PankoKing

It’s not about people who are genuinely trying and having a bad game or series of games even. Sometimes someone gets absolutely crushed in lane and dies over and over again. That’s very different to a player deciding the game’s over and then spending their time trolling others instead of trying to win.

A lot of people tend to have trouble with this. Most people are quick to jump the gun for anyone going 0/1/0 that they're trolling (I've seen it on stream a lot too)

Streamers often get targeted for this sort of trolling due to their higher profile. It’s not an issue unique to streamers, though.

Though this honestly seems like they're trying to move past the conversation about how streamers have a part in this issue.

Short Term - Champ Select Reporting and Muting

Well finally this should hopefully help out people stuck in champ select. Though I worry it'll be super abused and cause people to never try new stuff.

Streamers wise - definitely not trying to move conversation away from both how streamers get affected by trolling and trolling can be influenced by streamers. Did want to be clear though that we're interested in the wider impact, in addition to how high profile players get affected.

penguin-cat

It would feel so incredibly shitty to be banned for 14 days because you started off having a bad game which snowballed into you dying 12 times because you were dove under tower every minute.

Be careful please!

Yep, that's the sort of thing that makes this tricky. It means we can't simply penalize off KDA in a single game for example, just doesn't give enough context. Incorporating a lot more sources of information (multiple games, when in the games deaths occurred, odd behavior like avoiding all teamfights/objectives, etc) should give better accuracy. Still leaves the question of what rate of incorrect penalties is appropriate though hence the interest in hearing people's thoughts on that. It's probably one of those things that also varies meaningfully by MMR, region and other contexts too.

IIHURRlCANEII

I think one thing that could help is more "medium length" bans.

Why does the punishment system go from warning/chat restriction to 14 day ban? There should be medium length bans like 3 or 7 days that are used liberally. If you accidentally ban someone for 3 days then atleast it's of shorter length.

People don't care about chat restrictions and 14 day bans are actually super hard to get usually (for a good reason). Players not being able to play league because of their behavior is sometimes the best deterannt.

Edit: /u/purpleadlib pointed out a ranked ban would be a less severe type of medium ban, and I like that idea as well.

There needs to be at least something between chat restriction and 14 day ban that is used heavily.

That's a fair call out, will make sure it's one of the things we discuss again.

ReganDryke

Honestly, I think the improved report feedback is probably the most important change. Finally getting visibility on the impact of your reports is huge for the perception that the system actually do its job.

We think it'll be impactful yeah, though not enough by itself. The way I'm currently thinking about this issue is there are three elements that all need to be working well:

1. Detection of players ruining games
2. Appropriate penalties (ideally applied quickly) for those actions
3. Visibility into that process for others so it's understood action is being taken and that that sort of behavior has consequences

The improved notifications should help a lot with #3 there. As per the original post our next focus is on better detection.

S0fourworlds-readyt

Abused how? Shouldn’t it only punish people that announce they‘ll troll ( and seriously, there are a lot of them ) in Champ select instead of those that pick unusual champs?

That's our intent certainly. The risk of incorrectly flagging people who aren't trolling is why we're starting with a data gathering phase and then, once we've got a large enough sample size and confidence we're distinguishing trolling from unusual behavior, turning on penalties a bit later.

MasteaM8

I just hope this lasts longer than 1 week and that they dont give up

Can understand the skepticism, given this has been a long running issue. The commitment to talking monthly is meant to help both give you folks ongoing visibility into what we're doing and give you an avenue to hold us accountable if progress isn't happening.

SlurpTurnsMeGreen

Will there be extra measures taken to not false flag Janna players as afks?

So I know there's some trolling/joking about Janna play here. At the same time though it's true that detection needs to take context into account. Power farming jungle and not ganking? Sometimes appropriate for certain junglers, almost always inappropriate from a laner stealing everything from their jungler and not contributing. Being significantly behind everyone else on levels and spending a lot of time not farming? Can be perfectly normal for support play, warning flag for some solo laners though not all etc etc.

Spideraxe30

Hey Meddler do you have an ETA patch on when champ select reporting is going live

As per the post late Q2's our best estimate at present, so sometime in June if I had to try and guess a more specific period.

Mytias14

Quick mention: Chat restriction as a form of punishment is extremely counter productive.

Chat restrictions aren't something we're looking at as a response to inting/afking. Removing chat when the problem is chat behavior makes sense. When the issue is in game actions though other approaches are needed.

Resident_Wing

Is it?

If someone says "I am mid I don't give a fuck" and you report, what will it do? As far as I can tell the only stuff that gets punished right now is whatever is on Riot's "no no words" list.

We do penalize for a range of behaviors, not just use of language other players find offensive in chat. Can understand the skepticism on that. Hopefully the changes to report notifications we're just rolling out at present will help give better visibility and understanding of what's actually being dealt with how.

Spideraxe30

Out of curiosity, did you guys start prioritizing player behavior changes before Voyboy's video, since Brightmoon noted that that was one of the big trends that really ruined the ranked experience for players earlier this season

Some of this work has been underway for a while, as per Brightmoon's video and an Ask Riot response a couple of months ago. Plus, much as I wish we could, doing things like improving how notifications work is something that takes a lot longer than a few days.

