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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'

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.

shawn 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > uncontrollable It's not uncontrollable, you'd just rather have their money than ban them.
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    if you ban them they stop spending.
  - shawn 8y ago
    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?
    - adn 8y ago
      The same way ubisoft moderates rainbow six siege: ban anyone who uses slurs etc very quickly. It's not an unsolvable problem.
      - chronid 8y ago
        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.
    - TillE 8y ago
      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.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        Riot does exactly that.
      - shawn 8y ago
        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.
        ethbro 8y ago
        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.
        shawn 8y ago
        Kay. What are the odds that some HN commenters are going to solve the same problem that has been an active priority for years of the people in the field? I can’t speak for Valve or Riot, but at S2 it was a concerning issue. There’s just no good way to do it when the people involved are actively malicious. If you think there is, get ready to have your community collapse around you as everyone complains about unfair bans. I don’t think you really appreciate the scale of the problem. Final human analysis is not possible when there are literally millions of games per week. It’s also not something that ML can identify cleanly — the moment it does, the culture will adapt to bypass the evaluator. It always does.
    - PakG1 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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 8y ago
        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.
        chronid 8y ago
        Youtube, Facebook and company have a ridiculous amount of false positives, for the money (and the people, they have quite a lot of human moderators) they throw at the problem. Also, they enjoy complete market dominance, so even if you want to move out of youtube... where are you going to go? With the same rate of false positives there will be enough community rage (I guarantee someone is going to find a way to have your system ban the top 10 streamers of your game after 2 days you put it in place) your players (both good and bad) will go somewhere else. :)
        thomasz 8y ago
        The problem youtube, facebook and similar companies face is whole orders of magnitude more complicated than policing a game chat. It is, for example, highly unlikely that you will be censuring honest content when you encounter the words 'gas' and 'jews'.
    - davvolun 8y ago
      We can't stop everyone from killing, so let's just let everyone kill?
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    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.
- adn 8y ago
  The current CEO of S2, Marc DeForest, has said incredibly racist things in the chat of HoN.
  - shawn 8y ago
    Yeah... all I can say is, he doesn’t speak for anyone except himself.
    - throwaway-hn123 8y ago
      > we can't control the player base > the CEO is racist, but he only speaks for himself You pitiful coward.
    - ipioxu15 8y ago
      The CEO speaks for the company, like it or not.
      - shawn 8y ago
        Really? The CEO does not speak for me, especially when it comes to that.
        lubonay 8y ago
        Then again, you are not the company. If anybody speaks for the company as a whole, it's the CEO.
        shawn 8y ago
        Sure, but bucketing a company as racist just because someone said the n word once in 2009 isn’t productive. It’s like calling pewdiepie racist.
        Liquix 8y ago
        "Bucketing a company as racist" is not the point. The point is that the CEO is the head of, represents, and consequentially speaks for the company. Their personal opinions are reflected in the company's internal and external image. Don't we all have better things to do than argue moot points in nested comment threads? ;)
ggregoire 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
>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 8y ago

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 8y ago
> uncontrollable It's not uncontrollable, you'd just rather have their money than ban them.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  if you ban them they stop spending.
- shawn 8y ago
  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?
  - adn 8y ago
    The same way ubisoft moderates rainbow six siege: ban anyone who uses slurs etc very quickly. It's not an unsolvable problem.
    - chronid 8y ago
      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.
  - TillE 8y ago
    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.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Riot does exactly that.
    - shawn 8y ago
      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.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        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.
        shawn 8y ago
        Kay. What are the odds that some HN commenters are going to solve the same problem that has been an active priority for years of the people in the field? I can’t speak for Valve or Riot, but at S2 it was a concerning issue. There’s just no good way to do it when the people involved are actively malicious. If you think there is, get ready to have your community collapse around you as everyone complains about unfair bans. I don’t think you really appreciate the scale of the problem. Final human analysis is not possible when there are literally millions of games per week. It’s also not something that ML can identify cleanly — the moment it does, the culture will adapt to bypass the evaluator. It always does.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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.
        chronid 8y ago
        Youtube, Facebook and company have a ridiculous amount of false positives, for the money (and the people, they have quite a lot of human moderators) they throw at the problem. Also, they enjoy complete market dominance, so even if you want to move out of youtube... where are you going to go? With the same rate of false positives there will be enough community rage (I guarantee someone is going to find a way to have your system ban the top 10 streamers of your game after 2 days you put it in place) your players (both good and bad) will go somewhere else. :)
        thomasz 8y ago
        The problem youtube, facebook and similar companies face is whole orders of magnitude more complicated than policing a game chat. It is, for example, highly unlikely that you will be censuring honest content when you encounter the words 'gas' and 'jews'.
  - davvolun 8y ago
    We can't stop everyone from killing, so let's just let everyone kill?
- TomMarius 8y ago
  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.
adn 8y ago
The current CEO of S2, Marc DeForest, has said incredibly racist things in the chat of HoN.
- shawn 8y ago
  Yeah... all I can say is, he doesn’t speak for anyone except himself.
  - throwaway-hn123 8y ago
    > we can't control the player base > the CEO is racist, but he only speaks for himself You pitiful coward.
  - ipioxu15 8y ago
    The CEO speaks for the company, like it or not.
    - shawn 8y ago
      Really? The CEO does not speak for me, especially when it comes to that.
      - lubonay 8y ago
        Then again, you are not the company. If anybody speaks for the company as a whole, it's the CEO.
        shawn 8y ago
        Sure, but bucketing a company as racist just because someone said the n word once in 2009 isn’t productive. It’s like calling pewdiepie racist.
        Liquix 8y ago
        "Bucketing a company as racist" is not the point. The point is that the CEO is the head of, represents, and consequentially speaks for the company. Their personal opinions are reflected in the company's internal and external image. Don't we all have better things to do than argue moot points in nested comment threads? ;)

ggregoire 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago

>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.