Red Post Collection: New Player Reform System heading to testing, May Bundles, Ekko Q&A on May 21st, and more

"Hit the Rift with the new crew, embrace your inner 0101001001, or unleash the supports with May’s mix of bundles. 

Snag these limited time bundles or treat yo self to a Mystery skin or Mystery Chest now through 23:59 May 27. 

Mystery Chest - 790 RP
Mystery Skin - 490 RP

Mystery Chests are back as a new permanent feature in the Gifting Center of the store. Mystery Chests cost 790 RP, but guarantee your pals a Mystery skin worth 975 RP or more. And from now through 23:59 May 27, you’ll be able to purchase Mystery Chests for yourself also! 

Want to pick up a traditional Mystery Skin instead, score an unowned skin worth 520 RP or more for one of your champs during the promo period. 

Champion Catch-up Bundle - 30% off at 3673 RP (7083 RP if you need the champs)

Skins included:

• Elderwood Bard
• Eternum Rek'Sai
• Blood Moon Kalista
• Galactic Azir
• Dino Gnar

Champions included:

• Bard
• Rek'Sai
• Kalista
• Azir
• Gnar

Roboticized Bundle - 40% off at 2880 RP (4872 RP if you need the champs)

Skins included:

• PROJECT: Yasuo
• Creator Viktor
• Battlecast Kog'Maw
• Blade Mistress Morgana

Champions included:

• Yasuo
• Viktor
• Kog'Maw
• Morgana

Support from the Depths - 30% off at 2046 RP (4092 RP if you need the champs)

Skins included:

• River Spirit Nami
• Abyssal Nautilus
• Deep Terror Thresh

Champions included:

• Nami
• Nautilus
• Thresh"

"The team behind Ekko has agreed to take a second from finishing up his minute details to host a Q&A session at 2 PM PDT on 5/21! If you’re looking for stories about Ekko’s creation, story or design, come along with your questions! 

Rewind a little and check out more Ekko news here:

• Ekko: Seconds
• Champion Reveal: Ekko, the Boy Who Shattered Time"

New player reform system heads into testing

Next up we have Lyte with a look at the new player reform system that is being rolled out for live testing, including the return of reform cards and what else is coming down the pipe:

"When negative behavior occurs, we know that the faster a player receives feedback, the better their chances of reforming. With that in mind, we’re building and iterating on a new instant feedback system that delivers actionable feedback and appropriate punishment to players that need it most. In the future, we expect instant feedback to take on rewards as well, but in step one we’re focused on reform-oriented feedback and punishment. 

The system’s initial tests kick off today in NA and take aim at verbal harassment. The system delivers reform cards (notifications that link evidence of negative behavior with the appropriate punishment) that help players address their negative behavior. Your reports help the instant feedback system understand and punish the kind of verbal harassment the community actively rejects: homophobia, racism, sexism, death threats, and other forms of excessive abuse. These harmful communications will be punished with two-week or permanent bans within fifteen minutes of game’s end. Here’s how it works: 

• Teammates or opponents of the offending player send reports and the system validates them to make sure they aren’t false 
• The system examines the case and determines whether the behavior deserves rejection or punishment based on community-driven standards of behavior 
• The system fires a reform card through email, sharing the chat log of the offending player (we scrub other players’ names and chat logs) and the punishment for the behavior 

The player behavior team will be on deck, hand-reviewing the first few thousand cases the instant feedback system sorts through. If the test goes smoothly, we expect instant feedback to roll out to all regions shortly. Like we mentioned up top, this test marks the beginning for instant feedback. Upgrades will allow it to shoulder more reform and punishment responsibilities and even reward positive play. Here’s a peek at where we’re headed: 

• In-client reform cards 
• Follow-up notifications for players who reported a player who was punished 
• Upgrades for chat and ranked restrictions 
• Upgrades to recognize negative gameplay behaviors like intentional feeding 
• Recognition of honors and rewards for positive behaviors and communication 

We’ll hang around the comments to answer questions and hear your feedback. We’ll come back soon to share more about the vision for player behavior, including plans for the Tribunal."

