For those not familiar League of Legends is played fairly competitively and usually 5v5 (10 players per game). The only thing that matters in ranked play is whether your team wins or loses.
League has one of the most toxic communities I have ever been a part of. The problem is if even one person decides to troll in a game then the rest of the players really have no choice.
Also I would like to think if you work for Riot you actively try to improve the community. Otherwise I'd fire you too. There is a reason Blizzard GMs are almost routinely respectful.
>The problem is if even one person decides to troll in a game then the rest of the players really have no choice.
Why is this? I've played online FPS and RTS games for about 15 years now and have never felt like I "had no choice" when it came to engaging with trolls or joining in their behavior. Granted my only experience with MOBAs is Heroes of the Storm, but is LoL that much different?
Dotalikes (I refuse to use the term mobas) are a great study in unintended consequences. The game has strong RPG elements because those are fun... but that creates a vicious cycle where winners win more. The game has defenses that are tough so that the losing teams can hang on... but those prolong a one-sided game. And the RPG elements mean you can't just let players drop and come back like an fps game, so you're committed for the entire round.
Now add in its RTS roots - an overhead God's eye view lets you watch your teammates. RPG elements means a bad player isn't merely useless, but he's actually feeding power to your opponents.
So a long game, with a prolonged endgame that often results in 10+ minutes of moribund gameplay after the match is prettymuch already decided, without even the dignity of a quick execution like an rts generally provides. No leaving allowed, either. And you get to watch your teammate (you only have 4) who brought this fate on your head, and you're stuck together for the whole round.
They couldn't have designed a game that makes you hate your weakest teammate more if they tried.
This sounds quite interesting. In chess, most grandmaster-level games are resolved by a resignation or draw agreement; rarely does it reach checkmate, stalemate, threefold repetition, or a 50-move-rule draw. I'd expect a similar solution for any other game that has a long "slowly and surely crush your opponent" ending period.
You say players aren't allowed to leave? No one can prevent someone from quitting the application or shutting down their computer. But I'm guessing that the service won't let you join a different game until the current one finishes...
Is there a way for a team to resign? Surely if a team unanimously thinks they've lost, they can surrender immediately...?
About Heroes of the Storm: players aren't allowed to leave and if they do, they are threatened to be queued with other leavers. And there's no resign option.
On the other hand, my worst experience with Dota was that a lot of players were leavers, so any sign of losing and someone left the game. And after that it's really game over. No fun to lose the game this way, even no fun to win the game this way. But with HOTS that's completely different. Almost everyone tries to stay until the defeat and it's not that rare to see a comeback and victory.
So I'm supporting that notion of not allowing anyone just to leave. It's not a chess and there are other players who might want to fight until the end. On the other hand, quick anonymous poll, initiated by one player, if anyone wants to stay, and defeat if everyone wants to resign wouldn't hurt anyone, I guess.
The system penalizes you for leaving in the middle of the game, to the point where if you do it often enough you can get your account banned.
Your team can resign, but it requires at least a 4/1 vote. You typically end up with that one try-hard player who refuses to end with dignity and get 3/2 non-resigns, forcing everyone to play out a lost game.
On top of that if you afk or troll yourself there is a reporting feature at the end of the game where you can flag players, which can also result in account suspensions and bans if they occur too often.
It really is a terrible system all the way through.
A team can surrender if 4/5 teammates agree and at least 20 minutes have passed in the game. Players often believe the game is over before 20 minutes though, which causes these problems.
To use a RTS example since you mention playing them, imagine a 3v3 game.
If one player leaves and it becomes 3v2, the 3 player team has a huge advantage.
Now in MOBAs, you can let the ennemy team kill you or die repeatedly so they get more resources and xp than you.
Imagine for the RTS game that it is possible and one player starts helping the other team and that game becomes a 4v2. The 2 person team will have pretty much no chance of winning.
Playing a dota game with someone feeding (ie diying intentionally to the other team) is pretty much a game ender but there is no way to concede so you still have to play for ~20min with 1% chance of winning.
Maybe not intentional feeding, but if one or two people are having a bad game, you can get to a point where you've clearly lost in the first ten minutes, but since the opposing time is refusing to advance and there's no surrender, you have to waste 20 more getting slowly crushed.
it is an issue of player count -- with so few players per team even if one player is seriously off, you are basically doomed. That's why I prefer games with 16v16, statistically one player can't determine the whole game.
It's both player count and "weakest link" syndrome. Games more like TF2, where weak or out-of-position players don't necessarily break a team, don't grow as toxic over the long haul, even if you're playing them competitively. But all the MOBA-style games have feedback loops that require everyone to play at a minimum standard or the game is definitely lost, and that just isn't conducive to a good experience in online/pub games.
This is a skillcap issue, surely. One great CS:GO player might easily wipe out five bumbling opponents; in Dota-likes skill is much less likely to overcome numbers.
HoTS has also made several design choices that reduce the negative effect of poor play by a single individual - team-shared XP, lower complexity (no items), shorter games. LoL is much more 'snowball' prone and players have to live with the consequences for longer.
40 minute games where you are heavily penalized for leaving even when someone else leaves. It's a team based game where you can see your entire team on a map. Ranked matches are competely dependent on teamwork. It seems obvious to me why there is so much vitriol in league.
One is triggered if there are network connectivity issues, in which case the game isn't scored for anybody. This is to get around the MMR abusers that would queue bots to leave on the other team so they would get a quick win.
The second state is usually triggered if a player has left after first blood. Even then, there are compensatory mechanisms. You lose less MMR than you would normally, and if a player leaves, your team will receive unreliable gold at a faster rate.
In order to sell a high MMR account. This explains why there is massive amounts of MMR inflation across regions.
Prior to ranked matchmaking, the top 1% was typically around 4.2k hidden MMR. After ranked was introduced, it became closer to 5k. Now you have close to 8-9k MMR, because people are buying 5-6k accounts, and lose until they reach their true skill level (usually somewhere between 2-3k).
