Solutions To Solving Trolls, AFKs, Boosted Players and Re Implementation Of A New And Improved Ban System

Vainglory Archive 3v3
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Note: Ive suggested these ideas in a couple of posts as replies but never really thought of compiling them as a singular thread.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Redefining How Elo Is Gained or Lost
  3. Re-Implementing An Improved Ban System
  4. TL;DR

Introduction

The majority of the playerbase, including myself, would agree that the Low-Priority Queue has been proven to be ineffective on discouraging people from trolling, throwing or otherwise toxic behavior on our matches and especially in ranked.

Due to that I suggest the following:

  1. Redefine how elo is gained or lost, and to further discourage toxicity,
  2. Reimplement a ban system

Redifining How Elo Is Gained or Lost

As long as toxicity exists in a mild or greater form, elo loss would always seem ‘unfair’. To solve this, we must change how we gain or lose elo in a way that it would naturally eliminate toxicity, such a way is by making elo gain or loss based on a player’s individual performance.

This could be calculated based on the players in game participation(Objective Contribution, Kill Participation, Crowd Control, etc.). Average Player Performance would then be calculated and elo gain or loss will be determined by that, and a minimum ‘Player Performance’ Rating per SkillTier would be placed for the players to exceed in order to actually gain any elo. (e.g: (20 + 5n, where n is the players skill tier)

This way, by shifting elo gain from wins/losses to individual player performance, it would greatly discourage acts of toxicity as it would no longer affect anyone else on the match but themselves, and instead encourage every player to do their very best in order to gain elo. This system will also force boosted players back into their deserved skilltier, as thei either have to play ranked and underperform or decay back down.

Re-Implementing An Improved Ban System

With this I insist on reverting the LPQ system into the old, but improved ban system. This would work purely on player downvotes, by banning players that have recieved a few downvotes for the same reason, or numerous downvotes for varying reasons, which we will call ‘Downvote Streaks’.

If a player has been downvoted, their Downvote Streaks would increase for the respective reasons, and once a threshold is exceeded, lets say 4 within an t time period, a ban would be given. Similarly, if their total Downvote Streaks has exceeded, for example 10 within a t time period, a ban would be given.

Ban time given would increase exponentially per ban, which would reset after a certain amount of time. Bans would only bar a player from queueing for Standard gamemodes, leaving Brawl, Practice and Private Party modes open.

TL;DR

•Make elo gained/lost through individual player performance
•Revert LPQ to an exponentially increasing ban timer, which only bans the player from Standard gamemodes.

Opinions & Constructive Feedback Appreciated!
Thanks For Reading!

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Making LPQ players unable to rank would fix a lot too.

Though I agree with most of these the way you want to measure is risky because people can start playing too safe to keep their scores intact.

If that can be implemented well it could work.

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Of course the measurements would be much more varied with each giving either high, low or medium Performance Point Ratios based on their importance, thats why a minimum performance threshold (that scales over game time) needs to be surpassed so that AFKs automatically lose elo, and that scenarios like what you said doesnt happen.

The suggestions I’m putforwarding may never be final, so it is up to SEMC to work the numbers or smoothen it out. Although I really do hope that SEMC will adapt to this system if they really do care about their playerbase, and taking control of toxicity.

Their reasoning againts bans dont make sense - “The offenders most of the time are first timers”, so what? Prevention is much better than a cure, which is why I proposed this ban idea, so it will work againts those who only infrequently do it, and to those who just are too immature to reach high level play.

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Two really interesting ideas here.

I think I disagree with the first and agree with the second. So the reasons why I disagree with the first are basically that each role needs to do different things to be successful, they do them differently at different tiers in ways that are hard to capture (so for example kills in games tends to drop as players get to higher skill tiers) and that anything like this will introduce a heap of perverse incentives.

I think fundamentally I simply disagree with the premise that there is a substantial amount of “boosted” players, that there is an issue with the elo system or matchmaking in general.

I think people focus too much on individual games when any Elo system does its job over the course of many games.

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As I have said before, these are only the main ideas, and of course the individual performance will be based on each role.

