The problem here isn't percentage of the whole population Lyte - it's several factors.

First, saturation is a major issue. As a player between 900 and 1000 elo, I can say with confidence that there is at least one person per game who does something bannable by tribunal (AFK, verbal abuse, intentional feeding), and I'd be willing to keep a record to prove it. You can point to statistics that say 98% of the whole population of players never get into tribunal, when in reality it *feels* like at least 10% of players deserve it (statistically speaking on a per-game basis). It's a nice statistic you've found to be able to point to, but that statistic alone presents several problems. Is this active accounts only? Or does it include accounts that were made and then abandoned? That's just inflating the population with a demographic that isn't a factor. Abandoned accounts don't join a game, threaten "mid or afk", then proceed to rage, intentionally feed, then leave a game.

Second, Tribunal's effects aren't measurable when banned people can just proceed to make another account. I've noticed when leveling up a secondary account that there was an overwhelming number of trolls/feeders in the first 10 or so levels - I'd seen as many as 4 in a game (I'm not adding people who don't know/are trying to learn the game mind you - this is buying boots of mobility and charging into their tower like no tomorrow).

Third - the number of people I've seen ignore/refuse to report a person clearly in violation of the summoner's code is staggering. The majority of them come from the opposing team to the offender - if team 1 has an intentional feeder giving team 2 a free win, I've seen many times where team 2 just laughs and says they won't report since they got a free win and don't care. If someone from team 1 goes afk, team 2 will laugh and say it didn't matter and that they were going to win anyway. While many people do report and have a sense of justice, just as many people are supportive or that behavior.

That's understandable, but I can break down the statistic for any Elo, any game mode, any queue type We have to work with our marketing teams to figure out how to better talk about this data.

I only run analyses on current active accounts.

Players say this, but re-leveling an account to Level 30 is an obstacle that many players refuse to do again. Do some banned players create smurfs and start over? Yes. Do all of them? No. So the effects are measurable, they just aren't 100% effective against toxic players.

There tends to be too many extremes when talking about a system like the Tribunal. If there's 1 false positive, some players claim the entire system is broken--even if there's 59,999 correct verdicts in the same time window.

If there's 1 toxic player that gets banned and creates a smurf account, some players say the system doesn't actually reform any player. Systems that deal with problems like player behavior never work in this extreme fashion--it's never all or nothing.

When players look at the Tribunal forums and see complaints about their cases every week, they don't see the tens of thousands of players that receive cases and understand what they did wrong and don't make a fuss about it in a public forum.

Welcome to the world. If someone breaks open an atm and walks away with it wide open in NYC, people will gladly "clean up" the money lying around. League isn't a utopia, and there is no solid justice system in existence to have what you want and still make this game fun.

All in all, I think the Tribunal is an incredibly well thought out and ingenious system. Honestly, I'm surprised more companies are not adopting the system, and I would not be surprised if they are not developing a system of their own that reflects this and may one day show.

Do I fear a report? Not really. I have no fear that if I am reported for whatever reason should it reach the Tribunal I will be pardoned. I know I follow the summoners code.

The fears of what if bob and tom are co playing and both report you have been answered time and time again. You have to be reported multiple times across multiple games and I do not believe that would happen as long as you show sportsmanlike behavior. There is no evidence that it does happen and if it does you are found guilty by the tribunal. I think he mentioned a 0.5% "oops" rate, and they have mentioned that that 0.5% many of them are repeat offenders, so it's not like they were innocent to begin with.

Some things to think about

1) Riot has stated they feel the tribunal is TOO lenient. Consider that if they took the charge and removed tribunal they would be punishing a lot of players.

2) People keep throwing out "riot is a company and need to make money all they are doing is losing money". You have to view this on two angles. A hostile environment will make customers leave. They will lose money regardless. In this instance, instead of paying a human to scan through each report they have a basically free system of justice (that is showing to work). Now remember they were be MORE harsh than tribunal which means they would be losing more money by banning more people and losing money while paying a team to sort through reports. So, now they are keeping more customers by making the environment more friendly and saving money on workers.

I also know riot can give players things without losing money. The term "you have to spend money to make it" should be something most people are familiar with. They can promote good behavior by making skins for people who follow the summoners code, give away champs ect...because it makes your fan base more loyal AND promotes positive gaming which means more customers will likely stay and play and thus spend more money. The idea that riot cannot afford to give away things because they are a "company to make money" would only be true if they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

All in all, I think this is something you will see many other gaming companies take hold, It's proving to be effective, because if it was not, they would not use it. They are a "company after all", and if they were losing money they would not continue with it.

