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.
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?
I was about to make most of those points, but in terms of meta... there are exactly four gold streams (3 lanes + jungle). They could have people roll for one of those. And no, pickpocket does not count as a real gold stream, any more than GP10s do. I say that as a support Janna main.
Yes, there have been a few crazy strats, like the tournament game with the "jungle" Heimerdinger where they ran a push comp after their opponent picks had boxed the other team into a corner, but that sort of thing requires team coordination, in which case you're not worried about calling roles in the first place.
Matchmaking is a real problem and it sets people up for failure. There are plenty of people who are simply not prepared to jungle or support. Or, heck, depending on their lack of runes, they might not be able to tank, AP or ADC. You can say "you don't really need runes" but when you have little practice already, going in unprepared is only going to make it worse. I've supported without GP10s due to forgetting to change from a full ADC setup in champ select. It's painful, sightstone or no sightstone to be that poor, even if it was hilarious to ignite a poor, unsuspecting enemy Sona for first blood at level 1.
I've judged in several tribunals. While there are reporting options like unskilled player, the tribunal makes it very clear that a player cannot be censured for that. It allows complainers to report, but riot never punishes for it.
I believe that at one point -if it doesn't still say this- the "Unskilled Player" report option mentioned that such a report wouldn't go to the Tribunal, but would alter matchmaking in such a way as to make it less likely that you would be matched with that player.
I play LoL now for years. In my impression, your very first sentence is wrong: Riots implementation changed the behaviour profoundly and made playing LoL with random noobs way more friendly. It is still not perfect of course - what you described happens - but the game is way less toxic than it was before. Immediately after the introduction of the honor-system it felt like playing a different game, the impact was astonishing.
> 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.
Both of your examples should be punishable. Especially "gg easy" is the most anti-social behaviour possible in a game. People like that should get banned instantly and forever - from the whole internet.
> At best Riot have shifted the problem from verbal abuse to threatening to report.
Which is a great achievement by itself, if true. Reporting someone as unskilled player does no harm, at the most it leads to an adjustment in the hidden elo. Way better than insults.
> 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.
This is great behaviour. LoL does mention that button though. But I agree it could be more prominent.
> 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.
One has to be careful with that. Banning has to be a huge punishment, everything that helps experienced players with the game start can therefore be dangerous.
> 3. They could improve the tutorial so players actually start with some idea of what they are doing.
I was under the impression they did that with the new tutorial, with ingame-hints and such stuff?
> 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
True. But it has the issue of driving people to bot-games. PvP is the core of LoL and the botgame-players are their own subculture which I don't know if it should be supported... So also not as easy as it sounds.
I agree with the toxicness of the champion selection (though if someone says mid or feed, let them feed and report them. Haven't seen that in ages, so those people get banned). Riot does as well, I wonder what they will come up with. Picking a lane prior could work well, especially if combined with a system where the meta can be selected ("I want to play top in a top-mid-jungler-adc-supp-setup") or neglected.
> 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."
Not true.
> 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."
Sometimes that happens, but you should simply ignore and report those people (when not ranked. Then you should do the same, but only if the criticism is unjustified).
Best way to deal with all of this is of course to play with a premade team.
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.