The Science Behind Shaping Player Behaviour in Online Games

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Moonyu wrote:

I enjoyed your dissection except for the corruption of the language. I grew up with an Editor that blasted any misuse of grammar, but if you study history, and I have, language evolves. While you may not like the direction it changes, it does change and I could list many words that have lost their original meaning over time.

In this particular case, what I resent is not so much that it evolved the way it did, but why it evolved the way it did.

This discussion has been covered before.

The best communities online have heavy moderation, and the punishments have consequences.
Past that, they're grown slowly over time, so that each old generation can teach the new generation how to behave.

Neither Riot nor GGG care about any of that. They've shown beyond all doubts that they don't need to care. The money comes in either way because the draw of the game is strong, and people are willing to put up with a lot of shit to enjoy themselves. They have to do the bare minimum to keep the community from turning to death threats, then they pat themselves on the back.

At the same time, such a minimum community has the least discrimination, which means the maximal number of people can play the game. It's the realization that people can have negative value to the game that has not been reached by either company.

These minimal communities are not used for detailed feedback, for collective creative works, or anything useful like that. Their sole designation is to be a place for people to bitch and moan, and for $company to push patch notes and announcements through.

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Specifically returning to the OP, LoL's efforts seem to be somewhat good in reducing the workload required for punishing bad actors. The Tribunal is mostly automated, and it's best thought of as a pair of eyes to make sure false negatives don't succeed.

It would be great if Riot used the Tribunal only for verifying punishments for language offenses. It would work very well. The problem is that their punishments include behavioural offenses such as feeding, and behavioural offenses tend not to translate into text summaries very well.

Should someone be afraid to be punished for doing badly, or for wanting to try something new? Ideally not.

All that being said, I still consider Riot to be doing the minimum required for their community when they could have aimed for something more. The Tribunal is interesting in only the most non-interesting ways. It's lipstick on a corpse.

I hate the 'word' "lol" with fiery passion.

I would like to hear from somebody how he can use that word and still think of himself as a intelligent human being.

No offense. I am sure there are people i like to converse with who used that word, but I cringe every time I see it.

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Moonyu wrote:

Emoticons? I have told friends that to use them in an email is to end contact. Sorry Alexdaemon, but I hate them more than you will ever know. Smiley face.


But they do not violate any rule that I know of except for personal ones.

Spoiler

I try to live perfectly in an imperfect world.

=-[.]-=

There's a tl;dr at the end!

I have not played this game for a while, but I hang around the IRC and noticed a topic with this title. I have rather strong opinions about this subject particularly how RIOT handled it and why what they are doing is not quite what they claim.

That talk irks me. So very much. Let us start from the very beginning: their idea was to push players into a competition, where the standard mode of play was/would be to play with randomly gained teammates through a rating system which isn't really fit for randomly selected teams. If people play for competition then emotions tend to run high and in this particular case it's multiplied by the fact that the rating system is not a good way to model ranking of players by skill level (or match them up as such). Yet for some reason RIOT adopted the policy that people should always be nice to each other and not get carried away.

So how did RIOT go about implementing their policy of "you will always have to be nice to the people you play with"? At first they didn't really address this, yes, there were some warnings and bans but those were rare. Then they came out with this interesting thing called the Tribunal. Many lauded it as the salvation to the "increasingly toxic community" (actually this happens to pretty much any community that just increases in player numbers. The toxicity of the community itself doesn't increase, just the minority that is loud and can be obnoxious becomes bigger). Some saw that this was a disaster waiting to happen.

How does the Tribunal work? Essentially players after a match can report players for behavior that broke the rules. Then when a person accumulates enough reports over a period (I assume it's measured by the amount of games you have played vs how many reports you got in those games) their profile is automatically put into the Tribunal where people using the Tribunal can read the chat logs and see players' stats in that match (very basic and few statistics). And based on that the people voting have to decide whether the person broke some rules or did not.