You might be able to deny that there are a large amount of boosted players, but you cant deny that there is a lot of toxicity going on, especially from the server we are in, which is mainly what my suggestion is aiming to get rid of.

These suggestions are tailored aiming for the improvement of ranked solo queue play, in which most players dont see the need to synergize, or at least untill a very high skill level, but they do try to play their best. “Get a team” isnt an answer, what if our teammates are busy? What if we cant find a suitable one? The moment I try to solo queue I get these triggered trolls. Am I supposed to let my tier decay? SEMC isnt even trying to solve the issue, only untill 10 players take their time to report a player through support do they ban them for 3 days.

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interesting points.

I’m still seeing gaps though. Determining player performance by artificial intelligence would still be open to exploitation. Kill steals, Objective steals. laying down excessive vision to reach the quota.

The improved ban system, to be honest, already sounds alot like the system that’s already in place.

Although i feel this is not a full proof solution, I would agree that the current system isn’t working.

Who knows, with some collaboration and some more brain storming, this idea could work.

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I see what you mean by the exploitations, which is why it is just a ground base for SEMC to build on if they choose to adopt it, and think through to make it fool-proof as possible.

Have to disagree on that, the current system, as evidently seen, does not deter players from being toxic at all. Players put into an extra 5 minute queue would still be in a tilted state after, by giving hourly and massively increasing ban times, it would bar the players from playing in a tilted state, whilst scaring them from going any more toxic if they still wish to do so, and still giving them a chance to play other, but smaller gamemodes.

‘They would just log on to their smurfs if they have been banned’ - Then lock their accounts, prevent it from being logged out from, or logged in from other devices.

‘What if they share a device?’ - If a player has shown toxic behavior, what do you think about their close peers?

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I agree with what @idmonfish said. A philosophy I would like to see SEMC add to their game is instead of always trying to punish players for bad behavior, they could try rewarding players for good behavior more than just with the karma system. This video describes what I’m talking about well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8
An example of this is you could perhaps gain extra glory for every honor you get or something so you get rewarded for good behavior even if you don’t have great karma, or they can give rewards for not abandoning matches or for not getting more than one downvote.

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There is a concept in Chinese moral philosophy which is completely lacking from the Western lterature which I think this is one of the areas we feel the lack of it.

This is the concept off “De” - which broadly speaking (since we lack the concept) translates to moral charisma or even more accurately the infectiousness of good behaviour.

The idea is that if someone acts rightly this encourages others to act rightly - think of witnessing someone getting beaten in a schoolyard - there are a bunch of people just watching - together they could stop the bully, but none of them acts. Then one person steps up, confronts the bully and the crowd will usually follow them.

The Confucian political philosophers favoured a society where the most moral are put at the highest level of society so that their De will flow down and through the community (it also incentivises behaving morally - Xunzi has some fascinating stuff about how this effectively functions as a virtue trap as people who are pretending to be virtuous to gain power eventually internalise virtue through their behaviour.

Its a really interesting bit of moral psychology and I think game designers should take this on board - by clearly and visibly rewarding the virtuous players they will spread good behaviour throughout the game.

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I think both of OP’s ideas have promise, but fixing toxicity is probably the easier/simpler of the two. My thoughts on that belong in a different thread I plan to make sometime “soon”. In theory giving more elo/reducing the drop of elo for a well performing player works, but there are a few major flaws that would need to be sorted out first -

  1. There are so many different variables for captains and even some junglers, that go beyond raw damage.
  2. Not all stuns are equal. Not all healing is good or even important. There is no easy way to track actual misplays. In many cases, a team composition is played incorrectly and the wrong carry is outputting the damage. A simple example of this, is a Baron+Baptiste comp. Baptiste’s primary job is always to protect Baron. But what if Baron gets jumped while Baptiste is off trying to murder someone rather than peeling? If you pay close attention you can find many instances where someone has “high” stats - but lost the match because they played incorrectly. They did well individually but they ruined the team composition. You cannot see this unless you have a pretty knowledgable player watch the important parts of a match. Which is highly impractical unfortunately :stuck_out_tongue:

(I actually want this to be workable but I feel it is too impractical)

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