Commit a minor offense, get a one game chat restriction. No escalation. No leniency.
Commit a moderate or severe offense, go through the escalating tier system.
This system doesn't ban players for petty offenses. It still deters petty offenses though.
Leniency is required to limit false positives.
Let me elaborate with a simplification: Let's say the system that reviews chats outputs a single number from 0 to 3, determining how toxic the chat was. 0 being not toxic, 1 mildly toxic, 2 moderately toxic, 3 extremely toxic. Our system isn't perfect, though, so whatever it outputs, let's say there's a 5% chance to be 1 too low, and a 5% chance to be 1 too high. (For simplicity's sake I'll ignore Bayes theorem and the actual likelihood of encountering toxicity of a certain level)
Let's take a look now at a couple of scenarios:
A player's chat in 1 game is reviewed and the output is 1: The chance that this player was moderately toxic is 5% The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic is 95% The chance that this player is entirely innocent is 5%.
A player's chat in 3 games is reviewed and the output is 1 for all: The chance that this player was moderately toxic at least once is 14% The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic in all 3 is 86% The chance that this player was entirely innocent is 1%
A player's chat in 5 games is reviewed and the output is 1 for all: The chance that this player was moderately toxic at least once is 23% The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic in all 5 is 77% The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic in 3 games (or more) is 99.9% The chance that this player was entirely innocent is 0.00003%
A player's chat in 10 games is reviewed and the output is 1 for all. The chance that this player was moderately toxic at least once is 40%. The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic in all 10 is 60% The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic in 8 games (or more) is 99% The chance that this player was at least mildly toxic in 6 games (or more) is 99.99% The chance that this player was entirely innocent is 0.000000000001%
I feel the need to point out that this last number is not exaggerated or made up. It's really this low.
As said, this is a simplification, and a very extreme one at that, but it serves to illustrate that looking at multiple games is an incredibly powerful method of reducing the risk of false positives; even when the toxicity detection has low specificity. And that low specificity is probably a reasonable assumption. I'd even say it's probably even lower than 95% for mild toxicity, since it includes things that can even be tricky for humans to detect in pure text form.
Edit: If you want the maths, I don't mind providing it, it's just that I'll only put in the effort of writing up multiplication heavy formulas in a forum that uses asterisks for formatting if somebody actually requests it. It's difficult to spot mistakes in your own formulas when all asterisks are replaced with "*" and switching between editor and preview constantly is simply annoying.
I think when discussing things like this, it's important to keep in mind the scope of the system right now. It is a tiny fraction of the player base that ever gets a single chat restriction. And of those, it's a tiny fraction that ever gets another penalty. So what you're proposing is to make the bar for the expected level of decency even lower for the tiny tiny portion of the player base that refuses to adhere to the already low bar of Don't Be An Asshole. You don't have to be a nice person to not get penalized. All you have to do is keep your negativity out of the game and out of the chat. That should not be too much to ask.
I vote no.
There are some issues with this idea - first and foremost being, detaching minor offenses from the mainline punishment tiers can result in low-key toxic players not changing their ways. What are they going to care about one game of limited chat when they're not getting any actual deterrent from being toxic?
Second, a one game chat restriction is a pretty weak punishment, especially when no harsher punishments follow. One game is hilariously easy to punch out, whether they decide to do bot matches or even normals.
Having a punishment that doesn't actually have a noticeable effect would inevitably make people take the system as a whole less seriously - and may cause people to simply step up to worse behaviors since they've only known the psuedo-joke that is the 1-game chat restriction.
Third, the whole idea seems to be focused around not banning players for mildly toxic chat. In your own words;
This system doesn't ban players for petty offenses.
That's not a good thing to put your focus on. That leads to more leniency than the system has right now.
If someone continues to break the rules - even if only in small ways - after warning after warning after warning - they need to be given the boot. They're not gonna give a shit about the rules otherwise.
So, the real thing you gotta focus on isn't "not banning players for small offenses", but "making players stop those small offenses". Having "not banning" instead of "stopping rule breaking" as your foundation for the idea makes the idea itself fundamentally flawed, because the focus isn't on the right thing.
[{quoted}](name=mlm olo mlm,realm=NA,application-id=ZGEFLEUQ,discussion-id=zOQ8gafj,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-09-08T21:24:32.863+0000)
Commit a minor offense, get a one game chat restriction. No escalation. No leniency.
Commit a moderate or severe offense, go through the escalating tier system.
This system doesn't ban players for petty offenses. It still deters petty offenses though.
Why arent there any warnings? Getting a chat ban with no warning and an hour reduction is stupidly severe.
Honestly I find that some people are just that way. I think chat restrictions with no escalation would be appropriate because it defines control limits. If you frequently get chat restricted you do have a higher chance to change.
there's a mute button for a reason :)
the system is harsh enough.
