Since the PBE launched, it has proven an extremely valuable resource that has raised the quality of our content patches; however, from a player behavior perspective, we have not done our part to make the PBE an enjoyable test environment.
That’s all changing.
In the past year, the player behavior team has learned a lot from systems like the Tribunal, LeaverBuster and the Honor Initiative, and we are going to incorporate some of those lessons into the PBE. However, we are going to take a slightly different approach; for example, we are not going to just create a “PBE Tribunal” and call it a day.
To us, the PBE is a premium server where we expect more from our players, and the standards of player behavior can be higher than the live platforms. The PBE effort should be a collaboration between the developers and our community, and should be a place where players can play games with developers on any given day and directly contribute feedback that can shape the game.
We are going to try a lot of creative ideas to improve player behavior on PBE; however, we need your help. We have been recording and analyzing Report and Honor data on the PBE, and need you to continue to report toxic players and honor positive players to help inform our new player behavior initiatives on the PBE.
As an example, we have implemented a system on PBE that will automatically detect toxic behaviors and ban the players the same day—this system will go live today and will immediately punish 167 players with a 7 day ban. Depending on the consistency and severity of the toxic behaviors, this system will hand out bans that range in severity from a 7 day ban to a permanent ban from the PBE environment. This system will start off conservative and may have hiccups at first, but we hope to ramp up the aggressiveness of this system while maintaining a goal of 99% accuracy with a false positive rate of less than 1%.
The player behavior team has also been brainstorming punishments in addition to or instead of bans. We have always known that bans are not an ideal punishment solution when players can simply create new accounts, and we would like to experiment with some potential alternatives on the PBE. We believe the PBE community will see immediate benefits from these experiments even though they are not completely developed or polished yet. I am excited to talk more about the first experiment, and will update you when we are closer to rolling it out on PBE.
Longer-term, we are brainstorming ways to make players more accountable for their behaviors on PBE. Whether that is linking live accounts to PBE accounts or an entirely different solution is undecided, but these changes to the PBE will also allow us to completely open up registration to the PBE in the future.
Our take-away message today is quite simple: the PBE has zero tolerance for toxicity, and change is coming.
How do we know the system won't instaban the wrong players? And could we see the same system go live in the future? Or is it just for the smaller PBE server?
The current system on PBE will start off conservative, then ramp up in aggressiveness over time. We are going to manually review the data from the initial bans until we are confident that the system has an extremely high accuracy in the 99% range--once we reach that mark, we will loosen up the manual review over every ban.
This is very exciting! I just played a game today that a guy wasn't playing well started flaming and his toxic behavior started infecting his own team. He left the game with the infamous "It's PBE, it doesn't matter report me I don't give a @&%$!" So glad people wont get away with that anymore.
Just remember that it's critical that you keep providing us feedback on the players you play with. Report the toxic players and honor the positive ones--it'll take us a bit of time to weed out the initial batches of toxic players.
Hey I would just like to ask if you Reds are planning on forcing links to live accounts and you decide that the live accounts must be level 30, would you make it apply only for new PBE accounts or all PBE accounts? I ask because I enjoy improving League but grinding my level up in the regular League is something I neither enjoy or have the time for (I'm somewhere around level 20, I haven't logged into regular League in a long time). Indeed I COULD likely level myself up on my live account by the time any changes to the system were implemented, so I'd like to be prepared for how you would implement the system IF it were implemented. Thanks very much for cleaning house on the PBE, it needed it.
Nothing is set in stone yet. We're currently discussing the feasibility and work involved with linking PBE accounts to live accounts and whether it's a solution worth pursuing, or if there's a more elegant solution that is entirely different.
In saying this, I don't think enforcing a Level 30 restriction on a live account ensures a great tester on the PBE--I'm more interested in metrics such as how positive players are and how these players impact the experiences of those around them. In many cases we'll need testers of all skill levels and all level ranges to properly test features, so tying sign-ups to just Level 30 wouldn't make much sense.
I'm a bit concerned with the leaver buster tho. Not only mine, but a lot of PBE clients out there have a somehow consistent crash/bugsplat cases. Some patches ago (Draven release I think) I got crashs in about 50/50 games on the loading screen, and the game didnt reconnected at all until it ends or everyone leaves.
Please, just take it into consideration with the leaver buster.
We'll take a look at LeaverBuster on the PBE. We may have to make some adjustments given the nature of bugsplats, and ensure that it only hits consistent leavers.
Hm. I might go back to testing PBE stuff with this little update!
... Though what'd really do it for me is more of the Focused Testing Times like when Spectator Mode was in beta. Personally, I'm waaaay better at testing and bug-checking and being helpful when there's a specific goal or feature that's in the forefront of everyone's minds.
Focused testing times are very much a possibility--in fact, you might find Rioters during these times...
@Lyte, will we see this on the live version if it proves effective in PBE? LoL can be a pretty toxic environment, and I know a few paying friends who deleted their accounts because of it.
