You might be consistently impressed, lately I have been consistently disappointed by the Dota 2 community.
Sometimes you get teams of mature people who realize we're all in it to have fun, who will wait for you, crack jokes while you're all waiting, and generally make you feel better about the game. Those have been some of the best matches I've played, and included extending condolences to the other player when I've killed them and giving them tips on what they could do better after they respawn.
Other times, people will just yell at you, swear at you, call you names, constantly unpause the games, and just be horrible shits.
Also, I wonder what's different (culturally) about Russians, as they seem to be, by far, the less courteous of the bunch. I think they are racist towards Americans, so when someone speaks English, they basically go "fuck him, he's an American". A few of my friends go the opposite racism route, and say "fuck him, he's Russian", but I obviously try to tell them that you shouldn't be a dick to someone if he's not been a dick to you first.
Contrast this with any other multiplayer game and you'll see constant harassment, cheating, and an overwhelming lack of team play. Overall just too many people who make it their job to ruin the games.
The only thing I'd change is better onboarding of new players. There's a big gulf between the tutorials/bots and PvP. The first 5-10 real games for a new player are filled with insults, and losses.
Which is significantly annoying because there is a bug where you get disconnected from dota. Your only fix is to shut down steam, and I've had to turn off my modem and restart it.
And theres a 5 minute timer waiting to ban you if you are either AFK, or not earning EXP.
Then theres the bans for being a noob on top of that. As a result, its currently sub-par to on par with Dota 1 for me.
By promoting reporting now a lot of the abuse has turned into threatening to report each other. Where before new players would be called shit. Now they are threatened for being bad. There is actually a report option for reporting a new player.. this makes many new players give up because they feel it is against the rules to have no idea what they are doing.
The Tribunal while a nice idea doesn't work. Riot's implementation has a rating system where judges are ranked based on their accuracy. That means many people punish based on what they think other people are doing instead of making their own decision. On each case there is no requirement to spend a specific time looking at it. No requirement to read all the text. I know people who punish every case without reading and run at 90% accuracy on the league table.
Another issue with the tribunal is that it punishes for almost anything. If you say GG after 9 minutes... its punishable. If end the game saying gg easy... its punishable. Combine this with the fact that enemies can report you without specifying a reason means a percentage of players who get punished shouldn't be in the tribunal to begin with. Combine this with terrible support... getting unpunished means going on Reddit and hoping a Riot employee spots it..
At best Riot have shifted the problem from verbal abuse to threatening to report. At worst they have failed completely.
The two main flash points are before you can play ranked games and have a new account. The second one is in champion select...
If you are banned you make a new account. If you want a second account you make a new account. This means the game for new players is incredibly toxic. About 50% of new players are people on smurf's or banned players leveling. This leads to a lot of frustration when you have a 20 death ally on your team. There are a bunch of things they could do.
1. Add a tip pointing out a mute button exists... It took me 80 games of randomly being shit on before someone told me about the mute button. If someone starts to spout abuse I just click the ignore button. Problem sorted.
2. They could give headstart smurf accounts to people who tick an option saying they are experienced players. This would help noobie players play against each other and have a soft intro to the game.
3. They could improve the tutorial so players actually start with some idea of what they are doing.
4. They could make the early climb on new accounts start versus bots to force people to actually get a feel for the game before throwing them into PvP
All 4 solutions would ease the problem new users are facing.
Another issue is in games where 2 or more people want to play the same position while picking champions. A lot of people say 'mid or feed'. They want the mid position. If they don't get it they will repeatedly let the enemy kill them in game...
Simple solutions...
1. Implement a dice in champion select to allow people to roll for the same position.
2. Simply add a line of text when people enter champion select that position is given in order. If you are first pick you have first pick of position. It is up to you if you want to give it up.
There isn't a single tip that says "if you ally is having a hard time in lane, consider aiding them rather than criticizing them."
The attitude of league at the moment is "if you playing bad you are spoiling my game and I will abuse / threaten to report you for it."
When you actually take the effort to communicate with your team and your team actually aids weaker players the mood in games greatly improves. The trouble is that Riot provides little guidance on doing this.
For all their research the implementations based on the research sucks.
- There IS a minimum time requirement that you have to spend on each case (90 seconds, I think). People who punishes every case and run 90% accuracy on the league table could mean that, the priori of a player getting to Tribunal being banned is 90%. Which means that the automate system that put up Tribunal cases are doing a great job! Of course there could be other explanation. But I recalled Riots used to have a "pardon day" that they actively asked banned player to post in a thread, so that a human will actively review the cases. I don't think more than a dozen accounts were really edge cases.
- There are an option when you create new account to choose which type of players you are (there were 3 of them: new to MOBA, new to League, experienced, I think). I don't think it helped the smurf situation at all. The type of players that are banned would be more likely to be the type of players that like to "pwn" new players.