The account buyer essentially feeds 3000 MMR to their opponents, which is why a 5k player back when ranked was introduced is now an 8k player.
I still don't get it. Why would you buy an account with an MMR that virtually guaranteed you'd lose nearly every game? Are masochists more numerous than I'd imagined?
I imagine it's a form of Dunning-Kruger: account buyers feel that they are more skilled than the rating they received after calibration.
There are also those who legitimately enjoy griefing dota: their account is probably so deep into low priority stacks that it is effectively banned. Or perhaps they are shadow banned into the bot/multi box pool. So they buy a new account to try and ruin games at high MMR.
Riot are testing it for the case where somebody leaves early on. They don't want to allow it for mid-game abandons for fear that it will encourage players to gang up on their team's weakest link and flame him into abandoning so the rest of the team can leave without consequence.
This is a strategy you see in unranked dota pubs, but it doesn't work against a team that's competent enough to rotate the weakest player out, pile into their lane, or use them as bait for counter ganks.
It has to do with late game mechanics, which is dominated by team fights. Thus if one team has only 4 effective players, that team will lose, even if this team did everything else perfectly and the opposing team stumbled around early game.
I like to think of MOBAs like sports. Particularly, like basketball or baseball. It's a team game, and if one person is not pulling their weight, the entire team will suffer and lose. You can't win a baseball game with a pitcher who's wandering around in left field, eating popcorn and looking at spectators instead of pitching the ball.
In ranked play, an early quit (like if your team dropped and/or kicked a badly behaving player and you decide to leave instead of playing on) can undo days or weeks of successful matches, and can even bump you into a lower matchmaking category. Which can have long lived consequences on the quality of subsequent opponents and teammates you have.
It has an extremely awful horrible toxic community, even in a genre of games which is rife with toxic communities. (And seems almost designed, IMO, to encourage such behavior-- since one person doing poorly on a team leads directly to the opposing team getting stronger.)
If you are an employee of Riot then I guess I'd suggest you avoid playing in the competitive areas. It seems like a zero sum move: your employer is monitoring you to an inch of your life (which would probably be considered unacceptable in most other workplaces!) and to win you must play in a toxic environment where it is likely you might react badly and thus be targeted by Riot's HR department.
If you must play for your job, I'd suggest doing one of two things: a. Don't play to win, play half heartedly and don't engage, take lots of breaks and report each and every negative encounter to your manager so they can see that it's potentially impacting on your mental health, or b. speak to management about the toxic environment you are seeing and work with them towards studying what the chief causes are then start putting measures into place to prevent it.
Judging by Riot's job ads and glassdoor notes, playing LoL is required to get a job there. From what I know there is no gameplay in this game other than competition.
That's good to know. The job ads imply otherwise (I posted a quote elsewhere in these comments, and this is the new language, I remember it was saying effectively "must be an LoL player" few years ago). Not sure if you care, but I am not the only one who gets this impression and excludes Riot from the job search.
It's actually far more simple: follow Wil Wheaton's advice and don't be a dick. I'm Bronze (not al Rioters are good) and as you can imagine the toxicity is HIGH. That said it's not hard to not be toxic. Everyone has bad days, and you can't take it personally if someone on your team tilts. If it gets really bad just /mute them.
It basically seems that the more competitive a game, the more toxic the community will be. And that in turn gets squared, if not cubed, by how easily game mechanics can be used to troll or grief.
Never mind that if a game has both a story element and a competitive element, the story element will over time deteriorate to placate the competitive side's complaints about balance and whatsnot.
DotA2 actually has some measures in place that lessen the impact of trolls or AKF'ing/quitting players, such as sharing their gold and control among the remaining team, or disabling their abilities that can harm their own allies. In League of Legends, it's a guaranteed defeat if one ally decides to troll or quit (assuming comparable skill on both teams.)
I've always thought that instead of reports and bans, team games should have a peer reputation system, like Reddit or HN's voting.*
MMR/game skills should not be the only criteria for matchmaking; it should include reputation/social skills as well. Oh and disallow global chat in ranked matches.
EDIT: Yes, it makes for a nice thought experiment to come up with a reputation system that would be resistant to "gaming" or abuse, as others have mentioned.
One possibility is to associate a cost to upvoting, and/or make downvoting an earned privilege, similar to how new accounts on HN cannot downvote.
There is such a system in place actually [0]. It is believed that the playerbase is separated into pools [1] somewhat based of this number. How it is calculated is anyone's guess.
Then it's not working. There are console commands that will print your toxicity metric. I routinely score ~9800 out of 10,000, i.e. friendly, and several times a week am matched with very toxic players.
Are you on the extreme ends of mmr? I have a high rating and rarely get people that don't get along. On the other hand, with the introduction of international ranked, maybe they shelved this for a consolidated pool.
Dota 2 addresses this specifically with a time-sink. A minimum number of games is required to play competitively, which increases the cost related to "new accounts at will".
In addition, even for non-competitive games, players who obviously troll and are flagged by the community are pushed to a separate pool with other trolls.
The system isn't perfect but appears to work fairly well for new players.
League has the same deal. Also, in League, you either have to sink more time or pay real money to play the champions that you like, so that further increases the cost of creating new accounts.
You can buy champions with IP (in game currency) and not RP (real money). The only thing you can only buy with cash is cosmetics. All runes/champions can be obtained for free.
And it appears that some of those "downvotes" (called "reports" in game) are automatically cross-checked by the game. For instance, reports of "feeding" (that is, deliberately dying to give the enemy team an advantage) might be discounted or ignored if the hero being reported hasn't died repeatedly.
Also, in LoL the relative power ceiling of any one character is smaller than in DOTA2. If someone goes afk or trolls, your chances of winning in DOTA2 will be higher since their hyper carries can rip through a team (compared to LoL) if executed properly.
I don't play LoL, but I have seen Dota games where the short team wins in a 3x5 match. Experience gets divided out among the players in range, so if you get to the point where you're trading kills the short time advances relatively faster.
