That said, still glad I don't work there. To my mind, this sort of company behavior sets an unpleasant precedent, and I kind of like knowing I have the freedom to play a game without worrying about being fired for "snarky passive aggression" or something similar. Maybe I'd feel differently if gaming wasn't just something I did in my spare time.
Almost all of my friends there have separate personal and work ("Riot<username>") accounts, the latter at the very least requires you to set a good example as a company representative
What is not normal is asking prospective employees for their user id and making decisions based off of the chat logs attached to it. I mean, it makes sense, but it seems like an invasion of privacy.
Would it be fair for YC to make decisions based off of the HN comment logs of YC applicants?
Sometimes you do stupid things and I believe you shouldn't be forever in the future held accountable for what you said in the past.
They explicitly do this.
Certainly : acting like a fool in your place of employ is bad. However, using your analogy as an example, what's happening here is also a bit like those 3 AM campus shenanigans that occurred while you were a student being held against you when you go looking for a job - since Riot is screening potential employees based on their game history.
If Riot screens applicants based on their LoL behavior, then why shouldn't Facebook? Google? Why shouldn't any of these respective companies sell said information to other 3rd party companies that want to pre-screen hires?
Ultimately I guess I'm arguing against a fully transparent world, because as happy as I am with my electronic footprint - I'm not sure how happy I am about the idea of everyone in the world who I interact with peering at it with a microscope.
If you work for a bank touting stock X, you can't in troll Yahoo boards crapping on it.
If you work at a school teaching kids math, you can't troll on-line forums giving wrong answers to math problems. (At least morally)
Riot and every Rioter should be ashamed that this process is taking place. Search up on Henry Ford's practice of invading employees' private lives. It's disgusting. And what you guys are doing is no different. I can't believe there are employees defending this in public... anything to gain favor with your bosses, huh?
I appreciate the context - this wasn't really super clear from the article. It's completely nuts that anyone would behave this way on a Riot-named account.
Was this sort of behavior prevalent? I'm honestly surprised it's never come up. If I was in a game and witnessed a Riot employee going off on players with racial slurs and death threats - that most certainly would have been screenshot and reddit frontpage worthy.
Either way, specifics aside this sort of behavior is obviously completely unacceptable in a place of employ (of which a company sponsored account is an extension).
My concern with this growing "no assholes" or "no toxic people" sentiment is that it sounds great, but who gets to decide who is and who isn't?
From my perspective, they're hiring someone to have access to their codebase; release their code to millions of users; and spend most of the day next to other people. Hiring is already a blunt tool for finding out if someone can do the work, much less interact well with others. As long as the information isn't completely unrelated to their job function, and it's not discriminatory, it seems reasonable to use all the information at your disposal to reduce that risk.
> As long as the information isn't completely unrelated to their job function, and it's not discriminatory, it seems reasonable to use all the information at your disposal to reduce that risk.
Does it seem reasonable for Google to analyze the personal email accounts of their employees? If not, how is that any different from what's being discussed here?
Does this imply that chat in a 1v1 game is private? That doesn't really follow, since the only difference is the # of immediate spectators
> Anything said in in a LoL game is as sufficiently public as a Twitter account.
I suppose I see where you're coming from, but this feels like a stretch. For starters, the vast (utterly overwhelming) majority of LoL players do not have a real name associated with their gaming handle. They're theoretically similar, but in practice are far from equivalent.
League has one of the most toxic communities I have ever been a part of. The problem is if even one person decides to troll in a game then the rest of the players really have no choice.
Also I would like to think if you work for Riot you actively try to improve the community. Otherwise I'd fire you too. There is a reason Blizzard GMs are almost routinely respectful.
Why is this? I've played online FPS and RTS games for about 15 years now and have never felt like I "had no choice" when it came to engaging with trolls or joining in their behavior. Granted my only experience with MOBAs is Heroes of the Storm, but is LoL that much different?
Now add in its RTS roots - an overhead God's eye view lets you watch your teammates. RPG elements means a bad player isn't merely useless, but he's actually feeding power to your opponents.
So a long game, with a prolonged endgame that often results in 10+ minutes of moribund gameplay after the match is prettymuch already decided, without even the dignity of a quick execution like an rts generally provides. No leaving allowed, either. And you get to watch your teammate (you only have 4) who brought this fate on your head, and you're stuck together for the whole round.
They couldn't have designed a game that makes you hate your weakest teammate more if they tried.