- There are a tip that says "Your teammate performs worse if you harass them"
- Adding the dice roll for the game is infeasible, for the reason that the metagame's roles (top, ad, support, mid, and even the jungle in the past) are created by the players, not Riot. Unlike WOW, in which roles (tank, healer, dps) are specifically designed by Blizzard, the roles in League are strongly defined by the metagame at the time. It's not that Riot doesn't design a champion with a specific set of characteristics in mind, it's just that the range of role a champion can do varies quite a bit: in WoW, a dps trying to tank will be killed in half a second. In League, we used to have mainstream range AD mid, tanky mid, caster mid, assassin AD mid, teemo mid etc. There's no way to meaningfully classify "roles" or even "lanes" position properly - who knows if one day we might have 1 - 3 - 1 laning like dota?
Yes, there have been a few crazy strats, like the tournament game with the "jungle" Heimerdinger where they ran a push comp after their opponent picks had boxed the other team into a corner, but that sort of thing requires team coordination, in which case you're not worried about calling roles in the first place.
Matchmaking is a real problem and it sets people up for failure. There are plenty of people who are simply not prepared to jungle or support. Or, heck, depending on their lack of runes, they might not be able to tank, AP or ADC. You can say "you don't really need runes" but when you have little practice already, going in unprepared is only going to make it worse. I've supported without GP10s due to forgetting to change from a full ADC setup in champ select. It's painful, sightstone or no sightstone to be that poor, even if it was hilarious to ignite a poor, unsuspecting enemy Sona for first blood at level 1.
> Another issue with the tribunal is that it punishes for almost anything. If you say GG after 9 minutes... its punishable. If end the game saying gg easy... its punishable.
Both of your examples should be punishable. Especially "gg easy" is the most anti-social behaviour possible in a game. People like that should get banned instantly and forever - from the whole internet.
> At best Riot have shifted the problem from verbal abuse to threatening to report.
Which is a great achievement by itself, if true. Reporting someone as unskilled player does no harm, at the most it leads to an adjustment in the hidden elo. Way better than insults.
> 1. Add a tip pointing out a mute button exists... It took me 80 games of randomly being shit on before someone told me about the mute button. If someone starts to spout abuse I just click the ignore button. Problem sorted.
This is great behaviour. LoL does mention that button though. But I agree it could be more prominent.
> 2. They could give headstart smurf accounts to people who tick an option saying they are experienced players. This would help noobie players play against each other and have a soft intro to the game.
One has to be careful with that. Banning has to be a huge punishment, everything that helps experienced players with the game start can therefore be dangerous.
> 3. They could improve the tutorial so players actually start with some idea of what they are doing.
I was under the impression they did that with the new tutorial, with ingame-hints and such stuff?
> 4. They could make the early climb on new accounts start versus bots to force people to actually get a feel for the game before throwing them into PvP
True. But it has the issue of driving people to bot-games. PvP is the core of LoL and the botgame-players are their own subculture which I don't know if it should be supported... So also not as easy as it sounds.
I agree with the toxicness of the champion selection (though if someone says mid or feed, let them feed and report them. Haven't seen that in ages, so those people get banned). Riot does as well, I wonder what they will come up with. Picking a lane prior could work well, especially if combined with a system where the meta can be selected ("I want to play top in a top-mid-jungler-adc-supp-setup") or neglected.
> There isn't a single tip that says "if you ally is having a hard time in lane, consider aiding them rather than criticizing them."
Not true.
> The attitude of league at the moment is "if you playing bad you are spoiling my game and I will abuse / threaten to report you for it."
Sometimes that happens, but you should simply ignore and report those people (when not ranked. Then you should do the same, but only if the criticism is unjustified).
Best way to deal with all of this is of course to play with a premade team.
People like that should get banned instantly and forever - from the whole internet.
> doesn't work
From my point of view it's working wonders. Have you played the game long before and after these changes? It's day and night.
I can't help but feel the tribunal would inevitably lead to holier than thou attitudes, they would vote on surface behavior rather than intent and effect. To put that in context, I used to play Planetside with a clan called Obsidian Empire. We had a player there that was the most vial, crude son-of-a-bitch I had ever seen (well, heard). If you screwed up he'd be on you fast. But he was so outlandish that really everyone loved him.
Addressed in a setting as puritanical as the tribunal, he'd never make it. People are likely to vote on shortly adopted principles and on the surface behavior, rather than what message the player actually sent to who the player was talking to.
it's disinfectant, for sure, disinfectant gets rid of alot of problems. Serious problems in fact. It may sound incredulous to argue against it when weight against disinfectants benefits. I'd bet allot of the hackers reading this would rather my friend simply not be such a prick.
I'm glad it's there, but I would prefer a system where a good intentioned friend would survive the process.
2. If you're being vile to someone you don't know, it doesn't matter if your friends think it's hilarious. What matters is whether you're ruining the game for other people.
I have not noticed any holier than thou behavior since they rolled this out. It's been some time now, so if that was going to be an effect we'd probably have noticed it by this point. I have noticed that people have gotten much nicer on average, but it's hard to tell if that's the tribunal or that more skilled people are nicer -- my rank has gone up quite a bit since I started.
A vile (friendly) player can still exist. In your own private group chats you can say what you please. And if you are playing in an arranged 5 team you are unlikely to report your own team.
And the persons who believe that way can play exclusively with other persons who want to screw around, this ensures that. You should be happy to be put in queue with others who don't care about the rest of the players! They're edgy! They don't judge!