Lyte continued over on reddit, sticking around to answer questions:

"Happy to answer questions for a few hours while we're monitoring the system and working out some kinks. As usual, give a big shoutout to RiotTantram, RiotId, RiotNeurocat, RiotNoyz, stochasticmx, DoctahWayne, Riot Razor and RiotNakyle for working on this feature. It's a pretty crazy feat to be able to deliver feedback to players in 15 minutes."

In response to concerns over this automatic system, Lyte explained:

"I think there's a perception issue with "automatic" systems. For example, when we think about really high security stuff like credit cards, they use a lot of automatic systems but we don't really "think" about accuracy. In some fields of sciences, a 1% error rate is considered exceptional, even if it's in a higher risk field like medicine. 

At Riot, we want to make sure players never have to worry about punishment systems if they are neutral or positive. So, any system that we launch needs to have a 0.1% error rate or lower or we'll turn the system off. In first beta test of the new reform system, we were having Player Support teams review thousands of cases and we found that generally there was 1 error in every 6000 cases. In the case that a player did receive a false penalty, the e-mail has instructions and links to contact Player Support."

He continued, replying to concerns about "false punishments".

"I mentioned this in another response, but in our initial test where we hand-reviewed thousands of cases, we saw an error rate of about 1 in 6000 cases. 

Given League's scale and massive playerbase, this is still a large number of players affected, and we have systems and teams in place to fix this as soon as it's detected."

As for that hand review process, Lyte elaborated:

"We already did a round of testing where Player Support teams and Player Behavior teams all banded together and hand-reviewed every single case. 

Moving forward, we'll use a technique called "random sampling," where we'll random pull a bunch of cases the system and hand-review those which will give us a representation of how accurate the system is doing without reviewing every single case. 

With random sampling, we can purposely target more serious punishments and sample them more often because they are a higher impact if they are mistakes."

When asked if there is a difference between a "false" (bad-faith) report and a "not-punish-worthy (good-faith) report as far as the system is concerned, Lyte noted:

"Yes, the system "validates" every report, and false reports are ignored. If the report is generally correct, but the system just doesn't believe the behavior is worthy of a punishment, the reports will still "stick," and could affect the next potential check of the player."

When asked why they chose a "machine learning" engine for this new system, Lyte explained:

"The reason we like a machine learning engine's approach is because it is very difficult to work around. Because every player's report and honor teaches the system about emerging changes in language, the system can "keep up" with new phrases and trends faster than a human team would be able to. 

In the future when players can read random chat logs and vote in the Tribunal again on whether behaviors are negative, neutral or positive, these will also teach the system more about behaviors on a continuous basis."

When asked if the system will note any sort of profanity if you end up reported, Lyte noted:

"The system isn't necessarily out to get rid of profanity. If you say things like, "Fuck, missed that skillshot" you will generally be fine. If you say, "Fuck you, you missed that skillshot" you might end up punished because that's targeting someone."

He continued:

"We've mentioned this before, but for 95% of players in the game, they'll never be exposed to a penalty in their lifetime playing League. 

If you are neutral or positive, you should literally have no fear of any system."

As for when these changes will roll out to each region, Lyte noted:

"We're monitoring the kinks and will do a full roll-out today on NA. We're working on EU tomorrow, with other Riot Regions over the next week if tests look good."

As for what is being done about issues in champion select, Lyte reiterated that the team is currently working on a draft version of the Team Builder queue:

"We're working on Team Builder Draft which should solve most Champion Select issues. If the problems remain and we have to, we've considered a few designs for reporting specific Champ Select behaviors."

He continued:

"I think players have some kind of mental model of what Team Builder Draft looks like, so they are worried about things like diversity and specialization. 

One of the explicit goals of the system is to increase diversity, and give players more reasons to be skilled at multiple positions. So no, I don't think any of the issues you state will occur. We'll be talking more about our designs here in the future."

Fantasy LCS returns for the 2015 Summer Split

As the EU and NA LCS are gearing up to start next week, the Fantasy LCS is back!