Red Post Collection: "Very Sadistic" Easter Egg coming to Summoner's Rift, Sion Still in Works, Lyte on Chat Restrictions

Posted on at 8:55 PM by Moobeat
Tonight's red post collection features Meddler with a reminder Sion's rework is a large project and is still worked on, Nome teasing he's been working on a "very sadistic" Easter Egg for the updated Summoner's Rift, a note that the new in-game jungle timers will not be included in patch 4.11, and Lyte discussing the effectiveness of the current chat restriction experiments.
Continue reading for more information!



Sion still being worked on

When asked about the whereabouts of the long awaited Sion rework ( which will include a visual update and a new set of abilities ) , Meddler reiterated that Sion is still in the works as he is a sizable project.
"Sion's being worked on at the moment and basically as big a job as a new champion in terms of assets that need to be produced, questions that need to be answered, testing needed etc. As a result he's taking a lot longer than other smaller reworks. 
Can understand your frustration he hasn't been reworked sooner, while we've talked about his need for a rework previously though this year's the first time we've announced it as something we're actively working on. Not sure what you're referring to from two years ago as a result."
He continued:
"We're thinking roughly along the same lines - undead juggernaught, raw physical power, heavy and brutal."

[ Continued ] Summoner's Rift Update Discussion

We also have a few comments on the Summoner's Rift update, which is currently on the PBE for testing!


Nome tweeted out that he is working on an Easter Egg ( a small surprise or secret for players to find ) for the new Summoner's Rift update.
"Working on a very sadistic Easter Egg for Summoner's Rift. There will be blood."

He later followed up with:
"Internal feedback to the SR easter egg. HAHAHAHAHA >:) "
When asked if it involves poros, Nome replied:
" It's NOT Poros. It will make you question the meaning of life. Maybe you will become a existential nihilist."

What a tease!

Jungle Timers temporarily disabled

The new in-game jungle timers have been temporarily disabled on the PBE as they will NOT be coming with the 4.11 live patch.

On Twitter, Nome commented:
"We're temporarily turning off jungle timers in preparation for 4.11 testing, as the feature isn't going out with that patch."

Lyte on chat restrictions

When asked about the effectiveness of chat restrictions and if it is possible to get an additional chat ban while being punished for the first, Lyte explained that the system takes into account recent behavior to decide if a player has improved or remains negative:
"I'm currently out of the office so I can't look at your specific account; however, there's some misunderstandings to how the system works. 
If you were communicating in a toxic manner, you'll get a chat restriction; it's nearly impossible to get your first chat restriction without behaving toxic in some way. 
However, what happens afterwards varies a lot from player to player. In each case, after the chat restriction ends for a player, the system reviews all the games you played recently and tries to determine if you've improved your behavior. If your behavior has gotten worse, you will get even more chat restrictions than what you got in the previous set of restrictions. If your behavior has improved dramatically and you are in neutral or positive standing, you will receive no chat restrictions. If you don't talk at all, it's still better than communicating in a toxic way so you may receive a few chat restrictions until you are in better standing. In fact, many players never talk in League of Legends and just use smart pings to communicate in-game and that's perfectly fine.
If the system is unsure about your current standing (because you never talked in your past sets of games, or you showed both positive and negative patterns of behavior in your games), you'll receive a few more chat restrictions so the system can collect more data. In ambiguous or extreme cases, Player Support will also assist the system with manual review of the data to determine next steps; for example, some players who become even more negative after a chat restriction may end up losing their Ranked rewards or receive permanent account bans if Player Support feels like the player is unlikely to ever reform."
Facing criticism for the system, he replied:
"I'm open to hearing your feedback. Even in the Tribunal, Player Support only manually reviews ambiguous cases, or severe cases (that result in bigger penalties). 
Even in the chat restriction system, so few players are affected on most servers that Player Support does review a significant portion of the cases and Player Behavior reviews another significant portion. The teams don't review 100% of cases. 
Is the problem you have with the system that there are false positives and positive players being punished, or that we should review 100% of cases regardless of the accuracy of the system?"

