Lyte Talks Tribunal

Continue reading for a series of red posts about the Tribunal, including info on recent successes, future plans, and more!

Talking about the progress made through Tribunal judgements and punishments, Lyte reports that normal and co op vs ai games have seen dramatic improvements but Ranked play hasn't seen much improvement.

"The prevalence and severity of toxicity in general has seen dramatic improvements across League of Legends; however, most of this improvement tends to be in Normal Modes or Co-op vs AI Modes. We're seeing lower AFKs/Leavers in these modes, and less reports/toxic behavior overall per active player. We're trying to figure out which stats related to player behavior we should share in 2013, so hopefully I'll have more specifics in the future.

Whenever I see players mention how toxicity is at an all-time high, there's a few interesting insights/exercises I often investigate on my end. For example, a lot of players tend to get streaks of games with Leavers and say, "Wow, a majority of my games have a Leaver! This sucks Riot!" If we asked every single player here to look at their 10 recent game match history we'd probably find a decently low percentage of games with a Leaver across all of our match histories. But, one or two of us might actually have a decent string of games with Leavers.

However, if you are playing Ranked Solo/Duo Queue, it's unfortunately still about as toxic as it used to be 8-10 months ago. We recognize that very few of our player behavior solutions have targeted Ranked Solo/Duo Queue specifically thus far, but we hope to make some improvements in this space in 2013."

As far as future features and changes to the Tribunal, he mentioned

"I'm not quite ready to talk about the next features aimed at player behavior, but I've mentioned a few of the areas we'll be taking a look at in the near future.

These areas include:
- improving the speed of the Tribunal and getting toxic players punished quicker
- discussing new ways of handling punishments instead of just using timebans
- determining solutions for the toxicity in Champ Select Lobby

There's a lot more on our minds for 2013 than just the items here."

Similarly, he also mentioned they are brainstorming more ideas on how to alert people they have been warned by the Tribunal, such as a summoner's idea that you would get a warning upon logging into your account.

"Thanks for the suggestion, this is something the team has been brainstorming about. We agree that we aren't reaching as many players as we should be with the Tribunal Warnings."

Getting a little more specific, Lyte brought up the fact that the Tribunal weights player reports based on how accurate they are at reporting negative behavior.

"Players do false report; however, the Report System automatically filters these. If a player reports legitimately often, his report 'power' goes up. If a player false reports often, his reports mean nothing."

 Likewise, he also revealed that people who provoke or instigate nasty behavior are commonly punished faster than those who retaliate to such behavior.

"Provokers are almost always punished more quickly and more often than retaliators."

Interestingly enough, he also mentioned the idea of prohibiting ranked play for summoners who spend a lot of time in the Tribunal.

"Stuff like this has been discussed and certainly isn't off the table."

He also addressed "Unskilled Reports", which are commonly misunderstood to be something punishable by the tribunal.

"Unskilled Reports aren't used in the Tribunal, but are aggregated for matchmaking analyses and adjustments.

We never want to ban a player for Unskilled Play because that makes no sense--everyone has bad games once in awhile, and League of Legends is for every player regardless of them being 500 Elo or 2000 Elo. If a player gets a lot of Unskilled Player reports (above the norm), then we need to figure out what went wrong in the matchmaking that the player got put into the wrong bracket and improve that."

Similarly, Lyte responded to a question on if players have ever been banned for "refusing to communicate with team", saying:

"I haven't seen any data of a case where a player was banned for "Refusing to Communicate" as the report reason and the only thing the player did was not talk much.

Calling MIAs and using pings really is fine for the vast majority of players. The average player isn't that vocal."

To cap things off, Lyte shared his thoughts on a possible mentoring system, something along the lines of a more experienced player offering tips to a new player while in game, by saying:

"A lot of applicants to Riot often mention a Mentor System as one of the things they'd like to work on; however, how many players would genuinely want to participate as a mentor? Or as a student? What would mentors need to encourage repeated participation, if anything? What kind of features or functionality would the mentor or student like to enhance their experience? What do we do when a mentor "goes bad" or treats a student poorly? What would the vetting process for being a mentor look like?

There's a lot of obvious answers like using the Honor Initiative or Report Systems to identify mentors or abusers but there's actually a lot to think about regarding a Mentor System and I haven't really seen a design that makes me go "Yes, that's it!""