Riot's Lead Designer of Social Systems, Lyte, recently addressed concerns about the Tribunal System with a lengthy post on the official forums. The Tribunal System, for those who don't know, is Riot's method of allowing the community to regulate itself via peer-review of oft-reported players. With a reported statistic of .7% player eligibility (from Lyte's post), this is something most players won't encounter. Still, some innocent players may, as is often the case with well-intended systems like this, trigger a false positive and face punishment. This notion of nontoxic players falling victim to the system is what Lyte addresses in his post:
"… the Tribunal isn't perfect. No system is. A lot of players might argue that if even 1 positive player is banned that the system is broken. This is unreasonable. The reality of the situation is, errors are going to happen–the question we should be asking is, 'What is the acceptable error rate?'
One of the first things we did with the system was optimize it to minimize false punishes. Since the player behavior team formed, we have not seen a positive player that was punished enough times by the Tribunal that they were permabanned. Some neutral or positive players receive undeserved warnings or timebans, but no one has been so absurdly unlucky as to end up in the Tribunal 5 times and ended with a permanent ban.
In saying this, we see a lot of complaints that the Tribunal is broken; if we were really punishing that many positive players, I'd shut the Tribunal down today. … When a banned player goes to the forums and complains about the system being broken, we're missing the counterbalance of that–how many players got a ban that was deserved, but don't go on the forums to post about it?"
He goes on to acknowledge that bans are not the complete solution and talk about the team's shift toward encouraging better behavior instead. He also discusses his beliefs about just how healthy and positive – despite how it may sometimes seem – the community really is. Solid read. Check it out at http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=35694081#35694081
