> I've never played their game... It shows :( I have a number of issues with this article. First, the "I don't know what methodology they used but I bet it's

> I've never played their game... It shows :( I have a number of issues with this article. First, the "I don't know what methodology they used but I bet it's bad" is not something you can credibly say about Riot. They famously hired a big team of academics and they've been studying the issue for several years now. They have more data to analyze than any academic could dream of, they've had time to iterate (institute a new policy or algorithm, punish players based on it, and see if it reduces bad behavior by some metric) multiple times, and at this point it's likely that they know more about what constitutes bad behavior in a video game than any other organization on Earth. Second, if Riot's analysis of player behavior constitutes an illegal trial on human subjects (which sounds dubious to me), their EULA certainly inoculates them for it. Riot has been very publicly doing this kind of analysis on players and using it to punish them (up to and including deleting the stuff they've purchased in game) and if that was actionable it seems like it would've been tried by now. Maybe the EULA isn't good enough or would fail at trial, but it's a little presumptuous to just casually assume that such a novel claim would be a slam dunk. Third, I'm no lawyer but it seems to me that CA 980 is irrelevant. It pertains to employers demanding access to social media they wouldn't otherwise have access to, not just social media in general. Under 980 it's illegal to demand an employee's Facebook password, but AFAICT perfectly legal to fire them for something they post on Facebook publicly. In this case, not only was the speech in question made publicly, it was made in a way that Riot indisputably has a legal right to access. Finally, the author repeatedly refers to the behavior that got these people fired as "being snarky," when a much more reasonable assumption is that the behavior was significantly worse, e.g. racial slurs and death threats (both of which are very common in LOL chat). The source article tells us that, once Riot had identified the group of problem players, a committee examined the cases individually and decided which ones to reprimand and which ones to fire. Do you really think that "would we lose if this person sued us" wasn't one of the criteria? Is it not reasonable to assume that each of the people who got fired did or said something so bad that Riot felt legally justified in firing them? tl;dr: "I don't know by what methodology these people were measured or by whom, or what they signed, or what they did to get fired, but I'm dead certain they have a case" does not sound persuasive to me.