It's very close, but not quite a guaranteed loss at 4v5. I've won (and lost) a number of these.
We almost even won a 3v5 once, but we didn't quite close it out fast enough, so they finally caught up enough to take us down. And it was down to the wire.
That was actually one of the better games I remember, just because it was so intense, though that certainly isn't normal.
Then again, there is another side to things. I once had a team where we all completely sucked and we got pounded into the ground... but every single person was still nice and friendly. We all made friends after game, joined into a group, and played a lot of games together for some time after that.
In the very high skill bracket (3.8k+), I've found players on US East and US West are extremely toxic, and the playstyle is relatively boring. So these days, I queue on EU West or EU East.
It might be because when switching to a new game, a player normally would be treated more harshly because he/she would be considered a burden to the team.
Especially true, since Dota2 is generally considered less newbie-friendly than LOL.
Both games are awful. Compare them to, say, SMITE. Which is still awful by the standards of any genre other than MOBA, but is far better than both LOL and DOTA2.
But I think the general consensus is that LOL is worse.
Both are bad enough that I stopped playing them very quickly. SMITE I stuck with significantly longer.
Interestingly enough, games like LoL have communities with heavy influence historically from Blizzard's own Battle.net, as it descends from DotA on Warcraft 3, a UMS cloning other similar UMS maps on wc3/Starcraft.
My first instinct is that this is creepy overreach, and that I'm glad I don't work for Riot. On the other hand, they have the right to big brother their staff - and said staff should probably know better. It's definitely one of the costs of turning a hobby into a job.
That said, still glad I don't work there. To my mind, this sort of company behavior sets an unpleasant precedent, and I kind of like knowing I have the freedom to play a game without worrying about being fired for "snarky passive aggression" or something similar. Maybe I'd feel differently if gaming wasn't just something I did in my spare time.
Being passive aggressive is not an issue here; employees calling their customers worthless cancerous trash while on an official company-name-tagged account is an issue and would have you removed from any company regardless.
Almost all of my friends there have separate personal and work ("Riot<username>") accounts, the latter at the very least requires you to set a good example as a company representative
I didn't get the impression that only company accounts were being audited, since the article ends with mentioning how new hires are forced to share their personal handle.
New hires share their personal handle because that is the only handle they have; i.e., they have not played games on their company-provided accounts yet.
You don't need to share your primary account, you can theoretically apply for the job with a secondary, or none.
This isn't exactly strict separation of personal life, you are basically working at a specific venue and playing at that same venue just without your uniform; people know and you won't last long in similar situations elsewhere either (unless you're maliken/s2 games)
> New hires share their personal handle because that is the only handle they have; i.e., they have not played games on their company-provided accounts yet.
So, are you saying that once they acquire a company provided account their personal ones are no longer audited? That doesn't seem to be the case at all.
No, I think they are saying that you are asked to share your handle and new guys tend to hand over their 'real' one. While you might just as well create a 'I apply at Riot' one earlier. Or (no idea about that) claim that you don't have one perhaps?
So you have a primary account that you play on, then apply to riot, and then create a new account that Riot doesn't know about where you call your jungler cancerous garbage. Easy peasy.
Unless you're playing your alternate account via Tor or a VPN or something, Riot can presumably notice that both accounts are used from the same IP and put the pieces together. And that would be a long way to go to hide your behavior.
It's not a non sequitur at all. Just pointing out that it's not unreasonable to imagine someone working somewhere without being a user of that company's product.
I find this creepy. I completely agree with policing your employees when they self-identify themselves as such (e.g., with RiotFoo name tags). This is normal.
What is not normal is asking prospective employees for their user id and making decisions based off of the chat logs attached to it. I mean, it makes sense, but it seems like an invasion of privacy.
Would it be fair for YC to make decisions based off of the HN comment logs of YC applicants?
Sometimes you do stupid things and I believe you shouldn't be forever in the future held accountable for what you said in the past.
not parent. I bet they do not, however I think you implicitly agree by providing it on the application. Maybe in the case of partners being on the fence, ect, but if not out of privacy probably strictly out of time and number restrictions. That said, they always speak about how incredible their internal software is YC and HN has solid management & spam reduction software. I wouldn't be surprised if they filter for some internal criteria in an automated fashion.
To be fair, using the word 'privacy' implies that those conversations were private in the first place. In my opinion, there is nothing 'private' about verbally abusing (or whatever else lead to the report) a stranger on the internet on a 5v5 chat (plus any potential spectator).
At first I thought the same with the creepy overreach. But I thought for two seconds, and was like if I went around acting on my work campus like I do at 3am drunk with friends I should be fired too. You are engaging in your place of work and should be a positive influence. You don't shit in the middle of the office.
In principle, I agree with you. In practice, I think we're entering somewhat untrodden waters.
Certainly : acting like a fool in your place of employ is bad. However, using your analogy as an example, what's happening here is also a bit like those 3 AM campus shenanigans that occurred while you were a student being held against you when you go looking for a job - since Riot is screening potential employees based on their game history.
If Riot screens applicants based on their LoL behavior, then why shouldn't Facebook? Google? Why shouldn't any of these respective companies sell said information to other 3rd party companies that want to pre-screen hires?
Ultimately I guess I'm arguing against a fully transparent world, because as happy as I am with my electronic footprint - I'm not sure how happy I am about the idea of everyone in the world who I interact with peering at it with a microscope.
It's less about your game history and more about your behavior directed at strangers. We're a player focused company, and if you're a total jerk to strangers because you've tilted, how can you be expected to make the game better for those same people?
> It's less about your game history and more about your behavior directed at strangers
This is a bit like saying "it's less about the means, but about the ends". I don't think anyone's confused about your motivations.
> We're a player focused company, and if you're a total jerk to strangers because you've tilted, how can you be expected to make the game better for those same people?
