Boards›Player Behavior

Let's talk toxicity - An open discussion about Player Behavior [1/2]

ModWuks·8/17/2016, 12:24:00 AM·25 votes·3,910 views

The following are my OWN opinions based on my observations over the past few months. Comments aren't representative of any other group or individual other than my own.

http://i.imgur.com/Y2Tadof.jpg

I check this sub-board on a daily basis; sometimes, it's a Miscellaneous day where I just feel like posting casually, and other times, I'll sit down and type out a few responses to some threads here. But regardless of whether I post in PBM that day or not, I read through a good number of threads and I empathize with the points that a lot of players make.

Right now, I'm at a weird place, and here are a few of my thoughts:

  1. While the Tribunal was active, Summoners were able to review cases by reading the entire chat logs of a player (enemies, allies, and reportee alike). There was context, and perhaps a bit of leniency with manual review by peers. Albeit, the system was flawed and abused by a few and was often slow to react, but I think most people had positive perceptions of the Tribunal.
  2. I can't shake the feeling that there's a shift in what acceptable behavior looks like. I might be completely wrong about this, and this may simply because the bounds of where the system stands on certain behaviors is ambiguous, but I think there's an atmosphere for some players where they're too afraid to talk, for fear of being flagged by the Instant Feedback system. While trash talking isn't the most respectful or good mannered thing to do, I personally don't think that it would be worthy of a permanent suspension through the escalation process.

I see where Riot is coming from. Mutual respect between players isn't the most unreasonable thing to ask for. In a medium where anonymity spawns toxicity through a lack of fear of repercussions, Riot is forging a new path in combating these negative tendencies.

These are my thoughts. I'm here as an Arbiter to facilitate and foster discussions about Player Behavior & Moderation, and a good majority of the time, I'll speak in the context of the existing Player Behavior and Reform systems; but today, I want to gauge where the you stand and read your sentiments on the changes over the past two years.

What are your personal opinions on the current environment in the game? What are your thoughts on the existing Player Behavior and Reform systems, such as Instant Feedback, Positive Play Rewards, etc? What is your idea of the IDEAL Player Behavior & Reform system? Feel free to drop any additional questions or comments that you have. I'll do my best to read all of the comments, and respond where it's appropriate for me to step in. [Post 2/2 coming at a later time]

Thanks much, Wuks

151 Comments

theArtifacts8/17/2016, 2:30:03 AM9 votes

Part of the problem right now is that premades do not report eachother and are intentionally toxic towards the odd men out. They won't get reported enough to get flagged and will often team up on reports the second they push someone over the edge; causing the more innocent of the players to receive punishment.

DevilishMetal8/17/2016, 2:29:38 AM6 votes

Yknow, I've always tried to keep an open mind about things in general. It only occurred to me recently how hard it actually is to do so.

I used to have a weird viewpoint on humanity in general (partly due to this game), where I questioned general morality of human beings. Like, how can people think this is okay? Even after 3 warnings, people continue to say these awful things, and I didn't really get it.

I was thinking about this one day, and I came to a thought that changed my entire perspective- people's actions are almost always based on what they have done and have had done to them throughout their lives. While it didn't necessarily justify the use of "kys" or other things of that nature, it does make you think a bit about the nature of this thing we call "toxicity".

Basically, my viewpoint is that toxicity isn't something Riot can solve- it's a much deeper problem than a video game.

The rest is open to interpretation, I guess.

Mistress Shyvana8/17/2016, 1:15:29 AM5 votes

I really like this post. You made some really good points

Good luck.

Sorin Alucard8/17/2016, 12:39:56 AM4 votes

You're absolutely right. You can't speak up especially when matched with premades. The community is disappointing imo. I'd rather mute them all at start and never exchange any other forms of conversation, but the trolling can start in select. You can't mute them in lobby, and you can't report them til the full game is over. If you dodge, you lose the lp. The advantage lies in the hands of people who don't care about their fellow players. They know what they can get away with.

Utility Backline8/17/2016, 1:38:29 AM4 votes

I'm someone who has almost strictly played solo queue since season 1 began. It is my honest opinion that nothing has changed, just the stylistic choice of how to be an asshole has changed. Let me explain

Season 1 - Was an absolute free for all. I still remember my first toxic experience. A guy was mad about not getting bot lane as Nunu and he and his duo sat in fountain all game. I remember everyone pissed at him and that first hopeless moment where I knew we would lose a game via toxicity. Nothing happened to him, and I realized I was in the wild west. I'm not pissed about this reality, because I am someone who can be very toxic myself. I am a provoker or someone who was willing to throw a win over a minor issue.

Season 2/3 - Tribunal years. Felt great. You never knew what happened to those you reported, but when you voted yes on a separate tribunal case, you almost felt like you were hitting yes on the guy who screwed you over. Naturally I also got punished numerous times, so I had a huge sense that the tribunal was effective. I reported 10 guys, I tribunal voted yes 10 guys, and I got punished 10 times. It seemed flawless. Even if it wasn't working, only Riot would know that, imo they should've left tribunal and left us in a placebo effect.

