Originally Posted by Lyte

I can't keep up with multiple threads, so I'm going to consolidate the information here. I am happy to answer questions in this thread; however, I cannot look up everyone's account and provide comments about their account's behavior history. If you have a legitimate, reasonable request, I'll look into a few accounts here and there.

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Our Player Support teams actually sweep accounts for toxic behaviors on a frequent basis and we've empowered them to hand out direct bans as necessary without prior warnings if they catch players displaying excessive racism, bigotry, or other toxic behaviors in their matches. We use these sweeps to determine whether we are doing enough for our community and to check the accuracy and speed of systems such as the Tribunal and LeaverBuster. The Tribunal is just one piece of the solution to player behavior, but we realized we need to do more.

We've been receiving a lot of complaints from our community about how the act of reporting has created a more toxic environment for other players; players will write in about having a poor game and someone screaming profanities at them and threatening them with reports and bans.

Because of these complaints, we decided to run analyses and metrics against some of the players who reported the highest number of players in the game (after normalizing for games played and all that fun math stuff). We found something a bit surprising and a bit shocking. There were some players that had reported over 1000 times more players than the average player in the population! In addition, these players were often extremely toxic in their games and had repeated cases that were punished in the Tribunal. When we analyzed chat logs in this population, we noticed that they were using reports in an offensive and abusive manner. For example, these players would often say "Enjoy your report f@ggot!" or "everyone in this game, plz report this n*gger." Not all players behaved in this way, but these players were consistently negative towards their teammates in their matches and often tried to convince others to report someone in the game. Many of these players reported for issues (such as playing a poor game) that were not legitimate according to Riot staff standards.

The decision we made today was not easy. It was actually quite sad and a bit depressing for me. We knew that we had never banned for something like this in the past; however, as we dug into the data more, we realized how toxic these players were to their teammates and their opponents and we knew that a verbal warning would not be enough.

These are players that were abusing our report feature and using it as a tool to bully, criticize and frustrate other players in the game. These players that try to get decent players banned from the game! Many of these players already had Tribunal histories and already had their report weights set to 0, but we felt that these acts were distinct enough that an additional punishment was warranted because the Tribunal was not designed to combat abusive reporting.

Today, we decided to give a 7-day timeout to players who were the worst 0.2% of players who abused the report feature and had displayed toxic behavior in their recent matches.

The bans were harsh, I agree. But, we felt they were warranted given the level of abuse these players were involved with. I will continue to answer questions in this thread, let's keep it constructive.