There is no other game developer as determined as Riot Games to stamp out toxic behaviour in gaming. The League of Legends maker has been constantly tweaking its response formula to deal with problem players, although this latest move has left some players extremely puzzled.
Riot’s latest move has been against players with inappropriate gamer tags, or Summoner Names as it likes to call them. LoL players are able to report others for inappropriate names, and what used to happen is that Riot would assign them a temporary name until their changed it to something less offensive.
This has changed to something a little more complex. Problem players will who are reported will now be required to take a survey, play 50 games, and then take another survey. If they meet Riot’s requirements, they will be allowed to change their names to something acceptable. The problem with the process is that 50 games can take a very long time to achieve. LoL matches can drag on for an hour with two evenly matched teams, and this could easily translate into 50 hours of game time before the second survey appears.
Despite this lengthy process, some players have also noticed another issue with Riot’s survey. The questions are taken directly from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) created by Robert Raskin and Howard Terry, a method for measuring narcissism. Another part of the survey also appears to be a modified version of “The Aggression Scale: A Self-Report Measure of Aggressive Behavior for Young Adolescents.”
Riot is collecting more than just user data from these surveys, although it has declined to comment on what is actually going on. Some observers are worried about the ethics of conducting the survey without first receiving the consent of the participant, or even informing them of how the information will be stored and used. Of course, Riot is not a research company and probably isn’t aware of these matters.
It could be that Riot is seeking to better understand the psyche of toxic players in an attempt to better deal with them. Which isn’t a bad thing considering the reputation of online communities. However, it could have at least explained what it is doing here instead of being so secretive.
[Source: Motherboard]
