League Analysis: Adding A Report Match Option

The high levels of toxicity that the League of Legends community is said to have is nothing new. Though I personally find most claims to be exaggerated they're not by much and I certainly am not the best the community has to offer either. Such negative behavior can be contributed to any number of reasons, such as the competitive nature of the game. However, despite attempts to reduce this type of behavior, I feel a little more can be done to prevent it.

While I'll go over some ingame-related issues in a future article, in this one I wanted to discuss reporting and the Tribunal. As the title of the article implies, I want to add a report match function, which is something I've mentioned on my stream numerous times when noticing questionable behavior when playing League of Legends.

Why Add Such A Feature?

When playing League of Legends, I occasionally notice cases where multiple players flame, berate, or otherwise reduce the enjoyment of other players' experiences within a single match. This usually involves two individuals but can easily involve far more, especially if there's trash talking going on between the teams (and the like). Anecdotal experiences aside, the tribunal has cases where I want to punish someone other than the offender when perusing the chat history. While I'm sure the other players in question probably also got reported, I feel that creating cases for each specific individual can get a little inefficient especially since players often need multiple matches to build a case at all (at the time of writing this article the NA Tribunal is in recess and trying to build more cases and has often been when I visit Tribunal to judge a few cases). Therefore, given these facts, this is what I propose...

The Logistics of "Report Match"

Report match as a concept sounds rather simple, but then questions get raised such as "how exactly would players get punished?" and "how would Tribunal case reviewers handle match cases?" In this section I will explain an example of how the report match function could work (in this case, report match would completely replace reporting individual players).

• At the post-match screen, instead of the player reporting individual players, they can instead choose to report the entire match. When reporting the entire match, they can highlight potential problem players and add reasons for reporting the player descriptions for each of them (essentially like reporting players now).
• A case can then potentially be built out of the match depending on how many players reported the match. It could even be built off of one report if needed. Like with reviewing a player's cases, Tribunal judges can review an entire match instead.
• The match display on Tribunal would show the ten players (with their champion names to censor out their summoner names, as usual). The names would have some special highlighting if they were individually flagged by player(s) reporting the match. Judges can also highlight a name to see if they were individually reported and see the reasons the player was reported.
• Like with the current iteration of the Tribunal, the chat, items, KDA, and so on would be in their original spots so judges can analyze which players need to be punished. Judges can highlight the name of a specific player to show their name in a different color in a manner similar to the current iteration as well.
• Judges can then choose to Punish each player, adding a reason if needed (in case Riot's internal justice reviewing team reviews the case). They can Punish multiple players at once.
• It is worth noting a player can indeed abuse the system and just Punish all 10 players in a spiteful manner but such a pattern would be easy to catch. Also these players are probably the individuals spamming Punish in the current iteration of the Tribunal which essentially accomplishes the same thing.
• Players that receive a majority of votes choosing to Punish them receive a strike (out of number of strikes to be determined by Riot, but 3-5 would make sense for each step up the "penalty volcano") that decays over time (for instance, one strike is removed each month since players sometimes have bad days). This means players still need to effectively be reported some number of times to get punished but they may be caught in match cases where the player was not reported but someone reported the match for some other reason.
• Players who don't get enough Punish votes are effectively Pardoned. The idea is that players do get Pardoned on Tribunal because there are reasonable judges.
• It is also worth noting some judges skip cases because the player's behavior may be borderline in terms of violating the Summoner's Code.  Said judges may Punish some players in a report match case but find other players borderline and choose to not Punish them, so it becomes more unlikely a player will be wrongfully punished.

I will create a picture version of this idea later, but hopefully this idea makes sense because I feel this would make Tribunal much more efficient overall as judging matches allows for a very large number of incoming cases as opposed to creating gaps of time caused by the Tribunal creating cases for individual players, thus allowing judges to deliver swift action on offenders as needed.

UPDATE: As I said I delivered. Here is a picture version of this suggestion, which I may or may not post onto the League of Legends subreddit.