Incoming "Behavior Alerts" For Toxic Players

RiotLyte's got more whacky schemes up his sleeve, and this time the brilliant social scientist has cooked up another concoction..Behavioral Alerts! Check them out below:

Hey Summoners,

In a future patch, we'll be releasing a feature called Behavioral Alerts. This system will detect spikes of negative behavior (i.e if a player is having a particularly bad day or week) and fire an in-game client warning to the player; we hope that these alerts will give players appropriate feedback about their behaviors before they travel too far down the negative path. We believe that these warnings will prevent a significant number of people from ever being punished by player behavior systems; more importantly, we believe that these warnings will make a difference in the large number of Neutral and Positive players that have rare bad days of toxicity, but previously never got feedback to nudge them back towards the positive.

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In the past few months, a few key insights have shifted our approach to tackling player behavior in online communities. For example, we can use Honor, Reports and other behavioral metrics at our disposal to classify the types of players in League of Legends into four groups: Positive, Neutral, Bad, Toxic. It turns out that only 1% of the active playerbase is considered toxic---these are the players who are abusive to other players in a large number of their games.

The data suggests that over 92% of players are Neutral or Positive.

At this point, many players are thinking,

“Lyte, you’re a crazy scientist. If more than 92% of players are Neutral or Positive, why do a high number of my games seem toxic?” 

What we’re learning in the data is that context inside and outside a game can twist behaviors-it can even create toxic behaviors in good people. A player might have a bad day at work and get yelled at by their boss, then go home to play some League of Legends. At this point, the player already has high frustration levels or has a low tolerance for mistakes, and might end up raging at his teammates for several games; this pattern of behavior can create ripples in the community, and cause other players to have a bad day-this behavioral effect is like a toxin that can percolate and spread across hundreds and thousands of games. Given 10 players in a game, and the randomness that comes from every player having a unique circumstance, tolerance level and context, it’s now easy to see why a high number of games seem toxic-in each game, 1-2 players might be having bad days in real life, or in-game. So when a Neutral or Positive player starts down that negative path, how do we stem it?

Research suggests that having strong feedback loops can have a dramatic positive effect on behavior; in this case, the ability to quickly and effectively deliver feedback to players as soon as they exhibit behaviors that are out of line with the vast majority of players in League of Legends could be enough to get these players back on track. An example of feedback loops in action were Reform Cards, which provided more feedback to players about why they were being punished by the Tribunal---this feedback improved average reform rates by 7.8%.

Like many other player behavior features such as the Tribunal and Honor Initiative, Behavioral Alerts will take into account every player’s behavioral reputation in the system; for example, there is a lot of math behind the system to avoid firing alerts for false reports. In addition, there are numerous mechanisms in place to completely ignore reports from toxic players or those who abuse the report function to ensure that players will never receive any alerts from these reports. We’re looking forward to feedback from players and hope that these alerts will have a significant impact on player behavior in League of Legends.

This feature is currently live on the PBE. Translations are still being worked on for about half of the languages, and will be added in the future before the feature goes live. Source

What do you guys think? Comment below!

Sometimes you just gotta let the rage out...