To use a RTS example since you mention playing them, imagine a 3v3 game. If one player leaves and it becomes 3v2, the 3 player team has a huge advantage.
Now in MOBAs, you can let the ennemy team kill you or die repeatedly so they get more resources and xp than you. Imagine for the RTS game that it is possible and one player starts helping the other team and that game becomes a 4v2. The 2 person team will have pretty much no chance of winning.
Playing a dota game with someone feeding (ie diying intentionally to the other team) is pretty much a game ender but there is no way to concede so you still have to play for ~20min with 1% chance of winning.
LoL is heavily team focused w.r.t. strategy.
If you must play for your job, I'd suggest doing one of two things: a. Don't play to win, play half heartedly and don't engage, take lots of breaks and report each and every negative encounter to your manager so they can see that it's potentially impacting on your mental health, or b. speak to management about the toxic environment you are seeing and work with them towards studying what the chief causes are then start putting measures into place to prevent it.
In my experience they tend to go far beyond respectful, Blizzard has by far the nicest customer service staff I've come upon anywhere.
Never mind that if a game has both a story element and a competitive element, the story element will over time deteriorate to placate the competitive side's complaints about balance and whatsnot.
DotA2 actually has some measures in place that lessen the impact of trolls or AKF'ing/quitting players, such as sharing their gold and control among the remaining team, or disabling their abilities that can harm their own allies. In League of Legends, it's a guaranteed defeat if one ally decides to troll or quit (assuming comparable skill on both teams.)
I've always thought that instead of reports and bans, team games should have a peer reputation system, like Reddit or HN's voting.*
MMR/game skills should not be the only criteria for matchmaking; it should include reputation/social skills as well. Oh and disallow global chat in ranked matches.
EDIT: Yes, it makes for a nice thought experiment to come up with a reputation system that would be resistant to "gaming" or abuse, as others have mentioned.
One possibility is to associate a cost to upvoting, and/or make downvoting an earned privilege, similar to how new accounts on HN cannot downvote.
In the very high skill bracket (3.8k+), I've found players on US East and US West are extremely toxic, and the playstyle is relatively boring. So these days, I queue on EU West or EU East.
Especially true, since Dota2 is generally considered less newbie-friendly than LOL.
But I think the general consensus is that LOL is worse.
Both are bad enough that I stopped playing them very quickly. SMITE I stuck with significantly longer.
Time will tell.
I'd argue that Blizzard was largely responsible for defining modern eSports. Blizzard games helped drive the creation of many of the gaming leagues, ESL/IEM started with Warcraft III and the original Counter-Strike. Starcraft and Starcraft 2 had huge competitive communities in their prime and really drove the growth of eSports.
Starcraft 2 is tapering off today but Hearthstone is huge and Heroes of the Storm, while not nearly as popular as LoL/Dota2 is still built as a competitive game.
I'd say Starcraft, SSBM, DotA, Q3 CPMA/Reflex are games that are geared toward competitive play. Whereas HotS, LoL and Overwatch seem much more aimed at being fun and satisfying to play for the average person who isn't interested in sinking 40 hours into a game just to learn basic skills like how to strafe jump or tech/wave dash.
I'm not really trying to push a particular viewpoint though, just curious if you'd expand on what YOU think makes a game competitive?
As a result, there's very little "git gud" trolling or toxic chats were a player will blame his whole team when losing. It's a much friendlier atmosphere overall, and seems to attract a more diverse crowd.
What it does help with is teamwork imo, as the scoreboard in other games like CS usually diverts attention and makes play focused on individuals.
However, I'm noticing that as I've ranked up into the sub-population of more experienced or dedicated players, in-game chat has gotten uglier, with people ending games typing "gg ez" or "l2p noob" in chat.
Compared to the kinds of things you'd see in League of Legends, that's pretty benign, but I'm definitely seeing a steady increase in the number of angry or bad-mannered messages in my games of Overwatch.
Fortunately there are "avoid this player" and "block this person" buttons that you can use to tune them out and avoid ever playing with them again. Part of me wishes that Blizzard would shove players with high incident rates into some sort of toxic player purgatory.
You can see a similar trend in lots of online games like Rocket League or TF2.
Arenas? starcraft? WC3?
Those real time games are very immersive, and players can easily let their ugly true self out if they aren't careful. And that's why Riot is interested in their potential employees' chat logs.
this is coming from an EVE player.. you can be whoever you want in EVE nobody is going to tell you not to be an asshole.
