Riot Games and Player Behavior

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We’ve probably all heard of the MOBA genre before, a lot of people do play them after all. League of Legends, the most popular game of the genre, boasts 27 million daily players. Despite statistics from Riot Games claiming only about 1% of the playerbase is abusive enough to receive punishment, MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA don’t carry the best reputation in the gaming community, but both Valve and Riot have been making an active effort to improve the behavior of players in their games. Riot and Valve take different approaches in this effort though, while Valve’s main method to curb negative attitudes is by giving negative players lower priority when queuing up for a team, causing them to usually play only with and against each other, Riot believes that this prisoner’s island concept doesn’t improve player behavior, only gives them an environment where negativity is common.

So, what has Riot done to improve the experience for the game’s positive players? Previously, Riot used The Tribunal, a system where the game’s unpunished players would review reports of other players, deciding whether or not they deserved some form of punishment, which would then be confirmed by Riot. However, the time it took for The Tribunal to gather reports and accumulate votes from the players was taking too long and as a result, it is currently in temporary retirement, replaced by an automated system.

 

The system Riot implemented to replace the tribunal originally began by giving out a new form of punishment:

This new form of punishment is given out by the bot to players who have shown consistent negative behavior in their matches. Chat restrictions differ from the mutes traditionally given out in online games since MOBAs require communication for teamwork, chat restrictions  allow the player to speak up to 5 times per game. Although, not all 5 messages are unlocked at the beginning of the game in order to prevent spamming, more messages are unlocked as the game progresses.

As the system proved itself to be more and more accurate, Riot began to use the system for harsher punishments. The system began looking for extremely abusive, racist, homophobic, and sexist players and issued instant 2-week bans, escalating to permanent bans for repeat offenders. The system isn’t perfect though, and many people have challenged the reliability of the detection turning up false positives, so Lyte, of the Player Behavior team, occasionally goes on the forums to respond to these challenges in order to reassure the playerbase that the system does work and the chances of a false positive are low enough to not be anything to worry about.

 

In their most recent effort to stop toxic behavior from players, Riot has taken away the ability to play Ranked, League of Legend’s most competitive game mode, from players who are chat restricted. In addition, players who have shown themselves to be repeatedly unsportsmanlike have been threatened with the prospect of becoming ineligible their season rewards, which includes skins for a player’s profile, wards, and/or champion (played character), rewarded to sportsmanlike players for achieving a certain rank in the Ranked game mode.

Riot also holds the same standard for the professional League of Legends players, just being famous doesn’t exempt them from the punishments given out to regular players for similar actions. For professional players however, these bans also hold a greater risk, as banned players can not only be suspended from the game, but they can also be suspended from participating in tournaments, sometimes for an entire season along with a permanent ban on their accounts, and for the most extreme offenders, a permanent ban on not only their accounts, but competitive play as well.

Negative players aren’t the only ones Riot cares about though, as they’ve also been actively working to reward players who provide a positive experience in game. In the past, they’ve rewarded players with an icon during Christmas that portrayed Baron Nashor, an iconic monster from the game, wearing a Santa hat. Riot has also introduced Honor, a system where players can acknowledge other players for positive actions and reward them ribbons to show off their sportsmanlike behavior. While the honor system worked and promoted healthy attitudes at the beginning, its popularity eventually faded and with it, a fair amount of players’ positive attitudes as without constant honor, some players did not feel the need to be a positive presence in their games.

 

Outside the game, Riot has aimed to improve moderation of their community by moving their official forums to their new boards, much to the dismay of forum users who prefer the current interface over the boards’. The change aims to improve the quality of content and discussions through new moderation tools not available on the current forums.

While it is clear that Riot has been making an active effort to make the community a better place for their players, they have many players both supporting and questioning their decisions. Do you think the MOBA community is as bad as people make it out to be? Do you think companies like Riot do a good job in keeping their communities a positive environment? Leave your thoughts below!