I'm as jerk averse as the next person, but this reasoning is on the weak side. History is full of jerks who have made important contributions to their field despite of (or because of) their jerkiness. Edison, Ford, Jobs : all jackasses of epic proportions who all made quality products.
Ultimately, you do you. If you want to shit can jerks, then shit can jerks. I just feel like there are more germane - and less creepily invasive - metrics that can be applied to someone's job performance than their behavior in a game.
edit : I've responded to another one of your comments elsewhere, and just want to add some clarifying context. I really don't want to start defending in game trolls, because the specifics seem to be indefensible (racism, death threats, et al). My concern is a step removed into a hypothetical bigger picture, where everything we do electronically becomes fair game for assessment and auditing - and I see this as a step in that direction.
Exactly, as representatives you're held to a higher standard in setting the tone for the community, regardless of the time of day. That said, this should have been made clear to every employee up front if it's that important to them.
You can do both of those things anonymously. The problem is that, in Riot's case, employees are required to use their Riot username when they play, and IIRC the game clearly identifies them as Riot employees. Furthermore, the problem employees in question tried to influence their teammates by pulling rank on them or intimidating them using their employee status. That, I suspect, is the main reason they got in trouble.
Having players who are employees always explicitly identified by the game seems like a bad idea from the get-go. It exposes them to unusual user behavior, both from users that will not misbehave when they see an employee is present, and from users who will deliberately antagonize the employee. It also places employees in a situation where they may be tempted to pull rank on their customers; if they aren't identified as employees, they have no way of credibly doing so.
Most other online games I've played have had a policy of not identifying players as employees unless they're actively acting as a moderator (e.g, gamemasters in MMORPGs, who aren't really playing the game anyways). I'm very surprised that Riot isn't following their lead here.
My guess is that it serves to quench the common player criticism of "omg, this game is so unbalanced, it's like the developers don't even play their own game!"
And, from what I remember, the LoL community generally really enjoys playing with Riot employees. Back when I used to play (several years ago now) I don't remember running into a single toxic Riot employee. Then again they didn't have very many employees then.
Made an account to just comment on this. It's not little stuff like passive aggression, or even swearing at teammates. It's the extreme stuff that gets you in trouble: racial slurs, death threats, pulling rank (I'm a Riot employee I'm going to ban you BLEEEEEEEP).
Bullshit. It's claimed in the article that the frequency is ~25%. 25% of players do not commit the kinds of chat you are talking about. Clearly the chat log audit against employees is conducted via a purely subjective process, and you can be blacklisted into the "bad employee" pool for anything the auditor of the day decides is "inappropriate".
Riot and every Rioter should be ashamed that this process is taking place. Search up on Henry Ford's practice of invading employees' private lives. It's disgusting. And what you guys are doing is no different. I can't believe there are employees defending this in public... anything to gain favor with your bosses, huh?
> It's the extreme stuff that gets you in trouble: racial slurs, death threats, pulling rank (I'm a Riot employee I'm going to ban you BLEEEEEEEP).
I appreciate the context - this wasn't really super clear from the article. It's completely nuts that anyone would behave this way on a Riot-named account.
Was this sort of behavior prevalent? I'm honestly surprised it's never come up. If I was in a game and witnessed a Riot employee going off on players with racial slurs and death threats - that most certainly would have been screenshot and reddit frontpage worthy.
Either way, specifics aside this sort of behavior is obviously completely unacceptable in a place of employ (of which a company sponsored account is an extension).
If you get hired for many companies, they'll do a background check. Would you consider that overreach? And how is this any different?
From my perspective, they're hiring someone to have access to their codebase; release their code to millions of users; and spend most of the day next to other people. Hiring is already a blunt tool for finding out if someone can do the work, much less interact well with others. As long as the information isn't completely unrelated to their job function, and it's not discriminatory, it seems reasonable to use all the information at your disposal to reduce that risk.
> If you get hired for many companies, they'll do a background check. Would you consider that overreach? And how is this any different?
> As long as the information isn't completely unrelated to their job function, and it's not discriminatory, it seems reasonable to use all the information at your disposal to reduce that risk.
Does it seem reasonable for Google to analyze the personal email accounts of their employees? If not, how is that any different from what's being discussed here?
Email accounts have an expectation of privacy, since they are person-to-person communication. In-game chat on public servers does not have an expectation of privacy, since it's public to all connected.
By this reasoning, isn't email also "public" to all recipients? Does Google Hangouts not have an expectation of privacy, since it's fundamentally no different from chat on a game server?
You have control over who you email or invite to a Hangout. You do not have control over who you connect with in an online game.
You're trying to reason this through from a technology perspective, which is not how others are thinking about it. What matters more is the perception, not the software that makes it happen. We think of Gchat, email and hangouts as private communication. But playing an online game is more like being in a public space, so we have less expectation of privacy. Online games already have mechanisms for reporting toxic players, so you know going in: someone else may look at what I said.
Genuine question : isn't there a more objective standard to be appealed to than perception? Is that really the only thing that's stopping Google from snooping through their own employees private emails, or from reselling them to the highest bidder?
> League of Legends is a 5v5 team game, not a private 1v1 affair
Does this imply that chat in a 1v1 game is private? That doesn't really follow, since the only difference is the # of immediate spectators
> Anything said in in a LoL game is as sufficiently public as a Twitter account.
I suppose I see where you're coming from, but this feels like a stretch. For starters, the vast (utterly overwhelming) majority of LoL players do not have a real name associated with their gaming handle. They're theoretically similar, but in practice are far from equivalent.
Chat disappears after the game, unless someone screenshots (so it's 10x less private than a Snapchat DM or a 1v1 game). But this is orders of magnitude less public than Twitter.
Lots of people stream games, and lots of people watch those streams. Anything you say in public chat (or in team chat when your teammate is streaming) can be viewed by anybody who watches the stream or watches a recording of the stream. The potential audience is far greater than just "the ten players in the game at the moment".
That wording doesn't indicate that. Having nuance does not mean something must stop being true, and the nuance could apply to other behaviors not in that small list.