Isn't this saying the opposite?
It could totally be that all non-fired employees are toxic, and viciously went after their weaker colleagues by having them fired! I guess that would make them toxic, but whatever.
And regardless of whether bad behavior can be excused, sometimes the most net good comes from from removing the stress rather than the person.
I'd further argue that with enough stress bad behavior can be induced in anyone. The bad consequences of the bad behavior should really fall on the person responsible for the stress.
There are regional nuances, but toxic behaviors include homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of hate speech.
This would indicate that there are regions in which such speech wouldn't be considered "toxic". I wonder if they've made a map of this?
But I think what you're asking is probably true anyway. If you go to a country where homophobia is the norm, then saying something homophobic isn't really 'toxic' in the same way. It's a more mundane kind of bad.
So, yes, making an irrevocable decision based on one ambiguous data point is a bad idea, but using it as an indicator that a conversation should take place strikes me as wise.
In general another way to phrase it is that correlations in the past strongly suggest correlations in the future. This is especially true when you can think of reasons the variables are causally related. If they did this study and found that employees whose favorite cereal was frosted flakes are more toxic I'd be much more skeptical, as that could indicate they were doing a shoot everywhere and see what sticks approach.
Of course, the other side is that the chat data might create biases. The worry here would be that reading the chat logs might create a unfavorable opinion which then leads to unfair interpretations of workplace behaviors. If I was implementing such an action, I would make sure that the people checking in on those flagged by the system don't actually have access to the chatlogs, except in egregious situations.
Once you get the job, you could simply create a new account to do whatever you want. Using it to get a competitive advantage for yourself wouldn't be very smart though, because you would have to sign up with your real name for an event if you want to make money from that. The best option would be to sell advantages to other players, like boosting their ranks or unlocking in-game goodies.
This article is specifically addressing social media accounts. Trying to lump your 'gamer tag' under that section is pretty sleazy.
http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/permastun/blog/sabotage-and...
If Riot employees want to troll on LoL, they probably shouldn't do it on a company account.
This has nothing to do with "representing the company via an official channel"; this is directly an invasion of privacy of employees' private lives, for the purpose of weeding out those who don't "fit the company culture".
[to the down voters: I'll take bets on when this will happen]
In MOBA games, we have DotA versus LoL
In internet forums, we have 4chan versus Reddit
In nations, we have USA versus China
And even in traditional families, we have dad versus mom
For some reason, even though freedom and structure are polar opposites, as humans we apparently demand access to both.
If I'm playing, say, MechWarrior Online, and my Catapult K2 is killed by the enemy, that doesn't make the weapons of all the enemy mechs suddenly do more damage. But that's exactly how MOBA games work.
So it seems to me that the game design pretty much encourages this kind of behavior.
That said, random employee survellience is extremely fucked up, and I would not condone it.
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@Feliz, that is exactly the type of indoctrinated response one would expect from a brainwashed, ass-kissing employee. An employer should never be looking into personal lives. Look up what Henry Ford did to his employees for a perfect example of how completely insane it is. Your last paragraph comes across as an egotistical sociopath who is dictating how everyone else should behave.
The stat quoted is that it was discovered that 25% of toxic players were determined to be underperforming employees. That's actually a fairly low percentage; I bet that 25% of employees who fell into the non-toxic player pool would also fall under the umbrella of "toxic employees". Correlation does not equal causation.
Honestly, you sound like someone posting with your real name in hopes that your managers will see your comment and promote you, or at least look upon you favorably compared to your silent coworkers. Taking an activity that employees partake in during their free time to determine employment status is a disgusting practice that should not be permitted under the law.
(Though the article does present that some fired employees were toxic, it was not insinuated that they were fired based on this analysis.)
Edit: Yes, later in the article, it does suggest some employees were let go.
These are exactly the traits I want in coworkers.
The opposite - blaming everyone but yourself when your team is losing, raging at people who make honest mistakes, playing selfishly, and so on, are the traits I don't want.
Edit: this is all very problematic of course, but if I noticed that someone my company was thinking about hiring was one of my Dota2 friends, I'd put in a good word based on their in game behavior.
In some games(taking Eve Online as an example), being a dick is just part of the game. As long as you are not doing it in any professional capacity, or insulting people (as opposed to their in-game persona).
Yeah, right. Because that's how you fix toxic behavior. You can just show them they're being assholes. This definitely has nothing to do with threatening their jobs, or anything like that. /s
