Boards›Player Behavior

Should there be an actual place to report extreme toxicity to, run by actual people ?

The Twisted One·4/6/2017, 9:22:12 PM·2 votes·273 views

Hello everyone,

You probably guessed it from the tilte, this is yet another thread about the current moderation system and how it judges player behaviour, and how it seems to be inherently flawed. So let me explain.

To put it simply, the current moderation system is based on an "average behaviour"; it considers whether or not you got reported a lot recently for many games. So you could say that it works for people who are "toxic in average" so to speak.

But then there is a huge problem : I can be extremely toxic for one or two game, and say nothing for the next 10 games. Nobody will know, the system won't punish me.

Let's be honest a moment here, if the system were working as intended, and considering for how long it has been in place, why are we still coming across toxicity so much ? Well ti's very simple, Riot considers that "Everyone can have a bad day". But that's a really bad way of thinking when it comes to toxicity; no matter whether or not you had a bad day, wishing cancer upon you and your family, telling to go commit suicide or any other kind of such nice feelings is no excusable. I'm not talking about someone who said "you are bad" or that "you suck", there are actual "had bad day", excusable sentences. But the system only sees reports. Both people may get reported, but one of them would deserve to be at least chat restricted, while the other probably "had a bad day".

So coming from there, and considering that no matter what, the report system can only do so much, I believe League of legend should have some human-based moderation. The report system is good in general, but not for specifics.

Allowing people to get away with heavy toxicity should not be possible, and I guess it's up to us, the players, the ones who get all this toxicity in our game every day, to step up and tell Riot that the system needs improvements, and that there is a simple way to do it; adding a moderation team.

Sorry for the long post

5 Comments

Deep Terror Nami4/6/2017, 9:25:33 PM3 votes

You can get punished for a single game of extremely toxic behavior, and every report triggers a review. This is frequently what happens to people that think it's ok to use offensive slurs and threats.

If your situation is so bad that you absolutely must bring it to the attention of Riot (such as someone is doxxing you and threatening to come to your house, or hurt themselves), you can submit a Support Ticket and speak directly to player support. Use the category I have a question > Game & Features > General Questions if there isn't one more appropriate.

OnlyYouCanHearMe4/6/2017, 9:49:14 PM1 votes

Well, in a way, the system actually is capable of judging extreme toxicity. It's not simply a "chat filter" in the sense that it only looks for certain words. The algorithms that the IFS are based on make it capable of learning what sorts of things the community find inexcusable, which include things like wishing cancer on someone's family, or threatening to find them in real life.

You have two possibilities when a player is being extremely toxic, but not punished: they are being reported, but not being punished by the system OR they are not being reported. Given how many players actually come to the boards with "I got permabanned for saying %%% one time in one game" or showing logs of extremely mild commentary and complaining about how it led to them being banned because they were on their last punishment tier, I tend to think it's more that players are not being reported as often as they might think. In twenty minutes, I could show you evidence of over a hundred players who were banned for "one bad game" just by scanning this Board.

It is certainly true, that the system does forgive players who have a history of "good behavior" more than it does players who have not built up that level yet. It's one reason why newer accounts can be punished more harshly than older ones; not because Riot has any favoritism towards older players, but simply because older accounts will often have a higher percentage of "good" games compared to "toxic" games than newer ones. If two players are toxic in one game, but player A has played 10 games and player B has played 100 games, then that's a 10% compared to 1% toxicity. Consider then the difference between a player who has played 200 games and one who has played 3000. You start seeing a much bigger difference, and when players have played for a considerable amount of time, they are more likely to require more toxic games before they reach the punishment threshold, where the IFS determines that they require a punishment. Obviously, that does not count for games of extreme toxicity. Even players who have been playing since Season 1 have been ending up permabanned by the system this season after use of hate-speech in 1-2 games.

Something else to keep in mind, is that Riot does have the ability to manually review reports and issue punishments. It is not done in all cases, but it does happen for those punishments issued outside of the Instant Feedback System.