But I think what you're asking is probably true anyway. If you go to a country where homophobia is the norm, then saying something homophobic isn't really 'toxic' in the same way. It's a more mundane kind of bad.
It's not that simple. You can be a smart guy but a helpless sore loser, be one of those toxic players and be ashamed of yourself if someone would have you read your chat logs after the fact.
Those real time games are very immersive, and players can easily let their ugly true self out if they aren't careful. And that's why Riot is interested in their potential employees' chat logs.
It also means they might only be toxic while playing competitive games online and not working face-to-face with others. I guess I don't see why this would be more useful than judging them on their actual work behavior, kind of like when companies fire someone over their porn habits by reading their Google history. They can do what they want, it just seems a little invasive and probably pointless.
The article already states that they found a very clear correlation. Besides if someone is turns out to be a complete @$$hole whenever they aren't afraid of repercussions do you really want them working at your company.
Bullshit on correlation. They found that 25% of "toxic players" (determined by some subjective agenda) were also toxic at some level within the company.
This means absolutely nothing if you don't compare against the equivalent rate of "employee toxicity" from "non-toxic players". 25% isn't that high; I would bet that in general 1 out of 4 LoL players have been toxic in chat at one time or another. You can't just state 25% for one side of the equation without also mentioning what results you found from the other side.
I suspect that 25% of LoL players in general have been "toxic". You can't just focus only on the "bad employees" and call that correlation.
"The article already states that they found a very clear correlation"
Oh well that makes it ok then. If I find a clear correlation between say black skin and employee underperformance, I guess I can just go right ahead and sack individuals based on some statistical association discovered in a population they happen to belong to.
What the fuck is wrong with you people? I mean the entire lesson of not being racist or not being sexist or whatever is that it isn't ok to judge individuals by the population they happen to belong to. I mean guess what, black people are more likely to be criminals. Women are less likely to be coders. White people are less likely to play basketball well. These are statistical facts, though it seems awkward to say them. But that's ok, because the entire point is that you assess each individual you meet in life on their own merits, not some statistical generalization.
And somewhere along they way, you've missed this point. You don't get to assume that an individual is a shitty employee because they are a shitty LoL player just because you have some correlation to go on.
No. There is no need for statistics when you have the individual at your disposal and work with them day to day. Treat them as a human. There is no need to make vague statistical guesses, the data you gain by actually interacting with them is far superior, no? It would be like cutting John Stockton from your basketball team because he is short and white, there is no need to make statistical judgements like that when you can watch the actual player on the actual basketball court and assess them properly.
There's a heck of a lot of people in the world who know what they're doing is wrong, but simply do not care until they get caught doing it.
Sure, if your boss pulls you into his office and says your chat in that last game was completely unacceptable, you'll feel properly ashamed. But take that same person and put them in a situation where they know they can't be caught doing it (say, when they're playing an Xbox Live game), and the toxicity will spring right back.
It's not sufficient for society to merely teach people what things are wrong; that's not enough to stop every person. We also hire police to fill in the gaps.
One that though I don't play it, I take it that it simulates hostility (violence, fighting, etc). If I'm mistaken there, I welcome correction.
So the hostility doesn't have any of the harm that we associate with real-world hostility, but occurs within a video game that is modeled on hostility... and I'm not supposed to be hostile?
What, do avatars just wander around basket-weaving and finger-painting in League of Legends? It's bizarre. God, I worry that I need to rush off and delete my Facebook account, lest my own employers get any strange ideas.
No, hostility in the context of playing the game is fine. Its a PvP game so that wouldn't be a tenable policy. You can go and kill the other team all you want. Poor behavior in the in-game chat or metagame is whats at issue here: sending other people messages to insult them, throwing matches on purpose to "get back" at your team, being a poor sport, etc.
Edit: Here's an analogy. Consider if you were playing a basketball game and one of the players slapped the ball out of his teammate's hand and started screaming in his face about how he s a terrible player and should have been aborted. That's the sort of behavior we're talking about.
Doesn't matter; you're interacting with real people.
"So the hostility doesn't have any of the harm that we associate with real-world hostility, but occurs within a video game that is modeled on hostility... and I'm not supposed to be hostile?"
No. You're supposed to be a grown up. Especially if you work for the company making the game, and are a public representative of that company.
From my Dota experience, usually the hostility is between teammates. Because League partners 5 people together, mistakes and bad play from your teammates can have negative impact on your hero and this can be quite frustrating. Over-extensions from a team mate can lead to your hero also dying as you try to save your buddy. It is also easy to blame your teammates when you make a mistake.
Games and play is not only human. If you observe puppies and kitties playing, you'll find out that they are mimicking hunting moves, fights, etc., all things they'll do "seriously" in their adult life in order to survive and reproduce.
Kids games are no different. IRL games and video games are no different, except that anonymity allows people to abuse others more.
Interesting you jump to that though. This is what I'm talking about... anything less than perfect politeness must be exaggerated into indefensibility. The "you asshole" typed into in-game chat is apparently enough to get someone fired.
Then, if it's reported or commented on publicly, someone like you'd jump in and characterize it as "he was running around screaming that we were all faggots".
When we talk about "toxic behavior" in online games, calling everyone faggots is exactly what we're talking about. It's not "anything less than perfect politeness", it's not calling somebody an asshole one time. Constant, wildly abusive behavior is endemic to MOBA games in particular, to the extent that many developers have whole teams of people dedicated to trying to reduce it.
You've already said that you've never played this game, you don't appear to have much experience with online games in general, and you clearly haven't read the article if you think that Riot is firing people for saying "you asshole" in chat. You don't know anything about any part of the topic we're discussing. Why are you so determined that you're right anyway?
But yet you're all downvoting me for expressing an opinion without any name-calling at all. You disapprove of my opinion, you imagine that I'm screaming "faggots", and then you punish me for something that I've never done.
Why would I believe you when you tell me that you're only punishing those who deserve it? You've already given me all the evidence I need to see what you'd really do.
