Fixing Player Toxicity

League of Legends (LoL) has become synonymous with toxic player behavior. From my brief experience, as well as all the chat log people link, there is something about the game that makes players positively inhuman to one another. You may remember that I recently talked about how a poor community is the only true deal-breaker for me, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see that Riot, the makers of LoL, have been paying as much attention as every else.

Jeffrey Lin, lead designer for social systems in LoL, undertook an interesting experiment to see if he and his team could better understand player toxicity, which he defines as "offensive language, obscenity, and displays of negative attitudes." While Lin states that "online gameplay has an inherently toxic element that must simply be accepted," any online gamer knows that there's a line between those annoying 12 year olds looking for trouble, and people who are genuinely awful in their online interactions. I accept that I'll have teammates killing me in hardcore mode of Call of Duty, but I won't accept someone blowing up my chat window with vitriol.

After Lin constructed some player profiles, he found that players who are truly toxic (i.e. acting out without provocation) are rare, but that these few players infect others who then carry that toxicity to their own games. So toxic players are like patient zero in any zombie movie, but how to fix it?

I'm not sure when this experiment was conducted, but when I played LoL years ago the opposing teams could talk openly in a shared chat channel, as well as a private team channel. While my experience had an equal share of rude players on either team, Lin decided to make cross-team chat optional for players. With this option, they noticed a general decrease in toxicity - and when you can't see the other team mocking your team or singling you out, which leads to your team scrutinizing you more, I can understand how this would be beneficial and why many games don't allow it from day 1.

Now this is where LoL goes from being known for its community to being known for how it handles its community. Riot's Tribunal system empowers players by keeping each other accountable. In most games, moderation is handled by a skeleton crew that can't possibly work to keep players in check and help them learn better online social skills (something that really should be taught in school at this point). The Tribunal system instead takes an offending player's actions and displays it for the whole community to see and, most impressively, allows them to decide the player's fate.

I'd heard mentions of this, but I was skeptical. If people are horrible because anonymity allows them to be, then wouldn't giving an entire group of them control over another player's fate be doubly bad? As it turns out, just the opposite happened. An unnamed number of cases have gone before the community, and after 105 million votes, 280,000 players have been punished and returned to the game without causing any further problems.

Now there's a lot to the linked article that's worth reading, but the Tribunal is what has caused some stir in the gaming community. Players are tired of toxic behavior in games, and reporting seems to do no good unless the offense is incredibly offensive and against a game's Terms of Service. I've talked to many players over the years who express discouragement at player behavior, yet shrug their shoulders because they feel like nothing gets done about it.

Yes there is a mute/ignore feature, but that's just a Hello Kitty bandaid placed on a bigger problem. People need to learn to act like human beings, pure and simple. Kids are thrown on to the internet, see people acting like jerks, are allowed to act like jerks without repercussion, and grow in to mostly-functioning adults who are incapable of understanding that the people they're yelling at are, in fact, people. The Tribunal system has its flaws to be sure, but when players know that their behavior can be punished, and especially when it is punished, will eventually make them think about how they're acting.

I would love to see more games implement this across the internet. Sure it would be rough while the problems were ironed out, but imagine an online gaming world where your online reputation was affected by your behavior as much as your real-world one. It would need to tread cautiously so that players weren't punished unfairly, but Riot's cases use bad behavior from several gaming sessions so that a player isn't banned for having one bad game. The system is brilliant because the moderators don't need to dig through mounds of behavioral reports, letting many slip through the cracks because it isn't worth their limited time. Instead they let players decide whether someone deserves to be banned for 24 hours for scatological insults while they spend time dealing with players who need to be banned permanently.

What do you guys think of the Tribunal system? Do you have an online game that would benefit from the players taking an active role in improving their community, or do you think it's just a bad idea? You can read more about it here, but I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts.



See you tomorrow!

Remember to follow me on Facebook. I'm doing a blog post every single day for 2013, and Facebook is a great way to stay up-to-date as well as take part in my monthly giveaways!