Riot Games’ Lead Designer of Social Systems Discusses the Value of Reporting a Player

League of Legends players, it seems reporting does not make a difference.

But it is a matter of how you utilize the system that has been in placed. In this Reddit thread, players have questioned the usefulness of reporting or filing reports against players who are “intentionally feeding,” “assisting the enemy,” or simply “refusing to communicate.”

Well, Riot is taking a notice.

These reports serve as a different function for how they analyze the negative players who simply ruin the game for everyone. WookieeCookie, a Rioter, has stated that using the comment box provides context about what a player has done. This is then used to help decide whether the report was justified. 

However, not all reports are treated equally, say’s Lyte, Riot’s Lead Designer of Social Systems: 

All of the reports do something, but it varies a lot.

For example, Intentional Feeding reports do help our Intentional Feeder Detection system which aggressively gives 14-day bans to intentional feeders. However, I will note that many players think someone is intentional feeding when they are just having a bad game so there’s a lot of analyses that goes into the reports themselves and whether they are accurate.

Unskilled Player reports are used to inform matchmaking updates, but do not directly affect player accounts. For example, if a player is constantly getting Unskilled Player reports then our matchmaking system has wildly misplaced the player, so we can analyze those situations to figure out an improvement to the system. However, players are never banned or penalized for being unskilled.

In saying this, we generally find that some reports have too much overlap so we may remove some options in the future. For example, when a player feeds an enemy team, some players use Intentional Feeding and some player use Assisting Enemy Team… so there’s so much overlap with those reports that we may just remove Assisting Enemy Team.

It must be noted that within the Reddit thread, Lyte clarifies that inaccurate reporters who report other players out of spite are not taken as seriously. They carry a lower report weight and subjected to possible future bans. 

Think carefully for how you use such a powerful tool!