In a recent post in Kotaku, League of Legends is implementing a tribunal system on the game for “unsportsman-like” behavior of players. In a more digested sense, LoL is implementing player justice for in-game “jerks”. Now if that ain’t clear enough I don’t know what will.
Here are the possible cases player judges will be handling once it has been implementeed in LoL:
- Players who are AFK too long
- People who are using offensive language
- Bullying
- Or anything that gives a player reason to report someone
Oh, in case you are wondering, being bad in LoL is NOT a valid reason for being reviewed or does it even merit a report (douche).
Members of the tribunal will be given the authority to pass judgement (in the form of a punish, pardon or skip vote) to cases. However it is the LoL staff that will handle the punishment itself so that player judges won’t be able to abuse their powers.
Here’s the rundown on how the tribunal system would work:
- Requirement: Players who are at level 30 will have the opportunity to become part of the system. The reason behind this is that it prevents players from just jumping in and trying to judge cases.
- A player who is given the position of judge will be presented with a randomized selection of cases which are generated by a player or players who have complained about the behavior of a LoL gamer.
- The player judge have no power in the cases that comes to them. They are also kept in the dark on the how the votes would go or on how many are required to punish or the player in question.
- Player judgess will know the names of the the who was reported and those who have filed the report. Judges won’t be able to know who the other judges will be or will there be any means to communicate with each other. This is in place because Riot’s team believes that will reduce the likelihood that judges could unfairly gang up on a player.
- Player judges will be able to punish, pardon or skip, but they won’t be allowed to issue what kind of punishment is dealt. Riot plans to enforce a minimum of 60 seconds for each case to be reviewed and will require the input of special typed characters when a vote is made. These systems are intended to guarantee that players can’t issue a judgment without having had time to review a case and can’t program a robot to do it for them.
- Rewards: Player judges will be rewarded with Influence points, the in-game currency for purchasing heroes and skins as long as they are part of the majority vote. Riot assumes that the majority vote is the right verdict. Also, players who are consistently on the minority vote will eventually lose their tribunal privileges.
Riot is still trying to figure out on what kind of punishments will be dealt to players who are sentenced. As of now they’re still working on the system and hopefully once this is implemented it would make the LoL environment more competitive and less abusive
I personally laud Riot for creating such a system. At least someone is trying to stem down bad behavior in games (since most of the time I’m on the receiving end of it so yeah bias right there). While it seems the plan is good, there’s a saying that goes “No plan survives first contact with customers”, so we have to see how this pans out once Riot Games implements this.
I also have qualms with their assumption that the majority vote are often the right verdict (since the public doesn’t always vote correctly IMHO). But, yeah, those are just little details that I know Rio Games will fix eventually.
