You can read the entire article HERE.
I like the idea in concept. I don’t know how many times I’ve been on and had some jerkface just absolutely ruin my gaming experience. My husband tells me that I need to grow a thicker skin and in many ways he’s absolutely right. The world is filled with jerkfaces and the virtual realm is no exception. I could do an entire different blog post about this (and just might) but for now I want to focus on what LoL is doing to try and rein this problem in.
In WoW I get no satisfaction by simply reporting them to Blizzard and getting the reply that “they’re sorry” and “they’ll investigate” but I should “use the /ignore function”. I’m glad they needed to tell me to use that function, as if I already don’t have a sizable list of people to ignore. The /ignore solves nothing. The offender will move onto another target or they’ll simply pop off, make another character and let the harassment start all over. Although, on a side note, I do wish in real life that I had that capabilities to /ignore people.
What LoL is proposing is interesting and I’ll be keeping an eye out to see how it works out. They’re going to allow the players to judge offenses and dole out punishment. We see in communities that players tend to defend their own anyways and keep people in line whenever possible. They’re just taking the concept a step further and actually giving the players the power to do something.
There are problems with their proposed system though. First, they’re allowing only high level characters to be judges. While this means you’re getting people who have put in their time, it doesn’t mean they’ll be the best judges in this situation. So now you’ll have elitist jerks judging jerks. Just because you have a high level character does not make you the best person to pass on judgment.
Second, they’re requiring you spend at least 60 seconds on a case. The thought is that by requiring someone to spend 60 seconds on a case they will actually put some thought behind it and not just use click judgment or botting to make decisions. 60 seconds?! Are you kidding me… 60 seconds isn’t enough time to make sure someone has actually read, thought about and put some effort in making a decision. If you look at the way the system will work, it’s going to take a lot longer than 60 seconds to read through this.
Third, anyone can make a statement about someone else…where is the chance for the offending player to make their case? You can’t actually have a tribunal when you’ve only got ½ of the story. Now granted, they’re passed onto a Riot employee for review but the initial decision is based on a partial story.
Fourth, they plan on keeping the judge’s name hidden from the offending player but not the offending player’s name hidden from the judge. I think it should be anonymous across the board. Just because someone is a high level character and a judge doesn’t mean they can’t hold grudges either.
Finally, it seems to me as if Riot is being a bit lazy here. Why not just do the job yourself? I’m sure they get a flood of complaints but by passing the buck to the players is a double edged sword. On the one hand it does help the players feel a bit more invested in the game. It gives them a feeling of control, no matter how small that control may be. On the other hand it really does feel as if Riot is trying to figure out how to handle the number of issues they are getting without having to increase staff or man hours by passing this on to player volunteers. The more offensive cases are passed onto the Riot employees anyways so this really seems to be that they’re using players as a filter.
All in all I think it’s an interesting experiment to see what can be done about the increasing problem of people acting out online. With a few tweaks I think it will be a great system. However, it’s not truly a crowded sourced judgment as spelled out in the article. It’s about putting the power to judge in the hands of the players. A true crowd-sourced gaming justice system would have the players voting on offenses and appropriate punishments. Crowd-sourcing requires a crowd. Either way, I’ll be watching to see how this works in the long run.
