@Riot; The honor system. A failed attempt at positive reinforcement.

I have long said that Riot's system of player punishments is draconic as fuck and does just as much to punish people who already have a bad thing happen to them beyond their control (such as having the power shut off and getting a low priority ban or even 2 week ban for leaving the game) as it has any meaningful impact on player toxicity, which is such a nebulous fucking term as to be almost meaningless.

The problem isn't punishments, the problem is, there is literally no reward for being nice. You don't win more, that's a fucking lie and you know it. It's a cart before the horse argument. Of course teams that don't flame win more, when you're winning, you don't typically feel the desire to flame, because everything is going nicely and after the game you're generally in a good mood and you don't feel the need to report any minor incidents of name calling in chat, it was all in good fun. It's only when you lose that the blame game starts and the reports get hurled back and forth indiscriminately.

So why should I wish to be nice to someone in this game? I don't want to make friends with these fucking mouth breathers, if I wanted to make friends, I'd join a softball team or take up international round dancing or some fucking thing. Here, I play to win... However, I do like getting free stuff.

Now, back when the Honor system was first rolled out, I could see how banners were about as much reward as they could reasonably offer and you know what? I fucking loved my team work banner. I treasured that thing, but then I called someone a fucking garbage jungler in a game, got reported and OH SHIT, that's the end of that. Does me calling someone a fucking terrible jungler make me any less of a team player? I don't think so, but never mind, soon after it became an unheard of thing to ever see a banner and I think everyone now just thinks it's a hack when they see one.

However, now we have this hextech crafting nonsense, which to my mind provides the perfect method to offer some kind of reward for Honors and here is the TL:DR

Riot should change the Honors system to provide players who collect a certain number of honors with small little hextech crafting items. They don't have to be big, just a fragment, some dust, whatever the fuck, I don't care. You get your egg heads and your economists together and work out something that isn't going to break the bank. Obviously Honors would have to be from unique accounts and the rewards would have to be small enough so as not to encourage exploits through dummy accounts. Maybe it make it so that only lvl 30 accounts can even give honors. I don't know, you work it out, my point is, this is a form of positive reinforcement for good behavior rather than the relentless threat of living under Ritonian rule where you can have your account suspended indefinitely at any time with no recourse, which, take it from me, is only a problem if you spend any money. You've already lost me on that score, never again, but, you can reward other players who are NOT me and I think it's about fucking time that you do so because after last season, you're lucky anyone still plays this fucking game. You owe them.