On Riot's official forums, Lead Designer of Social Systems Lyte recently spoke about the player behavior team's thoughts on and upcoming experiments in player reformation. Outright bans, he says, are not the ideal solution for dealing with toxic players. What if they could be spat back out into the community as nicer people? If not truly kinder, then ostensibly?
“On the player behavior team, one of our core philosophies is to create features that can help toxic players reform their behavior. We have been working on alternatives to banning, and will begin running experiments on the PBE. Unlike many features on PBE, these experiments will see rapid iterations, and may look completely different when they go live. Some experiments might take two weeks, some might take two months, and some even longer. Running experiments this way on PBE will introduce a new level of transparency in our ongoing player behavior initiatives, and we encourage players to join us in these experiments and shape the future of the League of Legends community.
The first experiment we are trying is a new restricted chat mode. Players that are identified as the most toxic by our player behavior systems will be placed into a restricted chat mode where their ability to participate in [All] Chat is disabled. Also, these players will have a limited number of chat messages they can send to team chat, which will slowly increase over the course of a game. To unlock this restriction on their account, these players must play a set number of matchmade games with positive, non-toxic behavior.“
Given that MOBA communities tend to have less that sterling reputations for politesse, this sort of research is more than welcome. This first experiment in the series should be rolling onto the PBE sometime soon. To check out the rest of the post for yourself, head on over to this link.