> You've already said that you've never played this game, you don't appear to have much experience with online games in general, and you clearly haven't read the article if you think that Riot is firing people for saying "you asshole" in chat.
I did read the article. They didn't list out some exhaustive policy. They didn't talk about digging deep into the context or examining nuance and different perspectives. Like you, they already knew what they wanted to be rid of, they exaggerated behavior or fabricated it wholesale (just as you and the other hackernewsians have done here), and that was that. No defense, no appeals process, no presumption of innocence.
Also passionate gamers are like passionate sports players. Some times the game and your opponents get the best of you and you do or say things you wouldn't normally do in a normal, low stress game.
You dont. I have played all sorts of games and heard everything out there. Doesnt bother me personally, but when its the place you work for, I find its best to watch what you say. To me thats business 101.
I'm interested to see how Blizzard is going to handle its Overwatch community. It's very likely Overwatch will become incredibly competitive, and I don't think Blizzard has ever been a part of that scene (competitive WoW, anyone?)
> I don't think Blizzard has ever been a part of that scene
I'd argue that Blizzard was largely responsible for defining modern eSports. Blizzard games helped drive the creation of many of the gaming leagues, ESL/IEM started with Warcraft III and the original Counter-Strike. Starcraft and Starcraft 2 had huge competitive communities in their prime and really drove the growth of eSports.
Starcraft 2 is tapering off today but Hearthstone is huge and Heroes of the Storm, while not nearly as popular as LoL/Dota2 is still built as a competitive game.
I'm curious how you're evaluating a game being competitive vs. not. Maybe my bar is just set a lot higher but I don't really see HotS as being a game that's really intended as a competitive game.
I'd say Starcraft, SSBM, DotA, Q3 CPMA/Reflex are games that are geared toward competitive play. Whereas HotS, LoL and Overwatch seem much more aimed at being fun and satisfying to play for the average person who isn't interested in sinking 40 hours into a game just to learn basic skills like how to strafe jump or tech/wave dash.
I'm not really trying to push a particular viewpoint though, just curious if you'd expand on what YOU think makes a game competitive?
As a baseline I'd say that any game where the 'prime content' is ranked PvP it is a competitive game. Sure HotS and LoL have non-ranked play but they aren't the focus of the game.
Another simple metric is to look at eSport tournaments by prize pool. If people are playing the game in an attempt to win hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, it's a competitive game.
I get the impression that you are conflating 'competitive' with 'difficult'.
Ranked play is nothing other than a mechanic to match you with players of equal skill at a game. I posit that maybe every multiplayer game should have it, even cooperative games, since it removes the terrible experience that is having experienced players play with brand new ones.
I understand your point about conflating "competitive" and "difficult", but there is a reason why people couple the concepts together: there's no point in competitively playing a game with a low skill ceiling. An extremely contrived example of this: Rock-Paper-Scissors is a competitive, PvP game and yet no one would ever host tournaments for it because of the ridiculously low skill ceiling; there's not enough to differentiate an experienced player from a brand new one.
> Ranked play is nothing other than a mechanic to match you with players of equal skill at a game.
Almost all such games maintain some sort of per player rating (ELOish usually) which is separate from ranked play and often hidden. You certainly don't need to play ranked modes just to be paired with similar skill level players.
> there's no point in competitively playing a game with a low skill ceiling.
Sure, but in combination with previous comment your inference appears to be that HotS, LoL and Overwatch are low skill cap games. I'm curious what your argument for that is. Using LoL as an example the overall ELO distribution is extremely bottom heavy with a smooth taper to the top; vastly more players in lower ranks than higher despite having consistent promotion rules. A ranking for a low skill cap game would be expected to have a bunching at the top as the skill cap is quickly reached and the outcome becomes more random.
One thing these 3 games do have in common is a low barrier to entry, but I see no correlation between that and skill cap in video games or traditional sports. e.g. a very young child can start to play soccer, but that doesn't mean soccer has a low skill cap.
Starcraft was in its prime when KeSPA was managing everything. Blizzard effective ran SC2 into the ground rather quickly in comparison (SC:BW had a strong competitive scene for 10+ years, SC2 lasted maybe 4 and started to taper off very quicky).
Overwatch does several interesting things to try to limit bad behavior. For example, there is no scoreboard at the end of a round like you'd typically find.
As a result, there's very little "git gud" trolling or toxic chats were a player will blame his whole team when losing. It's a much friendlier atmosphere overall, and seems to attract a more diverse crowd.
In my experience with Overwatch, it feels about as toxic as LoL when adjusted for match length and the ease of dropping out. There's a lot of "gg ez", "trash [hero]", "kill yourself" - at least in my games.
Sorry, but that doesn't help with flaming. The losing team will find a way to criticize your play if they want to. You may not see that in the game now, but you will when ranked play is released.
What it does help with is teamwork imo, as the scoreboard in other games like CS usually diverts attention and makes play focused on individuals.
I don't think Blizzard is a stranger to the esports scene. Every single one of their current game offerings has a competitive scene with the exception of diablo 3.
Overwatch in general seems to be a pretty nice community compared to the others.
However, I'm noticing that as I've ranked up into the sub-population of more experienced or dedicated players, in-game chat has gotten uglier, with people ending games typing "gg ez" or "l2p noob" in chat.
Compared to the kinds of things you'd see in League of Legends, that's pretty benign, but I'm definitely seeing a steady increase in the number of angry or bad-mannered messages in my games of Overwatch.
Fortunately there are "avoid this player" and "block this person" buttons that you can use to tune them out and avoid ever playing with them again. Part of me wishes that Blizzard would shove players with high incident rates into some sort of toxic player purgatory.
Maybe that's more a product of the player base as a whole becoming better at playing. The longer a game is out the bigger the gap will be between new players and experienced players.
You can see a similar trend in lots of online games like Rocket League or TF2.
Nope, but it's still surprisingly a toxic community. You can select 1 of 6 emotes, all of which can be taken negatively by players. Also, you can play slowly for no reason.
