There is no perfect solution, and we realize that. The main goal of this specific change was to stop abusers from intentionally queue dodging down to low Elo and ruining games because they are actually a higher Elo player.

With regards to queue dodging due to toxic players, we just want that to remain about the same for this particular solution. We'll be trying to tackle this particular problem separately.

Invisible Elos and Visible Elos being separate systems behind the same Ranked mode is generally a poor idea. In your case, Ranked Players who queue dodge a lot might see their visible Elo as 1700 but constantly be playing against 1300 players. That doesn't make sense to the player and is difficult to educate.

We understand this, but it's still unbearably frustrating to lose because of a troll. "The Tribunal/AFK Detection systems will catch the bad guys" may be true, but it doesn't mitigate ELO loss because one of an innumerable amount of bad seeds happened to be on your team. We want some kind of system that provides fast, immediate results when a player is actively trying to make his/her team lose. It's an impossible thing to ask for, yes, but I think we deserve a better response than "they'll get caught eventually".


Sorry, I'm kind of in a bad mood today. But it's still true: knowing that the bad guys might get banned some day is small comfort when anyone can make as many accounts as they want, and more people than you can imagine will try to troll and ruin matches. It's what happens when you have an extremely popular f2p game. Our question is, why is it taking Riot so long to address this situation in a decisive manner? The Tribunal and Leaverbuster are steps forward, but they don't produce fast results that players can see. For the most part, we have to take Riot's word for it that the systems are effective. Games are still ruined, ELO is still lost, and player perception is that these systems are weak and ineffectual.

Completely agree with this. Maybe if one of these a-holes getting banned gave you your rating back for the game that was affected by them then things would be a bit better.

Agree with 100%

I agree with you, it is frustrating when a troll or AFK is in your game and you suffer through with just a hope that one day the troll will be banned by our systems.

We are trying to develop more features and complex systems that can prevent trolls from being in your games but this takes some time. This year Riot openly said that player behavior is a serious problem we are going to tackle and created Team Player Behavior & Justice. I recently started in February to help guide this team and we're going as fast as we can.

However, we had to launch several research initiatives to explore what player behavior even looks like in online games and what causes toxic player behavior. Then, we had to design several complex, often 'scientific-like' research approaches to feature-design that was not how traditional game development is... so these features are taking some time. We can only ask that our players be patient, and we'll talk about some of these features when we're ready.

We understand that this stuff takes time lyte. We really do, it's just very very frustrating to those of us who just want to play.

On that note, is it possible to set something up that makes it so we don't get paired with people on our ignore list? This would eliminate a ton of work for you guys because we could choose who is toxic to our game for whatever reason and put them on our list which would eliminate us from seeing them again. Obviously it wouldn't catch everybody because every game we could be paired with a different toxic player but it would help not seeing the same people again and be a beginning to eliminating the problem.

Also you could set something up so that a program could scan people's ignore lists and if somebody shows up on a large number ( no clue what a large number is for you guys ) of ignore lists then it could trigger something internally for the Riot team to look into why those people are on so many ignore lists. Maybe look at their last 10 games or something. If that is just too much work then maybe set it up so if they show up on a large number of ignore lists their last 10 games get put into the tribunal for review by their fellow players. This would eliminate work for you guys as well and put the onus back on the players to make the right choices.

I am not a programmer of any type so have no clue if this would be possible or if it would just be too much work on top of your guys other projects. Just throwing ideas out there.

So in a nutshell you could say...

YOUR GOING TO DO SCIENCE TO IT!

Basically.

Actually, you should rarely, rarely meet the same player twice unless you are in a weird Elo bracket, or playing at very off-peak hours. Are you seeing the same toxic player over and over again in your games? If so, let's dig into this deeper and figure out what's going on. Generally, if you wait 5-10 minutes after a game you will almost never see the same toxic player 2 games in a row.

The reason we don't explicitly make your Ignore List a "don't play with this player again" button is because it's very complicated in theory and implementation. The average player will use this button to ignore players they feel are 'unskilled' which undermines the actual systems trying to calculate player skill. This also makes it extremely crazy for the matchmaker who now has to find 10 players who are similar in skill, but also check to see that none of the 10 players ignore lists includes any of the other 9 players in the list.

Another complex issue is, let's say you are a support player in the 1200 Elo range. Your average stats are 0-5-12, which are decent for a support. Players might /ignore you constantly because you are an unskilled players in their eyes and eventually you are stuck in this weird pocket in the matchmaking system where tons of players your Elo range has /ignored you--not because they hate you or you are toxic, but because they just don't want to play with someone who averages 0-5-12.

We definitely are looking at which players are 'pockets' or 'nodes' of toxicity--one example of a node of toxicity is if we see a player who has been ignored by at least 1 person in every game he plays...

Makes sense. Maybe i'm just odd and only use my ignore feature for players who are verbally abusive. It's not a crime to be bad at the game. Hell, i'm not very good myself.