Having said that the recent discussion has also served as a catalyst for us to prioritize work we'd planned to do someday sooner. Better detection was on our roadmap for later in the year, after talking a lot about the issue and reading all the discussion we realized it was something we needed to accelerate a lot, moving other work out of the way where needed to get started on it sooner.

S0fourworlds-readyt

Nice to hear, I wouldn’t enjoy getting banned just for playing stuff that might not be meta at that given time. But as long as there are options like asking the support to revert a ban or so ( is that how it works? ), I wouldn’t mind getting falsely banned once or twice if that leads to less inting long term.

Yeah, we'd certainly want to keep some form of appeals process. Wouldn't want to rely really heavily on it though, results in both a shitty experience for incorrectly banned players even if things do get reversed and player support being slower to respond on other things if they're working through a huge pile of incorrect penalties. Some rate of incorrect penalties seems reasonable, don't want to rely on mitigation like player support intervention too much though.

In our minds, there are exactly two things we HAVE to do to win back trust on this issue:

1) Ship product changes and features that make a positive difference and meaningfully address game-ruining behavior (or that at least result in forward momentum on the issue)

2) Communicate regularly about those product changes and features

For the reasons above, we're committing to monthly updates on "game-ruining behavior" for the foreseeable future.

JA_JA_SCHNITZEL

If they're going to be more aggressive with bans, I think they'll need to be way more lenient on pre-30 games. Can easily see a new player having a rough game and getting banned incorrectly. And new players will just leave the game after a ban like that - would be awful for player retention.

Yep, different metrics are needed for things like account level, MMR, maybe region.

PatentMTG

Have you guys considered hiring/consulting with psychologists on player behavior? I'm sure you could probably find some in academia that would be interested in helping you look at the issue from a different perspective. Just an idea.

I would really like you to consider short term/temporary bans from things like just ranked queues. Say someone is "auto detected" by a new system instead of jumping to a multi-day ban immediately, issue some kind of warning message and disable their ability to Queue into Summoner's Rift for a day then next maybe 3 days. It would be good if you included in these ban messages more than just how naughty these players are being.

Including in these messages something like statistics on players that keep positive attitude increasing rank and winning more games (because they are out there many of us have seen them). Encouragement to reform could also be effective is what I am saying.

Thank you very much for addressing this directly, just knowing you are working on this is better than nothing. I think the community will be forgiving as long as you are trying to fix the problem even if there are mistakes made while getting to the most balanced place possible in this respect.

Yes, we've got people from psychology backgrounds on the Player Dynamics team.

We've discussed bans from Ranked queues as a tactic. From a Ranked player perspective it feels good, comes at the expense of players of Normal games though whose game quality is likely to drop as penalized players get moved there. We'd like to take different approaches to penalties as a result.

ValCip

Meddler what do you think of Yorick's current state?

I think this is so not the thread for balance questions.

Resident_Wing

You guys penalize on what the system can detect given whatever you've given it. The problem is once people see it and realize what it's looking for it's EXTREMELY easy to play around it. One thing I've seen more and more of nowadays is people AFKing in base, walking out for a min or two to attack/damage minions or champs, then going back. And they do this for 10, 15 + mins and don't get a "leaver" status for it. Seems like most anything that an automated system detects can be learned and avoided - which is why so much less hard flaming exists now and people instead soft int, troll, grief, etc.

Agreed, our detection needs to be improved. As per the original post that's our next project of focus.

IIHURRlCANEII

After the client stuff I'm sure you know that many people will be skeptical until it's 6 months from now and you delivered on both of those points.

Hopefully it goes better this time.

Previous client comms weren't handled well, and as Comms Lead that's my fault and it's my responsibility to correct it.

For that reason, Client Cleanup posts are also on a predictable schedule now: every two months instead of monthly (because we want each update to be meaty.)

First one (from March): https://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/introducing-the-client-cleanup-campaign/

Second one (from a week ago): https://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/client-cleanup-progress-setbacks-discoveries/

ParMonty

How many times in the last few years have Riot employees been trying to “win back trust” lmao

Countless times. And anyone who has ever worked on a game knows that the chance to fix your own fuckup is one of the most satisfying experiences you can have.

anghellous

Makes you think about how long it would've taken for us to get a proper response from them had Voyboy not made his initial video.

The things we're talking about today have been in the works for a while. Riot is just made up of people, though, and speaking for myself, I found the Voyboy video to be incredibly moving.

palomani

Can you stop communicating and actually ship improvements ?

...personally? No.

egzfakitty

One comms person to another - care to explain to this sub that public pressure and repeated outcries help move the needle?

It's mind blowing to me how often you see posts on this sub asking for an end to "whining" posts that are the only effective way this community has to push for change.

Would love to know what you do comms for.

egzfakitty

Financial institutions catering to private funds, previously for high-ish profile political figures (mid-level on the Warren for Senate team).

My post history is not indicative of my real life personality :⁾

This sub would be blown away how effective groups like the Hedge Clippers are at affecting change through what is, in essence, the real-world version of complain-posting.

Oh, cool, thanks for sharing that. To your point, I think performative anger via institutions like this subreddit creates leverage which (sometimes) leads to change. I wrote a post analyzing the cycle this creates which you might find interesting: https://medium.com/@RKRigney/the-3-phases-of-any-online-reaction-to-a-video-game-company-screwup-ed41082a5d10