
Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends - ayu
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/191262/Video_Fixing_toxic_online_behavior_in_League_of_Legends.php
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errantspark
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.

~~~
Glowbox
Actually, I think it's terrible in it's current state. I made a second account
to try some heroes/practice heroes on. Recently they changed the number of
reports to four per week, but I almost need to report a person per match for
either feeding, afking or really bad language. I realize this is in the
'normal' bracket, which is still pretty terrible.

You might be consistently impressed, lately I have been consistently
disappointed by the Dota 2 community.

~~~
cxx
I'm in the normal bracket too and that is my experience as well. I used to max
out on reports per week just reporting bad language.

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Strilanc
The way he presents the priming results makes me really suspicious that they
made statistical errors.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

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.

~~~
djt
I kept watching for the Standard Error, Im very surprised they didnt show it
as that is very important to know how accurate, he said they had millions of
data points but considering all the stats Im really surprised they didnt
mention it at all.

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Strilanc
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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

~~~
danielford
I've played a few of these games, and I also think it's an issue with the core
mechanics. Each match can be around forty-five minutes long. So it's really
easy to dig a hole for yourself and spend a lot of the game getting repeatedly
beat down. Then add in the high learning curve, and small teams. This means
that a single player who's learning the game or trying out a new strategy can
potentially cause his entire team to lose.

If you intentionally set out to design a game that turned all your players
into assholes you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better system.

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GhotiFish
That was an interesting watch.

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.

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.

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.

I'm glad it's there, but I would prefer a system where a good intentioned
friend would survive the process.

~~~
jamesaguilar
1\. You'll never get reported by people you know, so it doesn't matter.

2\. If you're being vile to someone you don't know, it doesn't matter if your
friends think it's hilarious. What matters is whether you're ruining the game
for other people.

I have not noticed any holier than thou behavior since they rolled this out.
It's been some time now, so if that was going to be an effect we'd probably
have noticed it by this point. I have noticed that people have gotten much
nicer on average, but it's hard to tell if that's the tribunal or that more
skilled people are nicer -- my rank has gone up quite a bit since I started.

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skndr
Funnily enough, I built something to solve this problem [1]. It's working out
alright [2].

It's fascinating what a simple humanizing 'hi' (with a smiley face) can do to
the outcome of a game.

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.

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: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3wqhmG__Io>

[1] www.teamfind.com - the idea is to find other real humans to play with that
you can relate to (and have fun with).

[2] There's a voting system - 93% of all votes are positive.

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friendly_chap
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?

\- 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.

\- When someone is AFK the gold is shared amongst the other players.

\- You can control the disconnected person's hero.

These and a thousand tiny other little touches makes Dota 2 a better community
to be in.

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bobsy
The problem is that Riot's implementations have completely failed at solving
the problem.

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.

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.

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..

At best Riot have shifted the problem from verbal abuse to threatening to
report. At worst they have failed completely.

The two main flash points are before you can play ranked games and have a new
account. The second one is in champion select...

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.

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.

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.

3\. They could improve the tutorial so players actually start with some idea
of what they are doing.

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

All 4 solutions would ease the problem new users are facing.

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...

Simple solutions...

1\. Implement a dice in champion select to allow people to roll for the same
position.

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.

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."

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."

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.

For all their research the implementations based on the research sucks.

~~~
NhanH
There are a couple of points I'd have to disagree with you. \- Firstly, I'd
bet that several report options, especially the "unskilled player" one, are
just placebo that do nothing, and provides the upset player a scapegoat to
fire on, without negatively affect anything. A rather nice solution actually.

\- There IS a minimum time requirement that you have to spend on each case (90
seconds, I think). People who punishes every case and run 90% accuracy on the
league table could mean that, the priori of a player getting to Tribunal being
banned is 90%. Which means that the automate system that put up Tribunal cases
are doing a great job! Of course there could be other explanation. But I
recalled Riots used to have a "pardon day" that they actively asked banned
player to post in a thread, so that a human will actively review the cases. I
don't think more than a dozen accounts were really edge cases.

