The Gaming Den

Forgive me if there's a duplicate of this conversational thread in the League of Legends forum; I looked through Google Search Engine and also through the built-in search feature of this forum and 'toxic' and 'lyte' didn't show anything. And besides, I think that this topic is worthy of its own forum thread.

So what do you guys think about this? I'm all for free speech and being vulgar on the Internet, even if it's (as long as it doesn't break any laws) abusive. However, that kind of covenant requires a degree of trust and the option for non-interaction i.e. an ignore button. If you're being thrown in with a bunch of strangers then I can understand why you'd want some rules regulating player speech.

Full disclosure: I've never played League of Legends, but I've seen a lot of promotional material and even some porny comics of it. Some VERY porny comics. Enough so that it makes me... ahem.

Free Speech means the government isn't allowed to stop you from saying it.
If you are invited somewhere, the host can tell you to shut up or leave and it does not go against free speech at all.
That's how ALL internet communities work. You sign up, you agree to obey THEIR RULES. And if not, they are free to kick you out at any given time. Yes, this applied even to the gaming den and every last single -chan . .

Cracking down on toxic players is something that far more companies should be doing, as long as the definition of toxic they use is not "Player ain't PG-13" or some bullshit like that.

But due to the fact that this would mean getting rid of potentially paying customers . . eh, yeah . .

They've been "cracking down on toxic players" for like three years now. What's different about this?

@Surgo What's different is that it was significant enough to get a Penny Arcade strip a few days ago.

@Stahsteele Sorry, I meant free speech in the colloquial sense. That is, the idea that people should be allowed to express themselves legally even if it involves offending people. Obviously there are a lot of limits to this -- spam, dox dropping, hogging up bandwidth and space -- but personally I think that for forums the TGD's approach to communication should be universal even if it results in lowering the tone of many websites. I'm just not sure how extensible this principle should be for other Internet activities.

From what I've seen, vulgarity is the tip of the iceberg. It's more about cracking down on (1) deliberate trolls who intentionally sabotage their own team, (2) people who rage futility at other people's mistakes, and (3) people who violently blame other team members for their own stupidity. I mostly play ADC, so I've run into a few toxic supports that played far too aggressively (charging past the entire enemy minion wave at a full-health ADC while their support has a 1.5 second stun ready) then blamed me for "not being there."

I've pretty much only played normals, so I'm sure I haven't seen the worst of it. I'd imagine most toxic players are much less toxic when their e-peen isn't on the line. Playing teambuilder also probably lowers toxicity because nobody's going to get mad about not playing the role/champion they wanted and sabotage the team.

I'm looking forward to the Tribunal upgrades, but somewhat baffled by the fact that the original version didn't store the pre- and post-game chat. Pre-game chat is especially important because sometimes people troll when they can't play who they wanted and sometimes they just suck at whoever they were stuck with. Being able to see their reaction to being stuck elsewhere is probably the best indicator as to which it is.

Surgo: They've been rolling out new systems for hitting toxicity really hard lately. Chat restrictions are still somewhat recent, then there was the 14-day bans on racism/homophobia, and I think they just implemented a feeder buster.

"a feeder buster"
que?

Stahlseele wrote:"a feeder buster"
que?

If you play eight games and go 0/20/2 in each of them, with no cs, it says "This looks like someone who is just deliberately feeding" and bans you.

But honestly, I have no idea how they could have a system that accurately figure out the way feeding usually occurs from just someone having a bad game. The bottom line is that people don't feed every game, they just get pissed in one game and then feed. You can figure that out from human beings reading the chatlogs, but you sure as hell can't figure it out from stats.

On the main subject of the thread... Yeah no, like 90% of league bans are just people saying fuck. I mean, yeah, don't get me wrong, those aren't the problems that need addressing, but because death threats and cussing are the easy things to pick out, those are what most of the bans are. Death threats, that is probably a good thing, cussing... it is a completely worthless waste of time and resources.

From what Lyte has been saying, it seems they've got some very sophisticated detection methods for differentiating bad games from troll games, including using timing and location of deaths. They're current system is also not designed to restrict you for cussing every once in a while -- only the 1% most toxic players will be punished in any way, while they get the tribunal up and running.

As someone who works on very sophisticated systems for detecting difficult-to-find behavior as part of his day job, I have my doubts. But I really do hope whatever they've come up with turns out great, because one ragey team can spoil everything.

If you're using other people's servers to play games with other people you don't have free speech, you have whatever the hell they say you have.

If I go into a privately owned establishment and start screaming "Fuck the police" over and over again they can kick me out. It's the same reason I can't take a gun into places that have "no guns" signs on the front without getting kicked out.

This is a good thing. And League has been doing this for a long time, but it'd be great to see some more automation for the really terrible offenses. Honestly, going 0/20/2 in a single game is a pretty clear sign you were intentionally feeding if none of your teammates have similar scores.

Pseudo Stupidity wrote:If you're using other people's servers to play games with other people you don't have free speech, you have whatever the hell they say you have.

