I think it is pretty safe to say that a lot of people are unhappy with Riot's punishment system and how it handles (or doesn't handle) intentional feeding and other gameplay trolling.

So lets try something new - crowd-sourcing. I'm going to outline the problem as best as I can, and lets talk about solutions that could be used to deal with it. Then lets discuss the problems with those solutions, and lets find ways to solve those. Somewhere along the line I bet we will crystallize the ideas into something more feasible that Riot could hopefully make use of when developing solutions to the ongoing problems with gameplay trolling.

The main problem:

Players intentionally ruining games for others.

Some of the problems with addressing that problem:

Players sometimes perform poorly simply on accident, and any system that is too trigger-happy with punishments could catch these innocent players along with the people who intentionally do it.

Players sometimes soft-int, by doing things to throw matches that are even harder to detect, but that are still obvious to their teammates that they are trolling.

Players who throw matches or die a lot can still do these things on accident, and because we can't know their intent, it is difficult to gauge whether or not they deserve a harsh punishment or not.

Solution 1 - More manual reviews (such as bringing back the tribunal)

Benefits:

• Fairness (people will have more trust in a system that has human reviewers)
• Accuracy - you could receive many peoples' input on cases to get a live-read on how the community actually feels about certain types of behavior
• Context - cases where the context might warrant leniency could result in that due leniency being granted

Problem: Scope and scale of reviewing cases manually can't keep up with volume of reports.

• Solution: streamline manual review process - needs further discussion as to how, problems & solutions
• Solution: get more participation by developing a review feature that is accessible in-client rather than on a website
• Solution: limit manual reviews to a smaller number of cases, and or double up by using them to help feed a genetic AI to learn how to judge similar cases

Problem: Cost

• Solution: get more participation by developing a review feature that is accessible in-client rather than on a website
• Solution: Set up a go-fund-me, I'm not kidding. I bet lots of players would be willing to either donate directly or participate in a sale who's funds would be set aside specifically for funding such a project

Problem: Participants intentionally judging incorrectly (WIP) This problem is currently being discussed in the comments

• Solution: Keep track of participants' accuracy by mixing in resolved cases along with their real ones to see if they vote accurately on the resolved cases.
• Limit the importance of their accuracy by only allowing them to review small snippets from any individual case. Basically nobody gets to actually give any "guilty" or "innocent" verdicts, they can only score individual things on like, a scale from 1 to 5.

Solution 2 - Lighter punishments and/or warnings and/or interventions applied more liberally

Benefits:

• Less objectionable - if innocent players are caught by it, as they aren't necessarily being punished, but rather they are being helped when they are having a bad day
• Training - with interventions, players could be more easily shown how to get what they want from their fellow players (because lets face it, most ragers and flamers are just upset that someone is not listening to them). If they are taught how to better express themselves without upsetting their teammate, they will be able to make teammates listen without behaving punish-ably.

Problem: Not all players want to be coached on how to work with others

• Solution: make coaching opt-out, but warn them that causing fights with other players will get them banned faster if they fail to shape-up

Problem: Malicious users will remain able to play games for longer, or they could make use of extra warnings to better reverse-engineer the detection system and find ways around it.

• Solution: If they have to dilute their behavior too much then they won't be able to actually make their teammates think that they are trolling, defeating the purpose of trolling in the first place.
• Solution: repeat offenders or unusual cases should be kicked over to a manual review to ensure that they get properly investigated.

Solution 3 - Increase rewards for winning games somehow

Problem: increase toxicity on losing teams

• Solution: Players who would soft-int to throw games will be more likely to try instead because they will want the rewards of winning
• Solution: Players who tend to be toxic in easily detected ways will simply get caught by the IFS anyway

Work in Progress (WIP)

This post is a work in progress, more solutions and lists and discussions will be added and summarized as more discussions are held in the comments. Feel free to jump into the discussion and share your thoughts about various problems or their solutions, and if you can think of problems that we haven't yet please do speak up, we want to catch everything that could go wrong so we can scrutinize it thoroughly and have the best working solutions that we can think of.