming these proposals become a part of it.