maybe a fame based system for good and bad reputation? I know a lot of MMO's do it to kind of show to the community "hey, this guy is generally really nice to people and most likely will be nice to you too! Two thumbs up, woot!"

Achievements could also work this way if you guys ever decide to finally implement those. Reputation/fame could eventually incorporate rewards, etc.

To improve the Tribunal remove banning for spit talking and just have those players globally muted.
Leave them the ability to use pings to communicate with the team.

Lyte, can you please change the place of the tribunal ?

I'm sure that if you take 10 people right now who never used the tribunal, they will take more than 5 min to find it.

It will help to put it somewhere else. PVP.net can be a good place for it, between "spell" and "achivement" in your summner's profile.

The one thing that becomes very toxic for me is when I lose a game to because of getting a troll/ feeder/ afk on my team go to queue again after and get placed with the same exact person again on my team causing another loss. This has happened multiple times and is very frustrating. The only solution i have found to this is having to wait a few minutes before going into queue again which is to say the least not fun in itself, it like I have to take a dodge timer to pretty much 90% insure myself i don't get another autoloss.

A little prelude before answering these questions. I'm an economist at the University of Illinois who is about to finish his PhD with a focus in behavioral economics. I've got around 1500 normal games played with probably a couple hundred more games of other sorts (ranked, custom, coop vs AI). So that said here is my very expensive opinion (expensive for me to get the credentials, not for you to listen to my opinion).

1) Why do you participate in the Tribunal?

I don't. I participated for about a week after launch and again around a year after launch to see how things had changed because I was curious. Beyond that I haven't utilized it.

2) What is your most requested feature in the Tribunal?

Quicker and clearer feedback to the people placed in the tribunal would most likely increase it's effectiveness. Feedback that is delayed from the initiating event is mostly confusing to the participant. The caveat to this is feedback too soon will most likely be dismissed by the offending player due to the common dismissive attitude towards their teammates that often enables the toxic play in the first place. How about something along the lines of "You have been reported X times in the last 48 hours" that is updated every 6 hours. It's a pretty rough idea but the core is you have to tie the feedback to the behavior if you want to change the behavior.

3) How would you make the Tribunal more effective?

I'm assuming this question is really asking how I'd make the tribunal more effective at reducing toxic behavior. I addressed this a bit in the previous question. I'll address a separate issue in the next question. Beyond those two points I will just mention one thing. Increasingly we find that the small easy incentives are more effective (or at least far more effective per dollar spent) than large seemingly impactful actions. Experiment with the easily implemented cosmetic incentives and you'll be surprised how far they go. Give players a counter that says how many games since they were last reported (again delayed update so as not to foster animosity between players). Avoid quasi-monetary incentives (IP or RP) unless they're dissociated from a given action. In other words do not give IP bonus if you go 10 games without a report. Give an IP boost if "you're a good community member" and don't define what that means.

Bans are bad for your game. They have a variety of negative impacts including polluting your low level games which are your most important market. You need to do everything you can to move away from them. The biggest suggestion I can give is just experiment with small incentives. Watch this video (it's about 10 minutes):

http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_suther...all_stuff.html

4) What is the Tribunal’s greatest weakness?

Most likely the tribunal's greatest weakness is ultimately it takes your worst offenders and dumps them with your newest players. Obviously some of those worst offenders are removed in the process but the rest really discourage a lot of your new players. Personally I advise my friends when they begin the game to not play anything but bot games until at least level 10 so they can avoid a lot of those players.

Beyond that my guess is that your "judge" participation rate is rather low. Maybe I'm wrong but such a trivial reward along with something that when done properly is moderately arduous just screams low participation rate to me. You need to revamp your reward system. Honestly, you should never have given an IP reward in the first place but that's water under the bridge. You've taken something that could have been driven by altruism and a desire to improve the game and turned it into work. What's worse you made it into very poorly paying work.

5) Would you still vote in the Tribunal if there were no IP rewards?