Yes, all effective experiments will be promoted onto live environments.
I browsed the Red responses and didn't see anything regarding this, so here is my question. If I'm playing in a five-man premade and all of us are playfully raging at each other will this new system detect excessive cursing and ban for that, or will it still be based off of number of reports?
Since you would be in a premade group of 5, a lot of systems will be quite lenient regarding within-team behaviors.
If automatically detecting misbehavior works well, do you expect to remove the tribunal in the future?
I don't think so. Tackling player behavior properly requires many different systems and solutions. The Tribunal is great at reforming or removing the worst behaving players in the game; however, its weaknesses are that it cannot provide immediate feedback on a player's behavior, and it cannot provide any feedback to players who are occasionally toxic, but not toxic enough to enter the Tribunal.
We don't believe there's a silver bullet to player behavior, which is why we have spent a lot of time behind the scenes mapping out all the problem spaces, and brainstorming how we intend to challenge and solve each one. Some systems or features may solve multiple problems, but some may be designed to specifically solve just 1 problem.
"As an example, we have implemented a system on PBE that will automatically detect toxic behaviors and ban the players the same day."-Lyte
Does this mean that people will be able to report you for no reason, and you could get banned from it, because there is a lot of trolls that would do this on the PBE :\
For a long time now, we have been working on ways to assess the validity of every single report. If players 'tend to troll report' for no reason, their reports actually become meaningless and all of our systems ignore the report.
Players that report legitimately and help remove toxic players from the game will find that their report values increase, meaning our systems will respect reports from these players more than the typical report.
State of Player Behavior on the PBE - Present and Future
Since the PBE launched, it has proven an extremely valuable resource that has raised the quality of our content patches; however, from a player behavior perspective, we have not done our part to make the PBE an enjoyable test environment.
That’s all changing.
In the past year, the player behavior team has learned a lot from systems like the Tribunal, LeaverBuster and the Honor Initiative, and we are going to incorporate some of those lessons into the PBE. However, we are going to take a slightly different approach; for example, we are not going to just create a “PBE Tribunal” and call it a day.
To us, the PBE is a premium server where we expect more from our players, and the standards of player behavior can be higher than the live platforms. The PBE effort should be a collaboration between the developers and our community, and should be a place where players can play games with developers on any given day and directly contribute feedback that can shape the game.
We are going to try a lot of creative ideas to improve player behavior on PBE; however, we need your help. We have been recording and analyzing Report and Honor data on the PBE, and need you to continue to report toxic players and honor positive players to help inform our new player behavior initiatives on the PBE.
As an example, we have implemented a system on PBE that will automatically detect toxic behaviors and ban the players the same day—this system will go live today and will immediately punish 167 players with a 7 day ban. Depending on the consistency and severity of the toxic behaviors, this system will hand out bans that range in severity from a 7 day ban to a permanent ban from the PBE environment. This system will start off conservative and may have hiccups at first, but we hope to ramp up the aggressiveness of this system while maintaining a goal of 99% accuracy with a false positive rate of less than 1%.
The player behavior team has also been brainstorming punishments in addition to or instead of bans. We have always known that bans are not an ideal punishment solution when players can simply create new accounts, and we would like to experiment with some potential alternatives on the PBE. We believe the PBE community will see immediate benefits from these experiments even though they are not completely developed or polished yet. I am excited to talk more about the first experiment, and will update you when we are closer to rolling it out on PBE.
Longer-term, we are brainstorming ways to make players more accountable for their behaviors on PBE. Whether that is linking live accounts to PBE accounts or an entirely different solution is undecided, but these changes to the PBE will also allow us to completely open up registration to the PBE in the future.
Our take-away message today is quite simple: the PBE has zero tolerance for toxicity, and change is coming.
Help us make the PBE a premium test environment!
In saying this, I don't think enforcing a Level 30 restriction on a live account ensures a great tester on the PBE--I'm more interested in metrics such as how positive players are and how these players impact the experiences of those around them. In many cases we'll need testers of all skill levels and all level ranges to properly test features, so tying sign-ups to just Level 30 wouldn't make much sense.
Please, just take it into consideration with the leaver buster.
... Though what'd really do it for me is more of the Focused Testing Times like when Spectator Mode was in beta. Personally, I'm waaaay better at testing and bug-checking and being helpful when there's a specific goal or feature that's in the forefront of everyone's minds.
We don't believe there's a silver bullet to player behavior, which is why we have spent a lot of time behind the scenes mapping out all the problem spaces, and brainstorming how we intend to challenge and solve each one. Some systems or features may solve multiple problems, but some may be designed to specifically solve just 1 problem.
Does this mean that people will be able to report you for no reason, and you could get banned from it, because there is a lot of trolls that would do this on the PBE :\
Players that report legitimately and help remove toxic players from the game will find that their report values increase, meaning our systems will respect reports from these players more than the typical report.