Red Post Collection: Quick LoL Thoughts: Game Ruining Behavior, Anti-Cheat /Dev, & more

Today's red post collection includes Meddler's quick LoL thoughts on game ruining behavior and what they are committing to work towards, a new /Dev blog on Anti-cheat, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

• Red Post Collection: TFT Galaxies Mid-Set Update, Universe Update - Ambition's Embrace, & more

Table of Contents

• Quick LoL Thoughts: Game Ruining Behavior
• /Dev: Anti-Cheat in LoL (& More)
• Miscellaneous
• Reminders 

Quick LoL Thoughts: Game Ruining Behavior

Here's Riot Meddler with his quick LoL thoughts for May 8th - "This week we talk about game-ruining behavior and our next steps to address it.":

"Hi folks,
This week I figured it would be good to focus on inting/afking, given it’s been a topic of quite a lot of conversation recently. It’s also something we should be talking about more, since it’s an ongoing pain point for many players. 

TL;DR : Deliberate game-ruining behavior is something we need to prioritize addressing more. In the near future we’ll improve how report feedback works and introduce reporting in Champ Select. In the moderate term we’ll test more responsive detection of deliberate inting/pseudo afking. We're still considering steps after that but the plan is to keep working on this longer term. We’ll keep you updated each month on how internal progress and tests being run in specific regions are going. 

The Long Version 

First off, let’s define exactly what we’re talking about: 

• This is about players deliberately ruining the game for others, making it very difficult or impossible for their team to win.
• It’s not about people who are genuinely trying and having a bad game or series of games even. Sometimes someone gets absolutely crushed in lane and dies over and over again. That’s very different to a player deciding the game’s over and then spending their time trolling others instead of trying to win.
• The sort of behavior we’re looking at here involves things like deliberately dying while pretending to try, running around taking CS from others but then deliberately avoiding teamfights/objectives etc. It’s not as easy to detect as straight AFKing or constant inting, it still ruins games though.
• It happens at all levels of play, though tends to be more common with players who’ve been playing for a while and generally understand how to avoid getting banned by our existing AFK and obvious inting detection.
• Streamers often get targeted for this sort of trolling due to their higher profile. It’s not an issue unique to streamers, though.

Ok, so here's where are our heads are at:

• First off, this is an area we need to prioritize work in more than we have recently. We haven’t done enough here relative to current player pain these behaviors are causing. We’re working right now to figure out which people we can pull off other projects to work on this instead.
• Second, solutions here need to be really targeted at these specific issues. Other behavior-influencing work is valuable too, whether that’s things like Honor, other social/recognition systems, features with social impact like Clash, etc. They’re not a replacement for taking action on this sort of game-ruining behavior that needs to be addressed regardless.

That’s pretty general, so what actual changes are we planning?

Right Now - Improving Report Feedback 

We’ve just started trialing improvements to how our report and notification systems work. For now, those are live on NA only, if this test goes well we’ll roll them out worldwide in a couple of weeks. Those should result in a significant increase in the number of punishments being surfaced. 

One component of that is changes to how punishment notifications are generated. Previously you’d only be notified that a user you'd reported had been punished if that punishment was triggered immediately after the game you were reporting them for and the punishment was for the specific category you’d reported them in. The actual punishment system, however, looks at a player’s games over time and aggregates reports from different categories together. As a result, notifications were substantially lower than actual punishments. The revised notification system, by contrast, will notify you if a user was punished regardless of category of report and will do so if the player gets punished after any of their next dozen or so games. 

Short Term - Champ Select Reporting and Muting 

Disruptive behavior in Champ Select is a problem that players have very few ways to deal with. Starting around late Q2 we're going to give you the ability to report disruptive players in Champ Select. First, these reports will be used to establish a data foundation for champ select behavior. Then, once we've got enough data to identify different types of behavior accurately, we'll deploy a punishment system. 

Moderate Term - Rapid Detection and False Positive Trade Off 

After the above changes, we want to go back and reexamine our previous stance on rapid, automated detection of players who are trying to lose a game. We’ve been very cautious about it historically due to the risk of falsely identifying, and therefore punishing, a player who isn’t actually trolling. Avoiding unjust temp bans is important to offer a good player experience. Having said that, so is controlling deliberate trolling, self-sabotage, etc. In retrospect we may have prioritized avoiding one type of player pain too much at the expense of another type, so want to look at our options here again. 

One thing that would be helpful as part of that is understanding where your heads are at as LoL players. What’s an acceptable rate of incorrect bans if it results in a noticeable drop in deliberate inting/afking? Is it worth accidentally giving a two-week ban to one player who was genuinely trying if that means 19 trolls also get banned? What if the ban is undeserved 1/100 times? 1/1000? Are incorrect bans never acceptable at all? 

Longer term - To be determined

Beyond that, we’re still assessing which approaches to investigate next. We plan on doing more work in this space than just what’s listed above once we’ve got some of those projects shipped. We’ll update you folks on how things are going within a month."

Over on Reddit, Meddler responded to questions:

• On streamers:
• "Streamers wise - definitely not trying to move conversation away from both how streamers get affected by trolling and trolling can be influenced by streamers. Did want to be clear though that we're interested in the wider impact, in addition to how high profile players get affected."
• On penalization that could be too strong:
• "Yep, that's the sort of thing that makes this tricky. It means we can't simply penalize off KDA in a single game for example, just doesn't give enough context. Incorporating a lot more sources of information (multiple games, when in the games deaths occurred, odd behavior like avoiding all teamfights/objectives, etc) should give better accuracy. Still leaves the question of what rate of incorrect penalties is appropriate though hence the interest in hearing people's thoughts on that. It's probably one of those things that also varies meaningfully by MMR, region and other contexts too."
• On improved report feedback:
• "We think it'll be impactful yeah, though not enough by itself. The way I'm currently thinking about this issue is there are three elements that all need to be working well:
1. Detection of players ruining games
2. Appropriate penalties (ideally applied quickly) for those actions
3. Visibility into that process for others so it's understood action is being taken and that that sort of behavior has consequences

The improved notifications should help a lot with #3 there. As per the original post our next focus is on better detection."