Sounds like a good deal - players being able to do their own justice! While this might seem like a good idea on paper in practice it is not. First of all, the people voting on the case have inadequate information on what is going on. If somebody is abusing the person in the through abilities or pulling them then there is no way for the Tribunal to detect such behavior. Yet, if the person asks to stop (and possibly repeatedly at one point says something offensive or maybe just curses) the person doing the initial abuse can report them back. And in this report's case there is evidence in the Tribunal for rule breaking.

Secondly, the game evolved with the Tribunal and got progressively worse with it. The Tribunal is used to punish behavior that somebody else disapproves of. How does this work? Well, remember how I said that players just need to report you to be put on the Tribunal? According to this[1] once somebody is on the Tribunal you have a close to 90% chance of being punished. And all it takes for you to get on the Tribunal is for you to be reported enough times. Reporting too much is not really punished either (at least not what should be seen as excessive). You can drop 3 reports pretty much every game and you will not be punished for it. So, essentially, if somebody disagrees with you they can harm you by reporting you. The game is a lot about somebody making a mistake, especially lategame by being out of position or almost anything minor like that. The game pretty much degraded into "report the person who made a mistake". It is rare to see in the middle to high level ratings (not to even mention lower ones) matches NOT ask somebody to report somebody else. This happens pretty much EVERY GAME. By the way, the disagreement doesn't even have to be in chat - it can even be an item build that deviates from the norm or having subpar statistics even if it isn't directly their fault.

The second issue has the effect of polarizing teams. Very often somebody will accuse someone else of trolling or something similar along the lines (or just ask to report them). This causes the team to essentially split into two - the ones who support the accuser and the ones who support the accused. Even more reports are thrown around!

But why did all of this happen? This is pure speculation, but I imagine that RIOT realized that their player numbers were growing incredibly quickly and did not have enough resources (or would not want to commit that many resources) to community policing/support. The Tribunal essentially removed the requirement of personnel from monitoring player activity. Yes, you can be banned by the Tribunal (and most people do these days) without anyone from RIOT approving it. And this has been going on for a very long time.

So why does the talk itself irk me? Because RIOT wants to "fix" community behavior through punishment that should be done through example and encouragement. Why would you not expect people to swear or let their emotions run wild if they're trying to play it competitively against other players? They have separate queue systems ("for casuals" and "for people who want to get a ranking"), yet the former is used mainly for just messing around and not even taken seriously so "the casuals" (just people who want to play for fun) join the same queue as the ones who want to take it seriously. There comes a clash of interests but because the people playing for fun don't take it as seriously it leads to more issues. Their policy just doesn't work. Not even that - it transformed a problem of people insulting each other a bit and usage of profanity in text chat (which you can turn off, or mute the particular person!) to having people spamming reports on each other that have account-suspension consequences. And the worst part is that they're not even willing to admit it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that you do see an excerpt of the reports for which you were punished. But as far as I know it only shows some of them and in some cases it can only show like 3 or 4 reports across 3 or 4 games. In 3 or 4 games you can play with 27 to 36 different people! So clearly something is left out and in some cases the reports that are shown show pretty much no real bad behavior (or at least not some which should get an account suspension) yet they are still punished. For instance, this one: http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/tribunal/en/case/782086/#nogo

I do not EVER want to see a system like that in a game. Account suspensions should be handled by the staff, not by users. The staff should be considerate and understand what is going on and have access to decent information to make their decisions. Remember that having a system that "gets rid of trolls" (which it most likely doesn't) does not justify even the banning of a few people unjustly. And to boot, I do not see why a game trying to label itself as competitive would adopt a behavior where emotional reactions (or even minor insults) are somehow considered the absolute worst behavior. I can understand this in World of Warcraft where the average target is a stay at home mom (not that there's anything wrong with that but I can understand why such behavior would be objectionable to that demographic), but not in a game that has a competitive section to it.

tl;dr: RIOT in that talk advocates a system which doesn't actually work and I do not like it. It is based on stats which in actual experience only transformed "the problem" that they themselves created. Communities get big and big communities tend to have more people who speak out and act in an immature manner. But it's part of being human.

[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/league-of-legends-tribunal-punishment-rate-revealed
[2] http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/tribunal/en/case/782086/#nogo