After playing for around five years, I can say that most verbally toxic players are not "physically" toxic. Not the right word, but what I mean is, just because someone gets chat banned doesn't mean that they're going to start AFKing, feeding, etc..
I've always been of the opinion that communications abuses should not be permabannable alone. Lyte has said time and time again that the mute feature isn't enough because "the damage is already done". Alright, then here's the solution... automatic mute. Players that exhibit extremely toxic communications will be automatically muted, simple as that. For them to be heard, they'd have to be unmuted. If someone wants to unmute one of these flagged players, that's their risk to take and they are responsible for what happens from that point on.
The argument against things like this is that it gets in the way of communications, but we all know that's BS. If that was true, servers would be region locked. The two guys in solo/duo spamming Romanized Mandarin/Korean are not contributing to the rest of the team's strategy whatsoever. If you want to say pings are enough for them to communicate, then the same goes for muted players, simple as that. The only reason people look at it any differently is that we're comparing "innocent over seas players who can't speak English" to "toxic assholes". To tell you the truth, I don't care in the slightest. We need a positive game experience. Communications wise, they're the same players.
You, me, and everyone working at Riot knows that no one quits this game when they get permabanned. If anyone is going to start AFKing and feeding because of a ban, it's the permabanned guy who just lost $500, not the perma-chat banned guy. For a long time, I received restrictions myself. I had a habit of calling out my lane opponents (Remember that pregame message that says flaming your team makes them play worse? Yeah, that works for the enemy team too, go figure. I'm not advocating it and you're going to get banned if you do it, but it's true.) When I got chat banned, never once did I say "OH WELL TIME TO INTENTIONALLY FEED, I GUESS", and honestly, I'd be willing to bet 95% of chat banned people don't, either. It's nonsense.
I haven't been hit with a restriction in a long time, and I won't. People are assholes. A lot of the things people say are definitely not okay and they shouldn't be said, but the social justice spin especially needs to go away. It isn't helping anything. The idea that a three letter word carries more weight than telling someone that you're going to hunt them down and murder them is frankly absurd. However, none of those things should get you permabanned. When it comes down to it, they're not ruining gameplay, they're ruining unnecessary communications. Someone who has intentionally fed once in their entire league career of six years is 100 times worse than the most vile, toxic, despicable, verbally abusive piece of trash, no contest, no argument, no questions. That's how it is. Legitimate trolls are on a level of their own.
No names here, but I read something earlier about some guy who has uncontrollable breakdowns when he sees a specific word said in chat. I'm sorry, that's horrible and all (if true), but that's not our problem. Riot needs to get in contact with this person and find out what's going on, because anyone who loses control of their body over text on a screen needs help. You can't protect individuals that have that many issues on something as open, lawless, and anonymous as the internet. The most responsible thing would be to ban them until you can figure out what's going on and if it's safe for them to be in this situation. Also, that thread needs to be removed because that individual is literally just getting trashed on now. Wake up, mods. Everyone else shouldn't be preemptively punished because of something like that.
1.) People need to smarten up. If you die and someone says "..." or "wtf", immediately mute them. What good could they possibly have to say? Stop letting them flame you and then complaining about it.
2.) People need to toughen up. Should anyone be flaming you? No. But no one should be jaywalking, either. If you lay in bed at night dwelling on someone calling your Zed gameplay bad, maybe you need a break from this game.
3.) Riot needs to stay out of social justice politics. Flaming someone is bad, period. Threats are worse than three letter words. Every bigoted slur is as bad as the rest. I had a stupid former team mate banned for using a racial slur, but twice I've reported individuals for anti-Caucasian slurs and, as an experiment, added one after (the second didn't accept, but I did check up on him occasionally). Absolutely nothing. Drop the double standard. Flaming is flaming, racism is racism.
4.) No one quits this game after a ban. Nobody. If I'm wrong, I want a legitimate statistic showing otherwise. It's better to shut the toxic players up permanently than recycle them back into the system to ruin the game for a new generation of players until they get flagged as a smurf and start ruining it for the same players all over again, except now ten times worse because they're angry that they just lost $500.
So what do you think? Agree, disagree? Why or why not? If these things are going to actually be fixed, delicate subjects need to be talked about, whether people like it or not.
