Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

I think the approach that Valve takes to this in DotA 2 is pretty phenomenal. If you get reported you are put into a 'low priority' pool, since the people who play in this pool are generally there for a reason it makes a very effective punishment. If you play a day's worth of games with people who are total assholes you see how much it sucks to be on the receiving end. I'm consistently impressed with how the community in DotA 2 will permit long pauses, be courteous, and in general nicer than any other game I've played. Also the pace of this talk is infuriatingly slow.

The way he presents the priming results makes me really suspicious that they made statistical errors.<p>First, the numbers are all given as percentages relative to a control. This makes the measured changes appear larger. If the control percentage was 5%, then a relative increase of 20% is just an absolute increase from 5% to 6%. (Also, the relative increase inherits variation from both the control and the target bin.)<p>Second, the data is presented as if it were cherry picked. They give the most interesting bins or transitions between similar bins, instead of discussing metrics over all of the bins.<p>I did a very rough estimate of the variation you'd expect to see, given 217 bins of binomial distributions with n=10^5 and p=0.05 where you report percentages relative to one of the bins. It's on the order of +-5%, despite the large sample sizes. Minor changes in protocol could increase this to +-30% and explain all of their results.<p>The wild swings when the color or font is changed increase my suspicion that they're seeing noise (because I really don't expect priming to be that strong).<p>Note that this is based entirely on the very superficial amount of data the presenter included in his slides. It may also be the case that they just omitted statistical details because they expected it to be boring to the audience.

I think it's interesting that they're attacking things from the human/social side, but don't even mention the possibility of tweaking game mechanics.<p>For example, years ago I made a DotA-genre map for starcraft. The community was significantly less "toxic". This may have been due to its smaller size, but there were also game mechanics that I think contributed to it.<p>First, I focused on uneven games being fun. This was mostly achieved by (partially) shared income. On a smaller team your portion of the shared income was higher, so your hero was stronger. An ally leaving had upsides: suddenly you'd have a higher income and a bunch of back-dated income.<p>Second, dying had no downsides except you had five lives. You didn't get a time-out. The enemy didn't get experience or a pile of money for killing you. Instead, you'd repick your hero and spawn back at base right away. When you died you came back specialized for the current situation and you came back fast (you had constructive things to do; no time to focus on complaining). Until your last life, dying actually had upsides! Sometimes people would even strategically die, trading a life in order to switch roles or to teleport to the base (in dire situations).<p>It was hard to be angry at a terrible player for dying repeatedly... they were removing themselves from the game, after all. I'm sure the smaller team size, and the presence of 'safe' tasks like moving tanks to defend key areas, also didn't hurt. Having a weak player on your team wasn't ideal, but you could still have a fun game where they contributed.

That was an interesting watch.<p>I can't help but feel the tribunal would inevitably lead to holier than thou attitudes, they would vote on surface behavior rather than intent and effect. To put that in context, I used to play Planetside with a clan called Obsidian Empire. We had a player there that was the most vial, crude son-of-a-bitch I had ever seen (well, heard). If you screwed up he'd be on you fast. But he was so outlandish that really everyone loved him.<p>Addressed in a setting as puritanical as the tribunal, he'd never make it. People are likely to vote on shortly adopted principles and on the surface behavior, rather than what message the player actually sent to who the player was talking to.<p>it's disinfectant, for sure, disinfectant gets rid of alot of problems. Serious problems in fact. It may sound incredulous to argue against it when weight against disinfectants benefits. I'd bet allot of the hackers reading this would rather my friend simply not be such a prick.<p>I'm glad it's there, but I would prefer a system where a good intentioned friend would survive the process.

Funnily enough, I built something to solve this problem [1]. It's working out alright [2].<p>It's fascinating what a simple humanizing 'hi' (with a smiley face) can do to the outcome of a game.<p>It's straightforward enough to match people perfectly based on skill level, but the pseudo-anonymity and high volume of games means that you often never see the same people again. It's easy to abuse them and never even consider your own mistakes.<p>The best players focus purely on their own play and their own mistakes; they rarely blame external factors for when things go badly. Just what they can improve on: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3wqhmG__Io" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3wqhmG__Io</a><p>[1] www.teamfind.com - the idea is to find other real humans to play with that you can relate to (and have fun with).<p>[2] There's a voting system - 93% of all votes are positive.

This is why I migrated to Dota 2. The general population is more mature, and there are simply less situations in the game which induces rage. What I am talking about?<p>- The fact that you can pause the game, and wait for someone to reconnect, so you won't lose a game because someone kicked his reset button.<p>- When someone is AFK the gold is shared amongst the other players.<p>- You can control the disconnected person's hero.<p>These and a thousand tiny other little touches makes Dota 2 a better community to be in.