First, the numbers are all given as percentages relative to a control. This makes the measured changes appear larger. If the control percentage was 5%, then a relative increase of 20% is just an absolute increase from 5% to 6%. (Also, the relative increase inherits variation from both the control and the target bin.)
Second, the data is presented as if it were cherry picked. They give the most interesting bins or transitions between similar bins, instead of discussing metrics over all of the bins.
I did a very rough estimate of the variation you'd expect to see, given 217 bins of binomial distributions with n=10^5 and p=0.05 where you report percentages relative to one of the bins. It's on the order of +-5%, despite the large sample sizes. Minor changes in protocol could increase this to +-30% and explain all of their results.
The wild swings when the color or font is changed increase my suspicion that they're seeing noise (because I really don't expect priming to be that strong).
Note that this is based entirely on the very superficial amount of data the presenter included in his slides. It may also be the case that they just omitted statistical details because they expected it to be boring to the audience.
Have you looked into it? I never heard of it but I read a lot about suggestion, conversational hypnosis... I'm going to spend my night studying this priming thing but I'm not skeptical about it.
I was surprised to see a complete shift of attitude, and I think this was the most efficient point (too bad they didn't talk about it). People now say GG before and after every game, it actually looks really superficial, like they're only being brown nose to get good badges.
The idea of the wider player community deciding who is or isn't an honorable/good player is absolutely terrifying as a COD/FPS player where large swaths of the community think you're a "n00b camper" if you play the game even slightly strategically. Every FPS I've played (as far back as Doom LAN on PCs) has been like this where the game supports many different weapons and play styles but community majority tends to decide what small subset of those are "good" play, and which are "cheap", "overpowered", etc.
So... meeh, I personally am not a huge fan of the player community being in charge of this stuff. YMMV depending upon which games you play and the average maturity of their community, I suppose.
If you take a look at it, it's really well made. It uses gamification, it rewards you with riot points (that you usually have to spend real coins to get!) and is apart from the game. By that I mean that when you're in the Tribunal, it has nothing to do with the game. It's like another game where the goal is to be wise and good.
Also many players have to decide whether or not the player is getting a ban. And as someone else said here, you rarely see players complaining when they don't deserve it.
> I personally am not a huge fan of the player community being in charge of this stuff.
It's either that or robots that would do it. The playerbase is way too big to pay people to do this job.
For example, years ago I made a DotA-genre map for starcraft. The community was significantly less "toxic". This may have been due to its smaller size, but there were also game mechanics that I think contributed to it.
First, I focused on uneven games being fun. This was mostly achieved by (partially) shared income. On a smaller team your portion of the shared income was higher, so your hero was stronger. An ally leaving had upsides: suddenly you'd have a higher income and a bunch of back-dated income.
Second, dying had no downsides except you had five lives. You didn't get a time-out. The enemy didn't get experience or a pile of money for killing you. Instead, you'd repick your hero and spawn back at base right away. When you died you came back specialized for the current situation and you came back fast (you had constructive things to do; no time to focus on complaining). Until your last life, dying actually had upsides! Sometimes people would even strategically die, trading a life in order to switch roles or to teleport to the base (in dire situations).
It was hard to be angry at a terrible player for dying repeatedly... they were removing themselves from the game, after all. I'm sure the smaller team size, and the presence of 'safe' tasks like moving tanks to defend key areas, also didn't hurt. Having a weak player on your team wasn't ideal, but you could still have a fun game where they contributed.
If you intentionally set out to design a game that turned all your players into assholes you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better system.
Also, if you want to help a player with a build or talk about the bigger strategy, you normally need to talk to your team. Not being able to do that could lead to frustrations and harm the game even more than the occasional insult does right now.
How to sort out champion selection before the game without a chat?
It's fascinating what a simple humanizing 'hi' (with a smiley face) can do to the outcome of a game.
It's straightforward enough to match people perfectly based on skill level, but the pseudo-anonymity and high volume of games means that you often never see the same people again. It's easy to abuse them and never even consider your own mistakes.
The best players focus purely on their own play and their own mistakes; they rarely blame external factors for when things go badly. Just what they can improve on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3wqhmG__Io
[1] www.teamfind.com - the idea is to find other real humans to play with that you can relate to (and have fun with).
[2] There's a voting system - 93% of all votes are positive.
- The fact that you can pause the game, and wait for someone to reconnect, so you won't lose a game because someone kicked his reset button.
- When someone is AFK the gold is shared amongst the other players.
- You can control the disconnected person's hero.
These and a thousand tiny other little touches makes Dota 2 a better community to be in.
Even now they seem more interested in allowing and studying the behavior than preventing it. Combine that with their poor-to-completely-dysfunctional matchmaking and the total lack of incentive to even play when your next 20-60 minutes are held hostage by a troll (whether it's on your team, the enemy team intentionally provoking things since forcing opponents to rage or afk is a valid "strategy", or both) and it's hard to take them seriously on toxic players.
It wore off.
If there was cross team chat and someone voted Honourable Opponent doesn't mean it was positive cross team chat.