Riot Stops In-Game Abuse

Riot, the developer's behind the MOBA League of Legends has been boasting about how their tribunal system for policing player behavior works. League of Legend players vote in the tribunal instances of behavior flagged as abuse. These votes are used to better enhance the automated systems to detect abusive behaviors. Thanks to the constant learning of this system, the tribunal has had a dramatic effect on abuse and player experience.

“As a result of these governance systems changing online cultural norms, incidences of homophobia, sexism and racism in League of Legends have fallen to a combined 2% of all games,” wrote Riot’s lead game designer of social systems Jeffrey “Lyte” Lin in a blog post at Recode.
“Verbal abuse has dropped by more than 40%, and 91.6% of negative players change their act and never commit another offense after just one reported penalty. These results have inspired us, because we realize that this isn’t an impossible problem after all.”

Riot Games has also given academic entities access to the data generated by League's systems, according to Lin. This is a crucial step towards understanding toxicity and creating a better environment for all gamers.

Such an effective treatment of what was previously considered an uncontrollable problem in multiplayer gaming has never been seen before, and I feel that other major multiplayer titles like the Call of Duty series, World of Warcraft, DOTA 2 etcetera need to take note, and implement it where they can.

It’s important that such a regulatory system is followed by other online communities. Sure, it might take and extra few dollars out of the gaming publishers’ pockets, but implementation of such a system ensures longevity of an online game, and prevents it from having unfortunate fates of titles like Modern Warfare 2.

I might not play League of Legends all too often, but I would certainly like to observe tribunal-inspired features in other MMO's.