The problem is that Riot's implementations have completely failed at solving the problem.<p>By promoting reporting now a lot of the abuse has turned into threatening to report each other. Where before new players would be called shit. Now they are threatened for being bad. There is actually a report option for reporting a new player.. this makes many new players give up because they feel it is against the rules to have no idea what they are doing.<p>The Tribunal while a nice idea doesn't work. Riot's implementation has a rating system where judges are ranked based on their accuracy. That means many people punish based on what they think other people are doing instead of making their own decision. On each case there is no requirement to spend a specific time looking at it. No requirement to read all the text. I know people who punish every case without reading and run at 90% accuracy on the league table.<p>Another issue with the tribunal is that it punishes for almost anything. If you say GG after 9 minutes... its punishable. If end the game saying gg easy... its punishable. Combine this with the fact that enemies can report you without specifying a reason means a percentage of players who get punished shouldn't be in the tribunal to begin with. Combine this with terrible support... getting unpunished means going on Reddit and hoping a Riot employee spots it..<p>At best Riot have shifted the problem from verbal abuse to threatening to report. At worst they have failed completely.<p>The two main flash points are before you can play ranked games and have a new account. The second one is in champion select...<p>If you are banned you make a new account. If you want a second account you make a new account. This means the game for new players is incredibly toxic. About 50% of new players are people on smurf's or banned players leveling. This leads to a lot of frustration when you have a 20 death ally on your team. There are a bunch of things they could do.<p>1. Add a tip pointing out a mute button exists... It took me 80 games of randomly being shit on before someone told me about the mute button. If someone starts to spout abuse I just click the ignore button. Problem sorted.<p>2. They could give headstart smurf accounts to people who tick an option saying they are experienced players. This would help noobie players play against each other and have a soft intro to the game.<p>3. They could improve the tutorial so players actually start with some idea of what they are doing.<p>4. They could make the early climb on new accounts start versus bots to force people to actually get a feel for the game before throwing them into PvP<p>All 4 solutions would ease the problem new users are facing.<p>Another issue is in games where 2 or more people want to play the same position while picking champions. A lot of people say 'mid or feed'. They want the mid position. If they don't get it they will repeatedly let the enemy kill them in game...<p>Simple solutions...<p>1. Implement a dice in champion select to allow people to roll for the same position.<p>2. Simply add a line of text when people enter champion select that position is given in order. If you are first pick you have first pick of position. It is up to you if you want to give it up.<p>There isn't a single tip that says "if you ally is having a hard time in lane, consider aiding them rather than criticizing them."<p>The attitude of league at the moment is "if you playing bad you are spoiling my game and I will abuse / threaten to report you for it."<p>When you actually take the effort to communicate with your team and your team actually aids weaker players the mood in games greatly improves. The trouble is that Riot provides little guidance on doing this.<p>For all their research the implementations based on the research sucks.

I play about 3 - 4 games of league per day and have over 3000 games played. My personal solution is to try and be the same as I would be face to face. Occasionally, I do get toxic and call someone an "idiot" but I never use stronger language than that. I enjoyed the presentation and it looks like Riot has some smart people actively working on problems. My only lament is the lack of smart people working in customer support. I've never been treated so badly as a paying customer. With 108MM players, I wonder how much I have to spend to get good customer support? Maybe it doesn't matter to Riot if they treat paying customers badly? I'll never know. Riot isn't getting any more of my money. I have other friends that spent at least twice as much as I have and they just won't play anymore simply because of a negative customer support experience. It doesn't take a PhD to know that paying customers make your business successful.

Even though MOBAs are inherent breeding grounds for trolls due to the captive nature of the game, Riot has done themselves (and everyone else) no favors in how they've dealt with things. For a game that was released in 2009 they've done an astonishingly bad job at working from the start to prevent things that _anyone_ who had played multiplayer games in the past 10 years could've predicted.<p>Even now they seem more interested in allowing and studying the behavior than preventing it. Combine that with their poor-to-completely-dysfunctional matchmaking and the total lack of incentive to even play when your next 20-60 minutes are held hostage by a troll (whether it's on your team, the enemy team intentionally provoking things since forcing opponents to rage or afk is a valid "strategy", or both) and it's hard to take them seriously on toxic players.

My favorite moment in this whole saga was when they started giving awards for being marked as pleasant/helpful by other people. Players were pretty religious about being quiet and saying 'gg' for the first couple weeks- they were grinding awards.<p>It wore off.

This is fascinating! And they don't even talk about their last point "showing what is good, encouraging good behavior" but they now have a "honor" system where you can give other players badges for their good behavior. They now have that as well in CS:GO and Dota2. And it's working.<p>I was surprised to see a complete shift of attitude, and I think this was the most efficient point (too bad they didn't talk about it). People now say GG before and after every game, it actually looks really superficial, like they're only being brown nose to get good badges.

Started playing LoL when the Mac Client came out beginning of last month, and have played an unhealthy amount since. The systems in place are nice (and I appreciate them and take advantage of them), but there are of course still those toxic players. Thankfully it's super easy to hit a mute button and never hear them again! But that requires the player to know about the feature and have the willpower to use it instead of responding in kind (as is often the case). Once I started muting toxic players my quality of gaming skyrocketed.

Why doesn't LoL just disable public chat? Enable chat for premades, that's it. If you're playing with your own friends you can chat. If you're playing with randoms, you don't get chat. Toxic behavior gone and people can actually, you know, play the game. The purpose is to play the game, not use it as 1998 AOL Chat Room.

It looks to me that the answer was to disable chat by default in all games. I like this a lot in console games, for example in Dark Souls summoned players bow to one another (or use other gestures), but for a PC game that's based on team work this is just giving up.

Feedback doesn't always indicate what he said.<p>If there was cross team chat and someone voted Honourable Opponent doesn't mean it was positive cross team chat.