He also squashed concern that players are regularly punished for "Refusing to Commuicate":
"This is untrue. Many players never talk in-game and just use in-game pings, and they aren't banned for Refusing to Communicate. A lot of players think they get banned for Refusing to Communicate, but it's never happened in all my years at Riot."
Lyte reiterated his earlier point, again stressing the system's way if asessing a players reform
"I explained this in the original post. If a player has behaved in a toxic manner in the past and received chat restrictions, then does not chat at all, sometimes the system does not have enough data to assess the behavior as neutral, positive, or worse. In the player's case, he may not have chatted at all, which is why the system gave him 30 games of chat restrictions this time instead of the 45 he got last time.
If the system thought the player was more toxic, it would have given the player more restrictions, not less. If the player had never received chat restrictions before and never behaved in a toxic manner before, then not talking in games would not lead to a punishment at all to begin with."

When asked how many false positives happen do the system, Lyte firmly stated:
"As you've seen on the forums several times, there's very few cases of players getting chat restrictions by accident. A lot of players post about their unfair bans, then someone from Player Support will typically reveal that it was well-deserved. It's 100% not OK for positive players or neutral players to be affected by the system, and we act immediately when such an incident occurs.

But right now, only 1-2 cases have been overturned since the chat restriction system started handing out penalties."
He continued:
"I agree with many of your points, which is why the chat restriction system is temporary and very experimental. The goal is to take many of the lessons from chat restrictions and incorporate them into the new Tribunal so that we can speed up the Tribunal 
We're investigating things like how accurate systems like this can be, and how different types of information can influence the accuracy of the system. For example, is analysis of the chat log more or less important than analysis of player-submitted reports? Or, the comments included in player-submitted reports? Given all the things we record, what data leads to the most accurate decisions? 
In the future, we can use a highly sophisticated system like this to determine which Tribunal cases are "ambiguous" and may need more votes, or which are more clear-cut. Alternatively, we could do things like figure out which Tribunal cases are more severe and deserve harsher penalties."
and:
"You're missing a critical difference in what I just posted. 
Players that have never received any penalties before, and not behaved toxic before, will never have an issue not talking. 
Players that have been punished before or behaved toxic before are treated differently by systems. So, if players that have been punished recently for toxic behavior do not chat in games, it's treated as "neutral" and not necessarily positive."

As for why players no longer receive emails detailing why they have been punished, Lyte reminded that that was a feature of the Tribunal and will return:
"The Tribunal does this, and when the feature comes back it'll start doing this again."

When asked how to curve the system and break free from a chain of chat restrictions, Lyte noted:
"If you ignore it all and stay focused on the game, you should stop receiving chat restrictions in the near future. It all depends on a number of factors; for example, if you were being toxic before for 100 games, then ignoring stuff and being positive for 5 games... the system won't immediately remove your penalties and give you 0 chat restrictions. 
At the end of the day, if you continue being sportsmanlike and ignore the trolls, you'll stop receiving chat restrictions--it might seem slow now, but we're still tweaking the values on a pretty consistent basis."

He continued:
"I mentioned this briefly in another post, it's a bit more nuanced than that. First of all, not talking is fine. Most players don't talk and just use in-game pings. 
However, let's look at players who have been toxic before, and earned a few penalties. For these players, if they were toxic for 100 games, then don't talk for 5 games... should we remove their chat penalties? Is the behavior considered fully improved? What if a player was toxic for 1000 games, then did not talk for 1 game? Should we remove their penalties?"

Lyte also noted that about 70% of players don't receive additional restrictions following their first:
"Right now, approximately 70% of players don't receive a 2nd set of chat restrictions after their first on ends. Just because you're chat restricted doesn't mean you can't communicate in positive ways."

Regarding player feedback ( such as this post by summoner Ulanopo ) for how effective the system can be without giving players  notice of why they were punished and how to prevent being punished in the future, Lyte replied:
"Ulanopo, just want to say that we agree with most of your points.