That depends. Am I going to feel like I'm making an impact? Am I going to feel like the effort I'm putting in is equivalent to the effort others are putting in or do I believe in the "spam punish" myth. I honestly believe that the tribunal without IP rewards would be better. I am not sure how the community would react without some sort of reward replacement however. Here are the key points when thinking about Tribunal rewards.

a) We are creatures of comparison. If the system is such that people feel others are gaining more then them with less effort than people will be unhappy. It would be wise to dissociate incentives from specific actions. Reward general good judging not 5 IP per approved case. Notice that people complain that others spam punish and get rewards. No one complains when you give everyone that played in the last month 300 RP for server trouble. One associates reward with specific action, the other rewards everyone equally for something everyone does. I suspect if you gave everyone who helped with tribunal a 3 game IP boost from time to time you'd hear less complaints regarding rewards than under the current system.

b) Action => reward is work. If you tie the two together as tightly as you have you only offer people a crappy job. The reward needs to be tied to the action abstractly. To put it in concrete terms you've given players a two week work week and a paycheck. You need to give them an activity that Santa Claus watches over and occasionally benevolently showers them with gifts. They know why they're being rewarded but it's not the slog that it currently is.

6) What kind of rewards would you prefer from using the Tribunal?

I feel like I've already addressed this adequately thought not towards my personal preferences.


1) If you could add one feature into the game that addresses player behavior, what would it be?

You need to work on separating new players from toxic players. I'd suggest expanding your tutorial to guide new players to bot games for their first several levels. Nothing forced, just a suggested path for them to take. It'd be as simple as asking them their experience level and taking the new players to a guide that has suggested goals for them to achieve against bots. Disguise it as a teaching tool when actually it separates the truly new from the recycled banned players.

As a sidenote if you want to pay me lots of money to figure things out more specifically for you I'm available in a few months for hire :P

Good Luck.

i said this in another thread and its sad but true lols community has the most rude mannered players i have ever seen in any game not all are like this but most i have encountered are

if i had a dollar for every time i seen the words baddie, mad, trash, feeder,noob i would be a very rich man

and as far as making it better thats going to be really hard because in a team game when your team is doing poorly someone almost always has to point the finger instead of just being quiet and taking the loss,

fortunately in my case i dont get mad or flame people that did not do so well in a match i understand that you win some and you lose some im proud that i can actually say that i have never trolled any other player by arguing with them or fueling a conflict when i see arguing and trolling i just stay quiet

starcraft 2 is a great example of a good mannered community most of the players understand that you cannot win every game and most of the time in a match the only thing you see is a gg at the end "lol prolly because there is no time to troll if you want to win " and the players in general are much more helpful and good mannered.

my best guess for making the community more helpful and good mannered and less trolly and sour
is to have a vote system after every game where u can go to each player if u want and vote them for being ( helpful,nice player,good player,rude,vulgar,) u knwo things like that and if a player gets alot of good votes they get a small gain in ip gain or something and if a player gets alot of negative votes they get a small ip loss. just a idea

1) Why do you participate in the Tribunal?
- I get chuckles at how poorly some people act in this game, and it's an easy way to kill short increments of time.

2) What is your most requested feature in the Tribunal?
- Eh, seems fine to me. Maybe more rapid feedback or stronger incentive to do so?

3) How would you make the Tribunal more effective?
- I like the idea of getting x right in a row causing something cool.

4) What is the Tribunal’s greatest weakness?
- I can't think of one. Seems like a decent system to me. The whole auto-punish BS seems like BS from what I've read, using my judgement almost always gives me full correctness.

5) Would you still vote in the Tribunal if there were no IP rewards?
- Yeah. The rewards are so small that it isn't worth the time if that's the goal.

6) What kind of rewards would you prefer from using the Tribunal?
- Neat content like skins or other small things that don't matter. Maybe an IP Boost for every X cases judged correctly? Man, a Judge Trundle skin after X number of Tribunal Cases would be hilarious.