League of Legends Trolls Can Now Be Banned Within 15 Minutes of Offending

Riot Games’ new “instant feedback” system can deliver 2-week or permabans to offenders within 15 minutes of being reported.

The problem with a lot of punishment systems in place for video games is that they take too long to take effect. If a player is being an asshole, a troll, or cheating, it could be months before he is finally weeded out and disciplined. Riot Games aims to solve that problem with its new “instant feedback” system that can dish out 2-week or permanent bans to offending players within 15 minutes after being reported.

“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,” announced Riot in a blog post.

The system is specifically focusing on verbal harassment and “hate speech”, which includes (but is not limited to) homophobia, racism, sexism, and of course the ever-present death threats.

Here is 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 (players’ names and chat logs are scrubbed) and the punishment for the behavior

Riot says that the player behavior team will be on deck, hand-reviewing the first few thousand cases the instant feedback system sorts through, but if it doesn’t find any major hiccups, it aims to eventually make it a fully-automated process.

For those of you worried about how accurate the system will be in discerning legitimate reports from “troll” reports, Riot assures us that through previous data collection, a system like this one would only have false positives in the 1 in 6000 range – an acceptable number for the developer.

What do you guys think about this? On the one hand, toxic players make the experience bad for everyone, but an automated system like the one Riot is proposing seems like it would be ripe for abuse from the very people it is trying to punish.

Source: Riot Games