For example, 100% agree that feedback is necessary and right now it's disabled because the Tribunal is in upgrade mode. But, chat restrictions are a temporary system, and it's being experimented with a lot to learn as much as we can about punishment systems so we can incorporate the lessons into the new Tribunal. For example, being able to sort through Tribunal cases with more accuracy, or even better funnel the right cases urgently to Player Support to expedite appeals or harsher bans. Every week with chat restrictions, a few things change, and some parameters change. As a side note, we agree with being more transparent about the system, but we're still waiting on some servers to get chat restrictions implemented and are waiting for that roll-out before we talk more in-depth about the system.

What's constructive and super helpful is posts like Ulanopo's and Eleshkai's that give us feedback about the concept of chat restrictions; for example, if players feel it's mandatory for cases to be human-reviewed, that's an important point that we know the Tribunal will help resolve when it's back up. What I don't want to get into the weeds about is the actual tweaking of the variables because those are easily changed in the system when we bring back the Tribunal.

---

Regarding whether players who don't talk at all should receive additional chat restrictions, it's actually a very edge case. For example, let's look at how the system works with this week's settings and variables.

Let's take 1000 players that have been chat restricted, and look at what happens with the current system which includes very little feedback.

1) About 67% of players improve their behaviors and never receive a 2nd set of chat restrictions.
- that's 670 players out of 1000 that are now in neutral or positive standing

2) For many players that receive chat restrictions, not talking at all actually removes their chat restrictions if they received 3-15 game chat restrictions. This is because we agree with Ulanopo, neutral rest states like not talking at all is "good enough" to lift chat restrictions. But, why are some players getting more chat restrictions even when they don't talk? That leads to point #3.

3) For players that are in the worst 1% of the entire playerbase, they receive 40+ chat restrictions.
- this is about 10 players out of every 1000 players
- since about 67% of players improve their behaviors enough in the 40 games, their chat restrictions are lifted
- this leaves about 3 players out of the 1000 that may receive additional penalties

4) For these worst 1% of players, for these 3 players out of the 1000, it's sometimes taking ~100-120 games to remove their chat restrictions, even if they don't talk at all. This means that sometimes these players are going through 3 to 4 batches of chat restrictions. This is because we have not perfected or optimized the tuning of the system, and it should have probably just given these players more chat restrictions to begin with. But, this is why we're moving rapidly to make sure we experiment efficiently and get to the optimized state ASAP.
---

We can always tweak the numbers so that players seeing problem #4 need to play through fewer games to reach the "neutral" state. However, due to the lack of transparency, it's easy to understand why players feel like the problems are more widespread than they are--that's our fault."
He continued:
"It is a big deal. I mentioned several times that we will strive to be more transparent, but we're still working overtime on some servers to implement chat restrictions at all. Historically, we've done a poor job at making sure every server has the full player behavior feature set; for example, to this day, some servers have never experienced a Tribunal at all and in some servers they don't have access to LeaverBuster. We need to get these features rolling on these other servers so they can at least match a baseline of player behavior before we keep forging ahead on NA. One of our core goals of the new Tribunal was to make sure that the tech was globally viable, so that we could launch Tribunal globally for the first time in League of Legends.

But, because standardizing player behavior features across the globe is a massive undertaking, it's greatly slowed down our communication with players in specific regions (like NA). We've been trying to figure out how we can maintain the quality of dialogue, while still ensuring that every player around the world has access to that information. But, it's a challenge when everything we'd want to discuss needs to be translated and localized in dozens of languages, then we need people like myself who are familiar with the systems actually interacting in every language at every timezone around the world. We're learning every day on how to do this better, and we aren't doing a great job today.

We also know that there's tons of bright players in TBI/PB forums, and we've rewarded them several times for their direct assistance on issues and in giving us a stronger player-perspective on certain things. We've invited players several times (if they live locally) to meet with us and talk about the features currently in progress. But right now, we know exactly what the problems are, exactly what we need to change in the systems, and exactly what dialogues we need to re-boot--we're just trying to figure out how to do it better everywhere, instead of just NA. For example, TBI/PB forums on some servers have gotten 0 responses from anyone in Player Behavior in the entire server's existence--we need to fix that.

Give us time, and we'll figure it out. In the past, we'd just post the KB article in NA and sometimes it'd take months before it reached other servers--we can't be that irresponsible anymore."

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