\- There are an option when you create new account to choose which type of
players you are (there were 3 of them: new to MOBA, new to League,
experienced, I think). I don't think it helped the smurf situation at all. The
type of players that are banned would be more likely to be the type of players
that like to "pwn" new players.

\- There are a tip that says "Your teammate performs worse if you harass them"

\- Adding the dice roll for the game is infeasible, for the reason that the
metagame's roles (top, ad, support, mid, and even the jungle in the past) are
created by the players, not Riot. Unlike WOW, in which roles (tank, healer,
dps) are specifically designed by Blizzard, the roles in League are strongly
defined by the metagame at the time. It's not that Riot doesn't design a
champion with a specific set of characteristics in mind, it's just that the
range of role a champion can do varies quite a bit: in WoW, a dps trying to
tank will be killed in half a second. In League, we used to have mainstream
range AD mid, tanky mid, caster mid, assassin AD mid, teemo mid etc. There's
no way to meaningfully classify "roles" or even "lanes" position properly -
who knows if one day we might have 1 - 3 - 1 laning like dota?

~~~
endgame
From memory, the Unskilled Player report option just tweaked their matchmaking
a little.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
It doesn't even do that, these days. It's there to let assholes vent their
rage while not filling up the queue with useless reports.

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trippy_biscuits
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.

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floody-berry
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.

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.

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krakensden
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.

It wore off.

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baby
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.

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.

~~~
georgemcbay
I don't play LoL or CS:GO or DOTA2, but I do play a lot of Call of Duty (yeah,
yeah I know, real gamers look down their noses at COD players -- I play mostly
because it is what my IRL friends play online and it is a great way to
socialize with them regularly).

The idea of the wider player community deciding who is or isn't an
honorable/good player is absolutely terrifying as a COD/FPS player where large
swaths of the community think you're a "n00b camper" if you play the game even
slightly strategically. Every FPS I've played (as far back as Doom LAN on PCs)
has been like this where the game supports many different weapons and play
styles but community majority tends to decide what small subset of those are
"good" play, and which are "cheap", "overpowered", etc.

So... meeh, I personally am not a huge fan of the player community being in
charge of this stuff. YMMV depending upon which games you play and the average
maturity of their community, I suppose.

~~~
baby
LoL is a PC game, thus the community is more mature. But I don't think that's
the reason the Tribunal is working.

If you take a look at it, it's really well made. It uses gamification, it
rewards you with riot points (that you usually have to spend real coins to
get!) and is apart from the game. By that I mean that when you're in the
Tribunal, it has nothing to do with the game. It's like another game where the
goal is to be wise and good.

Also many players have to decide whether or not the player is getting a ban.
And as someone else said here, you rarely see players complaining when they
don't deserve it.

> I personally am not a huge fan of the player community being in charge of
> this stuff.

It's either that or robots that would do it. The playerbase is way too big to
pay people to do this job.

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alanfalcon
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.

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Odin9
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.

~~~
onli
In a game like this, you need to cooperate, even with randoms. They now
introduced a ping-system where you can select specific pings via a radial
menu, which makes it possible to signal missing enemies to your team and warn
players in specific situations. But even that system, as great as i think it
is, lacks some signals. For example, how to communicate that the ping before
was a mistake by using pings alone? You couldn't signal the basics needed for
this game without writing.

Also, if you want to help a player with a build or talk about the bigger
strategy, you normally need to talk to your team. Not being able to do that
could lead to frustrations and harm the game even more than the occasional
insult does right now.

How to sort out champion selection before the game without a chat?

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viseztrance
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.

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Siecje
Feedback doesn't always indicate what he said.

If there was cross team chat and someone voted Honourable Opponent doesn't
mean it was positive cross team chat.

