[time0ut]

I have never played league of legends, but one of the things I've heard repeatedly is that there is an extremely toxic culture around the game. If true, it isn't surprising to see that the company has a toxic culture as well.

I feel for the author. It is sad that her dream job turned into a nightmare. I just hope some positive change comes from this at Riot and other companies.

[ggregoire]

Not that much anymore. Riot made a good job at detecting slurs and banning their authors. Racist and homophobic slurs have completely disappeared from the game from what I observed in the recent years.

To compare, I've played some games of CS:GO this week and got called "fils de pute" in one of them. In another one, a guy spammed the n word for 5 minutes before being kicked manually by his team. It's also common to heard people arguing about how they will fuck or kill each other.

[warty]

If anything, straight-out racism was replaced with passive aggression or non-textual harassment (i.e. intentionally throwing the game or screwing over your teammate)...

I'm not sure if I'd consider that a better player experience...

[gameswithgo]

>is that there is an extremely toxic culture around the game.

You hear that about most games that are competitive. Teenagers interested in games where you are trying to pwn everyone, are gonna be crude and awful a lot of the time.

[shawn]

Uhh, that logic doesn’t folllow. Heh. I’m a former S2 dev (heroes of newerth, a pretty similar game). The player base is uncontrollable. It’s a bunch of testosterone fueled teens.

Granted, we didn’t have any women in leadership positions either, but I’d like to think that was more because we were relatively small and it was Kalamazoo.

[pjc50]

> uncontrollable

It's not uncontrollable, you'd just rather have their money than ban them.

[shawn]

No, I assure you it’s uncontrollable. There are millions of games played per day on Dota. How do you propose to fairly evaluate each of them?

[TillE]

You seriously can't think of a single idea for how to ban toxic players at scale?

Start with crowd-sourcing via reports, then pass it over to customer service once a critical mass has been achieved. Make sure one person can't easily create a new account after being banned. This really isn't a new problem, tons of companies of all sizes have tackled it with varying success.

[shawn]

Spoken like someone who’s never played the game. Get ready to be banned for no fault of your own, just because your three teammates decided to report you for the lulz. There are people who post on /r/dota2 complaining that they get banned from the game for nothing but picking techies each game. They don’t even say anything. People just report them immediately.

By the way, streamers are one of the most high impact users of the game. They are also one of the most unfairly targeted by report systems. This problem is extensively studied and very tricky.

[olavgg]

I've been playing DOTA since the Warcraft 3 days, and a lot of HoN. I'm seriously grateful for the excellent Linux client.

Today I've moved over to Dota 2 and now I see that I no longer get banned and moved to unranked for picking techies. I play him at ancient/divine levels and getting reported is very common. Techies is my favorite hero as he is more about strategy than quick precise reactions. I think Valve has done some progress in this area, especially as you now can commend players.

[ethbro]

Just because there are false positives or one company has a bad implementation doesn't make it an unsolveable problem.

As parent mentioned, ml sentiment analysis + logging + peer reporting + final human analysis = problem effectively combated

It's the final human analysis that companies are loathe to fund (e.g. Facebook), as costs scale with user count.

But it's not efficiently unsolveable with current tech. Therefore, companies simply aren't prioritizing it. And won't, as long as the impact of toxic users isn't impacting the bottom line.

[TomMarius]

Riot does exactly that.

[zetimana]

Okay something tells me you've never played an online game, like ever?

[dang]

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[adn]

The same way ubisoft moderates rainbow six siege: ban anyone who uses slurs etc very quickly. It's not an unsolvable problem.

[chronid]

The chat is not the only way you can troll your team mates and cause them to rage quit (or scream at you and get banned themselves). I would actually say that the griefing created by people using slurs is actually pretty small.

You can be silent and ruin hundreds of games. Distinguishing that from genuinely bad players is not really easy.

[PakG1]

How do YouTube, Facebook, and others ban illegal, unsavory content? Teams of moderators with good tools. Unfortunately, also a thankless job with the potential to give PTSD.

[enraged_camel]

YouTube, Facebook and others have several orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem than an indie game company.

That’s why Riot’s level of progress over the problem is so remarkable.

[Qub3d]

Throwing an 'indie' tag on a company that makes over 1 billion in revenue annually is ridiculous.

And even indie companies have to pay the piper when the bad culture and tough decisions that are put off result in blowback.

[davvolun]

We can't stop everyone from killing, so let's just let everyone kill?

[TomMarius]

You'd have to have the game invite only and do a interview with each applicant, checking their IDs and having them sign a contract after a psychological test. That's the only way, but of course, that's not possible; technically doable, but no, not possible.

[StreamBright]

if you ban them they stop spending.

[adn]

The current CEO of S2, Marc DeForest, has said incredibly racist things in the chat of HoN.

[shawn]

Yeah... all I can say is, he doesn’t speak for anyone except himself.

[PakG1]

That's unfortunately not how being the top leader works. Although I suppose you could say recent events in the world say otherwise.

[ipioxu15]

The CEO speaks for the company, like it or not.

[shawn]

Really? The CEO does not speak for me, especially when it comes to that.

[lubonay]

Then again, you are not the company. If anybody speaks for the company as a whole, it's the CEO.