Hey Lyte, any chance of making the tribunal an App for the iphone/android?

Thanks for responding, but what's your opinion on the issue of saturation of offenders? I can say that I rarely ever play ranked anymore unless it's a 5 man team because the sheer number of people who do egregious offenses (afk, intentionally feeding, etc.). It's become an environment where you can't even enjoy a win anymore because it isn't a real win- it always becomes 5v4, or someone just starts feeding. It's both depressing, and drains any enjoyment out of the game.

That being said, a couple of questions and comments:

First, do you think the categories for reporting could use some expansion? I feel like there are some things that need to be added. For example, if somebody gets mad and proceeds to infinitely sit in a lane lategame regardless of if the team is begging for them to help during team fights. They don't intentionally feed, they don't exactly afk, and their stats look justifiably innocent for any of the existing categories. All that tribunal has to go in is word of mouth/the reports. As a person who has made decisions inside of the tribunal, there is no way to clearly communicate that situation. I know there are other situations like this where there is no clear way to communicate an issue - I can't remember it off the top of my head but I'll gladly readd it when I inevitably run into a similar situation.

I've also got a replay of another game where I truly believe that some bad offenders will not be reported due to no way to communicate it. The other team didn't care enough to report, and they were a group of two, so they'll have 3 reports at best assuming our other teammate reported them. I've got the replay in a LoLReplay file, as I know Riot doesn't enjoy calling names out specifically. Either way, they badly need to be banned and I have a very strong feeling they won't. It's a case that very strongly supports my last statement of having no way to clearly indicate why they need to be banned.

This leads to another question: Do you think there is room to add some sort of replay system or other more clear way to review a game? There were a lot of cases in the tribunal where there was so much gray area that I couldn't tell.

Next, a question: In the tribunal rules, it says someone has right to be pardoned if they leave after having already been wronged. What does this mean? If someone is intentionally feeding, do I have right to leave the game if they refuse to surrender and drag the game out? How far does this rule extend? How many people in tribunal will actually pay attention to this rule? I haven't used this rule yet, as I feel people won't acknowledge it and LeaverBuster is an automated system. It's an interesting rule with some good implications for people being griefed but there's a lot of gray area.

Lastly, I've noticed that when reviewing tribunal cases, there a lot of people in the cases reviewed that also deserve reports and may not have gotten them. I would like to see a feature where you can advocate for that person to be placed in the tribunal as well.

Actually, we're doing the opposite for a few reasons. There's too many categories with too much overlap and each report has a specific definition that is hard to understand for many players. For example, what the difference between "Intentionally Feeding" and "Assisting Enemy Team?" One could argue that intentionally feeding is assisting the enemy team. Expanding reports to even more categories just increases the potential confusion and overlap between reports.

In the future, I'm going to try to reduce the reports down to just the basics. Perhaps we'll require players to put in a detailed report reason, perhaps not. We have to see.

A lot of players ask for replays in the Tribunal, but it's not a great solution. For example, the vast majority of cases already have enough evidence to render an accurate verdict--we have done numerous analyses on this. Secondly, very, very few players actually want to load up a client and watch a replay to look for toxic behaviors--the barrier of entry is just so high so why work on a feature that almost no players will actually use?

Then you might ask: well, what do we do about cases where there isn't enough information in a classic Tribunal case and we need replays to tell what's going on? Well, the Tribunal isn't the answer for those cases. The Tribunal is one piece of the player behavior solution and we are constantly working on others.

What rule are you referring to? We're in the process of re-doing the guidelines and FAQ and this just sounds like an old rule we missed.

We won't be allowing reviewers to 'judge' other players in a given game--this is mainly to avoid double jeopardy. We encourage players to focus on the player you are given in your case because it's likely the other toxic players in the game are already being voted on in another case or even already punished.

But I ask you, how many cases are perfectly legitimate and accurate? For every case you see on the forums where you believe the banning was unjust, what if there are 50,000 cases where the banning was just?

Is it possible to have a perfect system where the false positive rate is 0%? What false positive rate is acceptable to players? In medical fields, a false positive rate of 5% is considered standard and a false positive rate of 1% is excellent. We hold the Tribunal to harsher standards, requiring much better than a 1% false positive rate.

As a company, banning players and removing players from the game is the last thing we want to do. We take banning very seriously--we have Player Support reviewing tons of cases to assign punishments and ensure accuracy. We have designers, analysts and executives personally reviewing numerous cases every week, even ones that are just for warnings.