Throughout this course, I will continue to try and point out ways in which you can get into the games industry outside of the typical designer, programmer or artist roles. I recently read an article about Riot games, dealing with the ‘toxicity’ of the LoL community. I read a few years ago that they hired two psychology PhDs to study the community, in an effort to try and clean up the community. Well…it seems that they are now way beyond just two people.
The League of Legends experiments are the brainchild of Jeffrey “Lyte” Lin, a game designer with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Washington in Seattle. He began studying human behavior the way most academic researchers did, arranging lab experiments with small groups of 50 to 60 college students as his test subjects. Today, he heads Riot’s player behavior team of more than 30 researchers working in game design, statistics and data science as they devise social psychology experiments on competitive League of Legends gamers.
So Riot has 30 people dedicated to cleaning up play behaviors in LoL. I had no idea the team was this large, and involves folks with expertise in statistics and data science (in addition to the psych). Data science is an emerging field, and something that is transferable to many different fields, including games.
For all the LoL players in the course, how do you feel about having your chat logs and behaviors going into a big data pool, and being analyzed by researchers? In terms of the goal of this team, cleaning up behaviors in LoL, do you think these are legitimate measures they are taking, and overall a good initiative for Riot to invest so many resources?
Having our chat logs and behaviors being analyzed has already been made known to the League of Legends’ community. Like the article had suggested, Riot Games has been very transparent about their intentions to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. I always see a blog post on their website about their plans to effectively clean up the community’s toxicity. Every year, they reward well-behaved players with mystery gifts or IP boosts during the Christmas season. But this is only one of the many ways Riot has attempted to clean up the community.
A while ago, they implemented two systems to help make the community better. One is “the Tribunal” where players can log in and read through chat logs of reported players and determine whether or not that player is toxic and deserves to be punished. Previously, as an incentive, players who helped out at the tribunal were rewarded with in game currency known as “IP”. The other system that was implemented was called the “Honor System” where players in the post-game lobby can “honor” their teammates for a certain category or honor their opposing players for the “honorable opponent” category. If a player acquires a certain amount of these “honor points” in some span of time, they will receive an “honor ribbon” to display during loading screen. From my personal experience, I feel as though both systems aren’t very effective in cleaning up the community. The honor system had a very strong beginning, but it was short-lived. In my opinion, it failed because people don’t really care to honor people. There’s no incentive to tell someone they did a good job that game. And the tribunal system never seemed to do its job very effectively. I have several friends who spend their time playing LoL just to annoy and bad mouth other people during games and they have yet to be punished in any form.
My idea for cleaning up the community would be to increase the incentive for players to do the Tribunal and possibly monitoring chat logs by flagging key words that are commonly used by toxic players. Let’s say if a player says something very inappropriate like a racist slur or sexist terms, they’re immediately reported and put in the Tribunal to be reviewed.
Having our chat logs and behaviors being analyzed has already been made known to the League of Legends’ community. Like the article had suggested, Riot Games has been very transparent about their intentions to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. I always see a blog post on their website about their plans to effectively clean up the community’s toxicity. Every year, they reward well-behaved players with mystery gifts or IP boosts during the Christmas season. But this is only one of the many ways Riot has attempted to clean up the community.
A while ago, they implemented two systems to help make the community better. One is “the Tribunal” where players can log in and read through chat logs of reported players and determine whether or not that player is toxic and deserves to be punished. Previously, as an incentive, players who helped out at the tribunal were rewarded with in game currency known as “IP”. The other system that was implemented was called the “Honor System” where players in the post-game lobby can “honor” their teammates for a certain category or honor their opposing players for the “honorable opponent” category. If a player acquires a certain amount of these “honor points” in some span of time, they will receive an “honor ribbon” to display during loading screen. From my personal experience, I feel as though both systems aren’t very effective in cleaning up the community. The honor system had a very strong beginning, but it was short-lived. In my opinion, it failed because people don’t really care to honor people. There’s no incentive to tell someone they did a good job that game. And the tribunal system never seemed to do its job very effectively. I have several friends who spend their time playing LoL just to annoy and bad mouth other people during games and they have yet to be punished in any form.
My idea for cleaning up the community would be to increase the incentive for players to do the Tribunal and possibly monitoring chat logs by flagging key words that are commonly used by toxic players. Let’s say if a player says something very inappropriate like a racist slur or sexist terms, they’re immediately reported and put in the Tribunal to be reviewed.
I feel that it is more necessary to monitor toxicity levels in LoL in regards to gameplay rather than actively analyzing chat logs simply because Riot provides players with the ability to mute others if they so choose. However, players simply cannot control what other players do in the game, such as “intentionally giving free kills” to the enemy or even disconnecting from the game entirely. Granted, I feel that actions to reduce toxic gameplay in LoL should be limited to specific matchmaking queues such as the 3v3 or 5v5 ranked matches as these count towards your overall profile ranking. Players who play casual matchmaking modes should expect a more chaotic community when it comes to gameplay. It is important for Riot to maintain an engaging and positive community since the game is largely free as this is the only way for it to garner a constant pool of players.
In short, I feel Riot has the right idea with needing to actively monitor players for toxic gameplay although they should rely more on the actual player’s actions themselves in the game rather than chat logs since players are able to control being able to chat or not via the mute buttons. It is also worth mentioning that even if a player chooses to mute everyone in the game, they can still communicate by using pings to indicate specific actions to other teammates, bypassing chat altogether and (hopefully) generating a positive experience. The positive experience ultimately depends on the actions (or lack thereof) of other players in the game.
I have mixed feelings about this topic. I like the idea of a less “toxic” experience, but on the other hand I am not a fan of people analyzing all of my user data.
The one side about making the online experience better for everyone is great. I know a lot of people that quit games like Call of Duty or Halo because they got annoyed at the community. It is also really nice that Riot is so open about their research. This is rare in today’s society as many companies, like Facebook and Google, perform research behind our back.
On the other hand, it makes me nervous as a player. There is this whole idea of “big brother is always watching.” This statement probably makes me sound paranoid, but this idea always comes to mind when I hear about people monitoring my behavior. There is also an additional layer about what makes what I say offensive and someone else says not offensive as certain language or phrases are up for interpretation.