User blog:Steelside/Thoughts On The Tribunal

This is repost of an extremely long reply I made to a wiki user's comment on my "Controlling My Rage" blog post. I decided the comment was so ridiculously long that it somewhat deserved its own blog post. Read my much short "Controlling My Rage" blog post to understand a little more on my situation.

Riot Games is the only developer that suspends and even permanently bans accounts for having a bad attitude. Other extremely popular games do not even care for this kind of thing, only permanently banning a person if they have been caught hacking. Take Starcraft for example. If someone cannon rushes you then rushes Voidrays and proceeds to smack talk calling you "bad' and "noob" you DO NOT get to ban them and yet the community extremely mature and polite without these ridiculous restrictions and punishments.

The Tribunal was created with good intentions, no one can deny this. My account was not permanently banned for having a bad attitude but for being suspended by the Tribunal repeatedly and if the Tribunal worked as it was intended to this would have been fine. The problem here is that a person can be suspended for having just one bad game within the two month period in which the Tribunal cycles.

I can almost guarantee that the vast majority of players who actively participate in the Tribunal will only look at the first game in a case and not at all of them because of how time consuming that would be for all 10 cases.

This creates a system in which if one loses his patience once within a two month period, he can ultimately be suspended. The number of games in one's Tribunal case and the severity of one's offenses has no correlation with the length of the suspension either. Suspensions, as I have noticed, get increasingly long as one is repeatedly punished until, eventually, Riot "deems it necessary" to permanently lock an account. This effectively punishes one for past offenses for which he has already been punished for.

The Tribunal has effectively put a gun in the hands of every League of Legends player, making relationships with one's allies standoffish at best while impeding on one's ability to instruct and give advice for fear that the player will incorrectly interpret and take offense to one's comments.

I am not saying all my advice has been constructive, and I am not saying I am innocent of Verbal Abuse or Flaming. But I am saying that if you want to give tips to a player, you are more likely to get a "fuck you and play" than a "thanks for the tip" in this community. I have given constructive advice before, without being angry. Playing bot lane for most of my time, I have given my randomed supports advice on playstyle, starting items, ward placements, and timings, not because I am arrogant but because I want, ever so desperately, to win the game. But giving advice and good intentions can ever so easily become warped and understood as arrogance or narcissism. If this happens, the person one is trying to help will most likely go out of their way to defy you, ignoring one's advice and the good will of his teammate. This transforms the chatbox into a minefield in which one must materfully maneuver else be blown to bits by a barrage of reports and an eventual suspension.

A sole cause of this is that everyone in the entire game feels he is the top person on the team when playing with randoms. I have encountered randoms on the enemy team that were actually better than me and taught me something. I have done poorly before, though not frequently, I have been the target of spiteful comments and firmly believe everyone has; some, obviously, more often that others.

In my time I've seen it all. I was there when Riot deemed it necessary to have the Tribunal. I also know the community hasn't changed since then. The only change that has come about is the reduction in leavers due to the automated leaver banning system. But the way people act, what people say, it is all the same. Riot hides behind the sheet of high Tribunal ban and suspension numbers and uses it as a measurement of success rather than insight to the system's many flaws.

And if questioned, Riot will say "working as intended". Apparently it was intended that frustrated gamers like myself be thrown down the same hole as AFKers, legitimate trolls, and hackers. I don't know how that does not sound flawed to people.