Season 4/5 - Lyte Years. Worst time. Worst method. I remember being punished for the most minor of instances in Season 4 til I fully 'reformed' and by that I mean I learned like everyone else how to game the system. No one reformed, everyone just learned to become a professional victim. Someone said the most minor thing "Yo utility backline, can you not touch my minions when I am trying to cs?" "yo adc, watch your micro aggression, I'm really butthurt you treated me with such blatant toxicity." Meanwhile the rest of your team saw this interaction and decide to band wagon to vent as well "yeah adc don't be rude, why are you so toxic" to the point where the adc flips out and afks/feeds or returns the victim game back "yo why are you 4 cyberbullying me".

Season 6 - 4 Strikes. New system is super scary. 4th strike is a perma. Thats brutal. Not sure what to make of it yet. It feels like Season 4/5 though where if you even misword something, you even give the smallest ounce of toxicity, everyone runs with it, makes you out to be a Hitler. Its super annoying, but then again so was every other season. Its just the nature of the beast. Ranked is toxic because you only have 2 options. Win or lose. Losing is the absolute worst and winning is the absolute best. Therefore if you're losing, getting someone on your teamto feel like they are about to get a 2 week suspension fills the void that winning has on a persons mental game. It helps you grind ranked. Many will likely say thats untrue, but they are lying. Winning is equal to getting a teammate banned. Either way you've made someone else feel like shit, and thats the whole purpose of ranked. Make 5 guys feel like shit or 1 teammate.

Praetor Notorias8/17/2016, 4:29:22 AM4 votes

I had a long thought on this, but basically the reforming process doesn't address the culture of league. Theory crafting used to be a major part of it, now everyone expects someone else to theory craft for them and they get mad when someone doesn't do it exactly like they saw this one guy on youtube do it.

League stopped being fun for me when winning was important. So the culture is all fucked up right now and the reforming system only deals with raw toxicity. There isn't anything in place to teach people to not expect every game to be the same.

But the most fun games I do have tend to be the ones with the weird builds. I'm getting very close to 2k wins so the cookie cutter games are really boring.

When my friends are actually on league we tend to dominate because we're used to doing off stuff, plus they don't play enough to know what meta is anyways.

Itankyou8/17/2016, 1:12:59 AM3 votes

I agree with you Wuks (and I appreciate your posts in these forums lol you're always so positive :P). Point #2 is spot on. To me however I am afraid of typing anything other than gl hf at the start of the game and gg at the end of the game for fear of being flagged by the system anymore (that might be because I value my account so much and have been playing since season 1 and recently got a 14 day ban with no email :().

The current environment in the game feels to me like no matter what anyone says, it must be passive aggressive or insincere in some way because it is always met with someone spamming 'report him' or something along the lines of 'kys' for just asking for a ward or something stupid.

The current system has really come down heavily on playful jabs between teamates aswell and bans them as if they are the scum of the earth, imho, a lot the system is catching is the scum of the earth but it's definitely not perfect and I felt that the tribunal did a reasonable job at clearing up that stuff as well.

I see a lot of people becoming discouraged that they were not told that threatening reports in game is a ban-able offense, I think this is what is discouraging a lot of people on these boards. This leaves people to beleive that they shouldn't say anything and just take the abuse that they 'rightfully deserve' (atleast that is the mindset; and discouraging mindset at that). Overall, the automatic system leaves most of us wondering just what happened to culture of the game that used to exist long, long ago.

End of rant.

Ellis McPickle8/18/2016, 7:51:48 PM3 votes

The problem with the current system is there is no feedback. Sure, you can report players and once in a while a screen will pop up saying someone got punished but in reality you never know what the punishment was or who is was. It feels like the report button is mostly worthless, while at the same time you can get banned yourself for talking, because people are so sensitive now.

RobTheTank8/18/2016, 1:57:02 AM3 votes

In League games, just like in real life, I keep my mouth shut most of the time. They say, "You can't be quoted on what you don't say."

There have been times when I've been mean to the enemy team but only to degrade their morale. Psychological warfare is how I saw it. Then someone on the Boards pointed out that that was a violation of the Summoner's Code so I stopped.

But I say a little amount of toxicity can be beneficial at least to the extent that the toxicity points out the seriousness of the situation. For example I work in maintenance and construction during the summers and I was once using a saw incorrectly and my boss started yelling at me, "STOP WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE DOING YOU DUMBASS MOTHERFUCKER OR YOU'LL CUT YOUR FUCKING FINGERS OFF!!"

I still have all my fingers and I've gotten very good at using a saw safely since then, I tell you what. I realize a loss in a game of League is not equal to a loss of fingers but my point is that some toxicity should be permitted as long as its to "whip a player into shape" as it were while not attacking the player themselves.

Astôlfo8/18/2016, 1:31:57 AM2 votes

The downside of a Tribunal-esque system is how widely biased the system can get. It can be both intentional and unintentional. Or it can be just a troll who doesn't actually think before clicking some answer to anything/everything (all 'pass'/all 'fail'/random choices/etc).