"... a quarter of all fired employees had been unpleasant players. Toxic players tended to be toxic employees, even if the reverse wasn't always true."
I don't think so. A = fired employees. B = unpleasant players. B is contained within A, so B implies A ("Toxic players tended to be toxic employees") but not the reverse.
We only have that P[B|A] = 1/4; we don't know anything about P[A|B] without more info.
It could totally be that all non-fired employees are toxic, and viciously went after their weaker colleagues by having them fired! I guess that would make them toxic, but whatever.
Though that seems to be how the sentence is actually parsed, it seems odd that that would be true. That indicates that every toxic player worked there, and some of the horrible people who worked there were actually not horrible in the context of the game.
Yes, that's what it would seem like, because that makes sense, but what it actually says is the exact opposite of that - if you're a toxic player, you're also a toxic employee, but if you're a toxic employee, you're not necessarily a toxic player. Seems wrong.
Maybe Ted for fired for sexual harassment of a co-worker. Maybe he worked for HR and rarely, if ever, played LoL in the first place. He'd be fired as a toxic employee without anything in his LoL chat log to hint at it.
What they're saying is that if you have a toxic LoL chat log, you're likely to be a Ted. But the reverse isn't true: you can have a pristine chat log, and still be a Ted.
Their point is that while toxic players were DISPROPORTIONATELY toxic employees, it's not the case that a MAJORITY of toxic players were toxic employees.
Sorry, I see what you are saying, and I wasn't (intentionally) complaining that 1/4 isn't 1/2 or so. Rather, that the stat only tells us that when you look at toxic employees you find toxic players, rather than vice-versa.
The cited statistic doesn't tell you anything of the kind. It tells you that toxic employees are by and large (~75%) not toxic players, and the following sentence repeats that toxic employees aren't always toxic players.
That followup sentence also supplementally tells you that the sweep of toxic employees happened to catch most of the toxic players. That information is unrelated to the given statistic.
The submission site doesn't allow comments from "non-gaming employees", so I will post a response comment here, aimed at Feliz whose comment you can read in the submission site's comments.
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@Feliz, that is exactly the type of indoctrinated response one would expect from a brainwashed, ass-kissing employee. An employer should never be looking into personal lives. Look up what Henry Ford did to his employees for a perfect example of how completely insane it is. Your last paragraph comes across as an egotistical sociopath who is dictating how everyone else should behave.
The stat quoted is that it was discovered that 25% of toxic players were determined to be underperforming employees. That's actually a fairly low percentage; I bet that 25% of employees who fell into the non-toxic player pool would also fall under the umbrella of "toxic employees". Correlation does not equal causation.
Honestly, you sound like someone posting with your real name in hopes that your managers will see your comment and promote you, or at least look upon you favorably compared to your silent coworkers. Taking an activity that employees partake in during their free time to determine employment status is a disgusting practice that should not be permitted under the law.
Employees aside, toxic nature is inevitable for competitive online games that allow for open communication. To "fix" this may mean to make chat communication closed, or opt-in with friends, or only have a select few chat rooms with heavy moderation, or only allow a select number of phrases, etc. It would require re-thinking how chat communication in games should work, something that say Nintendo and Disney put effort into.
MOBA games have an additional challenge in that if one player isn't as strong as the others, he actually makes the opposing team stronger.
If I'm playing, say, MechWarrior Online, and my Catapult K2 is killed by the enemy, that doesn't make the weapons of all the enemy mechs suddenly do more damage. But that's exactly how MOBA games work.
So it seems to me that the game design pretty much encourages this kind of behavior.
Riot employees are paid to play (on a Riot "sponsored" account). Just like company email, chat, or any other service, it should be assumed that it's going to be monitored.
If Riot employees want to troll on LoL, they probably shouldn't do it on a company account.
It's specified in the article that new employees (who do not have an employee account yet) are expected to provide their League username so it can be inspected.
This has nothing to do with "representing the company via an official channel"; this is directly an invasion of privacy of employees' private lives, for the purpose of weeding out those who don't "fit the company culture".
I don't know if they're required to play, but Riot employees who queue up and get matched typically are named Riot${something}. I have heard that users who aren't Riot employees with Riot in their name can have their handle renamed.
It was stated on a recent (3 weeks ago?) Twitch steam that in order to be part of the Q&A-ish testers team, you not only have to play League, but you need to be higher elo - I think it was Diamond+? - just to be hired. I mean, it's kind of cool to have "real players" handling the game, but it is a barrier to entry, and definitely furthers the culture of "must play LoL (and be good at it) in order to work for LoL".
Saying nothing about the practice or the article, but is this title accurate? From what I read, the employees were brought into discussions about their behavior, and were not fired.
(Though the article does present that some fired employees were toxic, it was not insinuated that they were fired based on this analysis.)
Edit: Yes, later in the article, it does suggest some employees were let go.
Couldn't this have a high risk of overfitting (not sure if that's exactly the right word, but I think it conveys the idea) when using it as a predictive or proactive measure? Just because you observe a correlation in the past doesn't mean it will continue into the future, and there's a lot resting on this prediction.
It sounds like Riot handled this very well: rather than just fire people based on their analysis, they sat down with the employees to discuss the matter.
So, yes, making an irrevocable decision based on one ambiguous data point is a bad idea, but using it as an indicator that a conversation should take place strikes me as wise.
While overfitting is always possible, in this situation there is an easy causal explanation for why toxic players could be toxic employees. From my experience playing Dota I know that if I was stressed out by work or life I would be more toxic in game.
In general another way to phrase it is that correlations in the past strongly suggest correlations in the future. This is especially true when you can think of reasons the variables are causally related. If they did this study and found that employees whose favorite cereal was frosted flakes are more toxic I'd be much more skeptical, as that could indicate they were doing a shoot everywhere and see what sticks approach.
That's a really good reason for not making decisions outright based on the information. You'd want to use the results of these models as a means to direct attention to where it is most likely to be needed. It sounds like this is exactly what they did.