If I go into a privately owned establishment and start screaming "Fuck the police" over and over again they can kick me out. It's the same reason I can't take a gun into places that have "no guns" signs on the front without getting kicked out.

This is a good thing. And League has been doing this for a long time, but it'd be great to see some more automation for the really terrible offenses. Honestly, going 0/20/2 in a single game is a pretty clear sign you were intentionally feeding if none of your teammates have similar scores.

That's fine that my literal parody score is an "obvious feeder" (unless you run into the assholes who refuse to end games, so you have to play 60 minutes of people waiting in a 5 person pack to jump anyone who leaves base, but never actually attcking inhib turrets).

But the point is that there really isn't that much difference between a feeder score and the score of an outclasses bronze player in a bad matchup. Many bronzies (and silveries, and probably goldies) are just not capable of walking away from a losing lane, and keep aggressively dying over and over nearly as fast as they get to lane.

I played a game on an alt account as fizz (who I don't know) and apparently I was playing a plat fizz player on a smurf. I died pretty much the second I walked out into lane to get one cs. There was nothing I could do after he got even a little bit ahead. I went and farmed wraiths and wloves all game (and got reported for it) and never left tower, but if I didn't do that I could have died 30 times before that game was over.

someone going 0/10/3 before surrender at 20 could mean feeder, could just mean someone really bad.

What does feeding actually do that upsets people so? Does it give the people stuck with you some kind of permanent penalty, or your opponent a permanent benefit that carries into future games? Or does it just fuck one game up and that makes some people super sad?

And if they randomly determine the character you get, they can hardly be surprised if some people end up being really shit in a consistent manner.

Well people like to win, so having someone suck makes them mad. But sometimes players will willfully do badly in order to make their team lose, dying over and over so the enemies are guaranteed to have lots of gold and can roll over everyone. It's a big deal in every League of Legends mode except ARAM (the one where your character is random) because I think it's much harder to tell and people don't take winning that seriously.

It's only one game, but if your opponents get enough of a kill advantage it's hard to come back because kills = gold = power and the player that's feeding isn't contributing much to your team. A deliberate feeder is like playing 5v4 with the enemy getting a bunch of extra money on top of that.

There's only one game mode where characters are randomly determined, but you can never have two of the same character on the same team and you usually want a good mix of character types. Also, ranked play uses a draft system where captains pick a few characters to ban and no mirror matches are allowed. It's entirely possible to get stuck playing a type of character you suck at or have you favourite characters picked out from under you.

Feeding ruins that one game, but LoL games take a decent chunk of time (both to find a good one and then play) and are incredibly dependent on teamplay, so it's infuriating to have a dude on your team suck or intentionally throw a game. It's not like a casual FPS deathmatch where sure you're on teams but who cares because you have your own score and it's difficult for your team's suckiness to stop you from personally rocking. In LoL, if one dude on your team throws it away you start getting personally roflstomped and it's not really worth anyone's time anymore.

Ah, lengthy games that take a fair amount of time investment. Fair enough, I guess I can see that being annoying. As can "having inexperienced players", mind you, but I suppose it tries to match groups with roughly equal records in an attempt to keep people on a more or less equal footing.

If you observe a game it's extremely easy to tell if somebody is feeding or not, using the metrics the game records it becomes more difficult.

I think automatically picking out the most egregious cases of intentional feeding would be extremely easy, but there are some games where it could be tough to do automatically.

Take this match for example. Gnar intentionally fed after a couple of deaths, and continued doing so until it became clear he couldn't stop us from winning (the final push). He would run directly up a lane, sometimes ignoring minions, and see if he could win 2v1s or just 1v1 people he obviously could not 1v1 (Vayne multiple times, including immediately after dying to Vayne once).

His score is bad, and his deaths are unusually high for a win, but he never says he's feeding in chat (he rages the entire game, complaining about our jungler for not saving him from getting camped and saying we all suck, the usual) and his score isn't that shit.

However, Gnar suddenly dies 5 times in ~5 minutes (around 17:00 to just after 22:00). That is something that a terrible player will not do past 15 minutes (death timers alone make it so unless you're running full speed at the enemy base you won't die that quickly).

From the score Gnar could just be a bad player, but seeing how quickly he starts dying it's clear that he tried to throw the game.

There are metrics that can show somebody is feeding aside from just score, and it can be pretty fucking clear. Nobody dies that quickly unless they're intentionally feeding or are pre-30. I'd hope any automated system would be more lenient with lower ranks and stricter with higher ranks, because there are definitely people who WILL return to a lane that's getting spanked and be genuinely surprised when they get killed over and over again.



Re: Why is feeding bad?

Feeding not only gives the enemy a pile of gold, but it also means your team is essentially down a player. Everyone gets pissy and the chat becomes a wasteland of people yelling at the feeder while the feeder either yells at them or stays completely silent in the hopes that they won't get banned.

It's usually a waste of 25 minutes (let's count champ select and load times!) to have a feeder in the game, no matter what team you're on. You do gain LP if it was ranked and the feeder was on the other team, but it's still not a fun game. It'd be like in American football if the other QB intentionally threw the ball to the defense every single play.