Intentional can fall under either the troll thing as I said or someone who intentionally finds it funny to either flag innocents or let guilties pass, or anything else of that nature.

Unintentional can be literally almost anything. Just waking up and not having had enough sleep or being cranky or something having gone less than optimal in real life can all affect decisions, and this sort of relation has been proved with hard data and experiments multiple times (not just for the Tribunal, but in general, with a judge/criminal sort of experiment).

Because of this, I don't think human decision is really reliable outside of official Rioters on either mistaken bans (actually mistaken error bans which are extremely rare) or on manually upgrading the bans to a permanent or such or explaining their decisions, etcetera.

UnbeatablePlayer8/17/2016, 2:04:27 AM2 votes

I agree with you about the escalation system being flawed. My first account ever received a permanent ban after I said fuck you to someone and made sarcastic remarks that wouldn't have gotten me punished without that single game of me saying fuck you.

Mister Punches8/18/2016, 4:11:59 AM2 votes

Depends on which part of the community I'm asked to describe.

The forum community is a mix bag for me. There's a lot of good people (in terms of personality), and a lot of bad people (the toxic people). However, it's relatively a 50/50, where I see about an equal amount of good people and bad people in the forums. Though, at peak hours, I notice that there are slightly more people who I view as bad people online (based off of community interaction, like flaming others or making fun of someone). There are some people who do end up being helpful, and then there are some genuinely nice people who I would share a discussion with over coffee or tea. I'm a bit glad that those kind of people do make up half of the forum community, but I'm still concerned that at least half of the community is definitely the kind of people I would easily avoid irl.

The ingame community, I see a LOT more bad people than good people. I can say this very easily without hesitation. The ingame community is much worse than the Call of Duty community by a long shot, because people take this game far too seriously, even in fun game modes like ARAM. I'm seriously disgusted by how toxic the community has gotten since 2011, when I first joined. I've spent more time getting flamed at and seeing others insult each other rather than actual gameplay where people don't type out their rage. The ingame community is easily worse than the Call of Duty community, and the Battlefield community, and this is on Normals. In ranked, I tend to mute everyone because I immediately assume that everyone is toxic (especially where I started out this season, in Bronze), due to the conditioning that I have received in Normals. These are the people who represent the community, imo. They are also the reason for why many people outside of League think that the League community is one of the worst gaming communities to ever exist.

Long story short, I feel that the ingame community overall needs a lot of attitude improvement. People easily throw around insults like homophobia, racism, and even making fun of physical and mental disabilities in the ingame community. In the forum community, I could easily see there being room for improvement when it comes to attitude, but the forum community is significantly much more tolerable than the ingame community. I'd like to see more of the forum community attitude ingame.

gottrjr8/17/2016, 10:12:15 PM1 votes

{quoted}

http://i.imgur.com/Y2Tadof.jpg

I check this sub-board on a daily basis; sometimes, it's a Miscellaneous day where I just feel like posting casually, and other times, I'll sit down and type out a few responses to some threads here. But regardless of whether I post in PBM that day or not, I read through a good number of threads and I empathize with the points that a lot of players make.

Right now, I'm at a weird place, and here are a few of my thoughts:

  1. While the Tribunal was active, Summoners were able to review cases by reading the entire chat logs of a player (enemies, allies, and reportee alike). There was context, and perhaps a bit of leniency with manual review by peers. Albeit, the system was flawed and abused by a few and was often slow to react, but I think most people had positive perceptions of the Tribunal.
  2. I can't shake the feeling that there's a shift in what acceptable behavior looks like. I might be completely wrong about this, and this may simply because the bounds of where the system stands on certain behaviors is ambiguous, but I think there's an atmosphere for some players where they're too afraid to talk, for fear of being flagged by the Instant Feedback system. While trash talking isn't the most respectful or good mannered thing to do, I personally don't think that it would be worthy of a permanent suspension through the escalation process.

I see where Riot is coming from. Mutual respect between players isn't the most unreasonable thing to ask for. In a medium where anonymity spawns toxicity through a lack of fear of repercussions, Riot is forging a new path in combating these negative tendencies.

These are my thoughts. I'm here as an Arbiter to facilitate and foster discussions about Player Behavior & Moderation, and a good majority of the time, I'll speak in the context of the existing Player Behavior and Reform systems; but today, I want to gauge where the you stand and read your sentiments on the changes over the past two years.

What are your personal opinions on the current environment in the game? What are your thoughts on the existing Player Behavior and Reform systems, such as Instant Feedback, Positive Play Rewards, etc? What is your idea of the IDEAL Player Behavior & Reform system? Feel free to drop any additional questions or comments that you have. I'll do my best to read all of the comments, and respond where it's appropriate for me to step in. [Post 2/2 coming at a later time]

Thanks much, Wuks

These are my two problems with RIOT and what makes me toxic.

  1. Riot has some fucked up matchmaking so that if a decent player duo q's with a complete noob they tend to be on a team with decent players.
  2. Noob from #1 feeds like fuck, 0/12, and the duo doesnt want to FF.

Makes me motherfucking toxic crazy!!!!!!