Solving the Toxicity Problem
I enjoy League. I really do. The game is fine. Unbalanced sure. But people will figure out how to make things look "broken" regardless of whatever changes are made. My issue is the people. Other games have found ways to manage toxic players, afk's, or players who refuse to cooperate. League doesn't have much other than a report system that doesn't work or doesn't appear to work in a way that makes people behave differently. From what I understand, this is because the sheer number of reports that come in hourly is too large to deal with by hiring GM's. The best solution would be to turn game analysis or chat analysis over to a program or algorithm.
The Idea: Create a program or algorithm that scans for specific words or phrases and flags them automatically.
The Reasoning: In high school I had to turn in my papers to a website called turnitin.com. The website had a database of all the papers submitted to it and kept them on a server. Each subsequent paper submitted was analyzed to check for plagiarism or percent similarity to other papers already on file. I've been told that the reason why it's hard to report toxicity is because the way people say things may be trash talking for fun or jabbing people they already know. However, a racial slur is pretty unambiguous and so is swearing. Most of the time when I see people use profanities in chat, it isn't because they are joking. Most of they time they're just toxic. Interpretation of what is said is the issue. The solution in my opinion is to store words or phrases that are unambiguously toxic in some form. Have something other than a human take over for searching for phrases that CANNOT be anything other than profane or a slur of some kind. You could also have the program "learn" by storing syntax or vocabulary that is repeated in chat logs that get reported. If a certain phrase repeatedly appears in chat logs of reported games, the program or algorithm stores that syntax or vocabulary and looks for it in future programs. This would be where the human element comes in. One or two people could comb through a list of newly added words, phrases, or emotes kinda like how Wikipedia monitors view new edits to a page. This would ensure that the right things are being flagged and it's not just the program jumping the gun so to speak.
The Cons: People will probably disagree by saying that this would turn League into Club Penguin by controlling what people can or cannot say. Certain types of language that people use to joke with their friends or things that they don't consider to be offensive at all would be removed pretty quickly. This might turn a number of people off. Another thing that people might not be happy with is the fact that they can't flame. If someone sucks at the game or is obviously feeding, a lot of players would feel entitled to letting that person know just how much they suck. Rito might not be happy with it because they might lose players who might otherwise have stayed or attracted other players to the game. The new chat system prevents these new players from saying what they want so they don't want to continue playing and will go somewhere else.
The Bottom Line: I can't recommend League to any of my friends. My friends who play league who are plat and silver wont recommend the game to anyone. The reason isn't the game. It's the people. Specifically the things that people say because no matter how many times they're threatened with a report, it seems like nothing happens within a significant enough time frame to matter. It's a numbers game. The population that plays league and the population that develops it are very different in volume. Shifting the effort to an inexhaustible program would make a marked difference.
Final Thoughts: I'm not sure how hard this would be or how much it would cost since I'm not a programmer or developer of any kinds. However, Riot has the resources and work force large enough to design or commission the design of something resembling what I described. I actually think more people would want to play if they didn't think that they were going to get trashed for trying something off meta or doing something that they actually think is fun. It's a game right?
What do y'all think?
