My email to riot on player behavior (posted here under riots suggestion.

Initial disclaimer that I am not a writer or that good at articulating thoughts because things like this require a huge mess of multiple layered ideas. This is my email I sent to riot about a way to deal with what I deem to be one of the more pressing issues in league of legends in terms of player behavior.

"Alright, I understand riots plan of giving things to players who are not toxic, but that doesn't stop people who don't care about online trinkets. Toxic players don't have large built up attachment to their account because they know one day they will get banned. I am sure you have seen people in your own ranked games do things like soft afk (always splitting till death, not participating in fights but just standing on the edge), intentional feeding, typing "I'm done" or something to the effect. The list goes on.

I feel like this just isn't being addressed as much as verbal abuse in league of legends. I get verbal abuse is cut and dry and easier to weed out, but its more of an automatic system at this point because of your larger player base. But personally and I know this is anecdotal, I would rather have my teammates calling me every slur in the book than soft afk or stop attempting to win. Its no contest. If the chat filter wasn't enough you have the mute ping and chat function so they can continue to flame without it clogging up the chat. I have surveyed my friends in the more competitive range plat-challenger about which they prefer. Every single time they'd rather have them try to win and flame than soft afk and "be nice".I get its harder to lock down instances of this because some people are victims and mass report every game for every transgression. But when a clear cut case of someone running it down or soft afking ("I'm done") is established the punishment needs to be a banger.

Which is where my plan is to restrict ranked behind either normal draft or normal blind WINS. I know you have talked about not wanting a certain queue to be prisoner island, but notice i said WIN not just a game. Regardless of what happens in game, these players have to play to WIN. You guys would probably come up with a different number but depending on how frequent I get these people in game I have said anywhere from 50-100 normal wins before being let back into ranked(also these people have no chat option at all instead of your normal 3/5 starting +1 every 4 minutes) This exposes these players to people who don't take the game as serious('its just a normal lol') so they really get their nose rubbed in their own behavior and have the 1st hand experience of how that makes other feel.

This doesn't exactly stop all toxicity, I'm not god and I don't expect toxicity to ever go completely away in any competitive game. This might initially make normal blind/draft (or a separate normal q for dick heads) slightly more unpleasant, but if the punishment was harsh enough, I believe these people would swallow their pride as to not be subjected to the horror of playing to win in a normal game. This direction of player punishment I think isn't as heavy handed as it first seems either. Because a temp ban/perma ban just means currently logging on the smurf account to continue the behavior where the stakes are even lower(if that's possible) or just buying another account for 20$. So I feel as though those two methods are totally ineffective in dealing with toxic behavior(see tyler1 20 accounts permas before being actually dealt with, the L9 toxic EUW people etc etc). Leveling up an account or buying one is just enough of an annoyance to where I think they would actually play the normal games (because they still get IPfor more champs runes).

I really think you guys can come down harder on things that actually ruin the game, I don't care about e-fame for this, this isn't going on reddit, I'll physically or digitally sign away any rights to this plan if that's an issue I just want to see the game improve in the ranked ladder. Any feedback would be great, test it internally somehow, or do it in very very clear cut and dry cases and go from there, I think the program would be more effective if you DON'T announce it and let word of mouth spread as fear of the hammer might be a greater motivator than the hammer itself. Thank you for reading."

Their response "Hey there,

To be honest, we get a lot of complaints about our IFS system, and we get even more not-so-thought-out comments on how we could make our system better. I am not going to lie, I thought this proposal would be one of them, but I think this is actually one of the most solid suggestions I have ever read regarding the fact. I'm in high Plat, and I totally agree with your assessment that I would rather have a negative person than someone who is not trying to win. This can definitely change from person to person, though, depending on how competitive they are and how certain language can affect them, but personally, I agree. That being said, I often really go out of my way to investigate reports of griefing (an umbrella term for what most of what you mentioned) but it is just so tough to confirm. At a certain point, it is very easy to say "oh, that person is inting", or if they say "I'm trolling in chat" we can punish them, but it can be so tough to be 100% certain that someone is griefing instead of just having a bad game. On the players that we do audit to be griefing, we come down hard on. We will 2-week or permanently suspend them. However, as you alluded to, many players don't even know that we do this, and I believe that them knowing that we punish this type of behavior, would be more useful in combating the behavior than the punishment itself. If we could deal with this a bit better, your system might work very well, in tandem with our current systems!

I think this idea is really interesting, but unfortunately I can't pass feedback reports directly to the development team, but I recommend posting to the Boards. I know you wanted to try to keep this private, but the team is always looking at the Boards to get a feel for things players think could be improved.

You can find the Player Behavior Boards here:

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation

Thanks a bunch for sharing your idea! Please let me know if you have any other questions." I left his name out in case he didn't want to be directly associated with this, if this person reads this forum post as well and wants to identify themselves as the riot employee who responded then they are free to do so.

Feedback is appreciated and if you require any further context or explanation I will try to clear up my rambling. I really want to see the ranked ladder change, and if this is implemented and and works, I think it could give insight on how to deal with toxic behavior in other game modes.