Of course, the other side is that the chat data might create biases. The worry here would be that reading the chat logs might create a unfavorable opinion which then leads to unfair interpretations of workplace behaviors. If I was implementing such an action, I would make sure that the people checking in on those flagged by the system don't actually have access to the chatlogs, except in egregious situations.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. In a competitive online scene, any remote potential for an unfair advantage should be taken very seriously. To ensure that their employees aren't using insider knowledge, tools, or access to gain an unfair advantage, they'd have to know what their employees' accounts are. To do otherwise would potentially undermine the company's very business.
You got it backwards: they are asking for in-game name so they can check their past chat logs and/or current "reputation" (there's an in-game system that allows other players to give you reputation rewards).
Once you get the job, you could simply create a new account to do whatever you want. Using it to get a competitive advantage for yourself wouldn't be very smart though, because you would have to sign up with your real name for an event if you want to make money from that. The best option would be to sell advantages to other players, like boosting their ranks or unlocking in-game goodies.
MOBAs like LoL and Dota2 do bring out the worst in many people, but in a few they bring out the best - the people who go harder when faced with adversity, who offer gentle, constructive advice and assistance to teammates who are doing badly, and keep their spirits up throughout the worst of defeats.
These are exactly the traits I want in coworkers.
The opposite - blaming everyone but yourself when your team is losing, raging at people who make honest mistakes, playing selfishly, and so on, are the traits I don't want.
Edit: this is all very problematic of course, but if I noticed that someone my company was thinking about hiring was one of my Dota2 friends, I'd put in a good word based on their in game behavior.
I sense an amazing income opportunity for about to be closed games. Its not like they have to tell you they did it anyway. I'm sure some of those PvP conversations would be sought after by many interested parties.
[to the down voters: I'll take bets on when this will happen]
> "social media" means an electronic service or account, or electronic content, including, but
not limited to, videos, still photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, email, online services or accounts, or Internet Web site profiles or locations.
Uh, if I play a game ("electronic service or account") and send someone else a message in chat ("instant and text message") then I'm pretty damn sure that is covered under that legislation. However, IANAL.
> under that section is pretty sleazy.
I guess "being sleazy" means you don't care about data privacy then huh?
I hope CCP doesn't do anything like that with their employees. Otherwise, they would all be fired. Or all promoted.
In some games(taking Eve Online as an example), being a dick is just part of the game. As long as you are not doing it in any professional capacity, or insulting people (as opposed to their in-game persona).
This is ridiculous. Now that people know they're being monitored they will make say nice shit on their work accounts and make non-work accounts where they can "be themselves." The system is now useless.
Don't forget stealing all of the Dota hero/item concepts from said forum. For example, Warwick and Teemo were fan made concepts from the dota-allstars forums, iirc.
The website dota-allstars was owned by Mescon, and it was acquired by Riot when he was hired by them. At that point, it became their property and they were free to do whatever they wanted, and they chose to display an ad for their main product. They then sold the website to Blizzard.
How is that sleazy?
I hope you aren't offended by this but all this sounds like some incredibly stupid MOBA/e-sports drama.
"Sleazy" isn't necessarily "illegal." All you have pointed out is that they were able and within their rights to do what they did. Sure, nobody disputed that. The discussion is about the morality of the move.
Honestly I don't have an opinion on the creepiness / necessity of riot doing this... but anyone else notice how common the dichotomy between "forced politeness" and "free toxicity" occurs in naturally occurring human interactions?
In MOBA games, we have DotA versus LoL
In internet forums, we have 4chan versus Reddit
In nations, we have USA versus China
And even in traditional families, we have dad versus mom
For some reason, even though freedom and structure are polar opposites, as humans we apparently demand access to both.
Seems like a slippery slope. For example, what if these "troll" employees were grumpy because of some on-the-job stress factor? Then, by dismissing those employees, Riot would be hurting its chances of diagnosing and solving that problem i.e. they would be treating the symptom but not the cause. I dunno. Just food for thought.
Your analogy isn't particularly good, as alcohol is something a person makes a choice to engage in, fully aware of the dangers. You can't know how stressful a job or project will be before you take it. Sometimes a stress inducing change (like management) can happen against your will.
And regardless of whether bad behavior can be excused, sometimes the most net good comes from from removing the stress rather than the person.
I'd further argue that with enough stress bad behavior can be induced in anyone. The bad consequences of the bad behavior should really fall on the person responsible for the stress.
I wasn't saying it was an excuse. I was just saying that it could point the way to identifying a larger problem. And why the hyperbolic analogy with rape, manslaughter, etc.??
The article is a little unclear on whether they're outright firing anyone over this, but if they are, it's only the worst offenders. (And in the context of MOBA games, "worst offenders" probably means a continuous torrent of abuse and obscenities, not just grumpiness.) The rest (and possibly all of them) are being called to resolution meetings and shown their chatlogs--most of them have been mortified and promised to improve.
I respect the principle. For me it hinges on how much of this was communicated to the employee and in what way. If they explicitly told you, and put it into an employee contract at least it would be a consideration. If it was either not explicitly comunicated by a human it would be a bad overreach, especially for a non riot handle. I think the degree of transparency & communication is important, and whether you represent the company (e.g. Riot handled accts).
That said, random employee survellience is extremely fucked up, and I would not condone it.
> "Pretty much everyone we spoke with was appalled at their own behaviour. We actually received some essays from employees vowing to change their ways and become not just more considerate gamers but better people,"
Yeah, right. Because that's how you fix toxic behavior. You can just show them they're being assholes. This definitely has nothing to do with threatening their jobs, or anything like that. /s
League has one of the most toxic communities I have ever been a part of. The problem is if even one person decides to troll in a game then the rest of the players really have no choice.
Also I would like to think if you work for Riot you actively try to improve the community. Otherwise I'd fire you too. There is a reason Blizzard GMs are almost routinely respectful.