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Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

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Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#21
post #19

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 communit…

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 consistentl…

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.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#22
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.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#23

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 communit…

On the flip side, if you get placed into the punishment brackets its back to dota1 style game play.

Which is significantly annoying because there is a bug where you get disconnected from dota. Your only fix is to shut down steam, and I've had to turn off my modem and restart it.

And theres a 5 minute timer waiting to ban you if you are either AFK, or not earning EXP.

Then theres the bans for being a noob on top of that. As a result, its currently sub-par to on par with Dota 1 for me.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#24
post #12
post #11

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…

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…

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.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#25
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

[deleted]

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#26
post #11

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…

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.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#27
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.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#28

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 communit…

It really varies. I try to play like I play prisoner's dilemma, my first move is "courteous" and subsequent moves are to do whatever you do.

Sometimes you get teams of mature people who realize we're all in it to have fun, who will wait for you, crack jokes while you're all waiting, and generally make you feel better about the game. Those have been some of the best matches I've played, and included extending condolences to the other player when I've killed them and giving them tips on what they could do better after they respawn.

Other times, people will just yell at you, swear at you, call you names, constantly unpause the games, and just be horrible shits.

Also, I wonder what's different (culturally) about Russians, as they seem to be, by far, the less courteous of the bunch. I think they are racist towards Americans, so when someone speaks English, they basically go "fuck him, he's an American". A few of my friends go the opposite racism route, and say "fuck him, he's Russian", but I obviously try to tell them that you shouldn't be a dick to someone if he's not been a dick to you first.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#29
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.

Re: Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends

#30

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.)…

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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