•  On the commitment for monthly updates from the team:
• "Can understand the skepticism, given this has been a long running issue. The commitment to talking monthly is meant to help both give you folks ongoing visibility into what we're doing and give you an avenue to hold us accountable if progress isn't happening."
• On when champ select reporting may go live:
• "As per the post late Q2's our best estimate at present, so sometime in June if I had to try and guess a more specific period."
• On chat restriction as a punishment:
• "Chat restrictions aren't something we're looking at as a response to inting/afking. Removing chat when the problem is chat behavior makes sense. When the issue is in game actions though other approaches are needed."
• On toeing the line to not get punished:
• "We do penalize for a range of behaviors, not just use of language other players find offensive in chat. Can understand the skepticism on that. Hopefully the changes to report notifications we're just rolling out at present will help give better visibility and understanding of what's actually being dealt with how."
• On accelerating player behavior work while its a hot topic:
• "Some of this work has been underway for a while, as per Brightmoon's video and an Ask Riot response a couple of months ago. Plus, much as I wish we could, doing things like improving how notifications work is something that takes a lot longer than a few days. Having said that the recent discussion has also served as a catalyst for us to prioritize work we'd planned to do someday sooner. Better detection was on our roadmap for later in the year, after talking a lot about the issue and reading all the discussion we realized it was something we needed to accelerate a lot, moving other work out of the way where needed to get started on it sooner."
• On making sure there is some sort of appeals process:
• "Yeah, we'd certainly want to keep some form of appeals process. Wouldn't want to rely really heavily on it though, results in both a shitty experience for incorrectly banned players even if things do get reversed and player support being slower to respond on other things if they're working through a huge pile of incorrect penalties. Some rate of incorrect penalties seems reasonable, don't want to rely on mitigation like player support intervention too much though."'
• On different metrics taken into account for punishment:
• "Yep, different metrics are needed for things like account level, MMR, maybe region."
• On ranked bans as a punishment:
• "Yes, we've got people from psychology backgrounds on the Player Dynamics team.
  We've discussed bans from Ranked queues as a tactic. From a Ranked player perspective it feels good, comes at the expense of players of Normal games though whose game quality is likely to drop as penalized players get moved there. We'd like to take different approaches to penalties as a result."

Riot Cactopus also commented on the comms side of things:

"In our minds, there are exactly two things we HAVE to do to win back trust on this issue: 

1) Ship product changes and features that make a positive difference and meaningfully address game-ruining behavior (or that at least result in forward momentum on the issue) 

2) Communicate regularly about those product changes and features 

For the reasons above, we're committing to monthly updates on "game-ruining behavior" for the foreseeable future."

He continued:

"Previous client comms weren't handled well, and as Comms Lead that's my fault and it's my responsibility to correct it. 

For that reason, Client Cleanup posts are also on a predictable schedule now: every two months instead of monthly (because we want each update to be meaty.) 

First one (from March): https://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/introducing-the-client-cleanup-campaign/ 

Second one (from a week ago): https://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/client-cleanup-progress-setbacks-discoveries/"

/Dev: Anti-Cheat in LoL (& More)

Here's mirageofpenguins and Riot K3O with a /Dev blog on Anti-cheat - "9 Ways Anti-Cheat Can Make You Invincible":

"Hello again. If you’re reading this, it is my hippocratic responsibility to inform you that you may’ve actually suffered through one of these before, and if you’re still here now, you have only repressed memories of the trauma. So, I’m what’s left of mirageofpenguins, a data-based engineer on the Anti-Cheat team, and I’ve been torn screaming from the void and disgustingly polymerized with this keyboard to: 

• Deliver the sesquiennial Anti-Cheat newsletter.
• Drop some hot scripting statistics, including artistic representations of what Cartesian coordinates might look like if rendered on a Euclidean plane.
• Share some of our initial approaches to Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, and VALORANT.
• Remind you that, if you cheat, you will be formally excommunicated by a shrieking manifestation of my incurable rage.

League of Legends 

As Riot whimsically adds games to its catalogue, we find ourselves in the position of having to mount a defense against an ever-increasing number of bad guys. Up until now, we had just been tenaciously flinging resources at any adversary we could sink our teeth into, but as machiavellian as that strategy sounds, it unfortunately doesn’t scale through the multi-game universe. 

Anti-cheat engineers have finite biomass, and as Dr. Einstein probably predicted, the human elements required to fabricate an entire anti-cheat platform had to be painfully extracted from the lifestream. To buy the time required to make tomorrow’s solution, we had to moderate the speed at which we were technologically advancing our own opposition. Every hammer we swing is a signal to cheaters, and every update we make is eventually circumvented. We needed to reshape the way we actioned abuse to extend the functional longevity of each iterative response. 

So how did we pump the brakes on our scripting arms race? Strap in, we’re going for a ride. 

Scripting 

Just to spare you the ethical catastrophe of pointing your browser to a cheat forum, scripting refers to having an external program monitor game state for the purpose of executing inputs on the cheater’s behalf. It’s kinda like if your keyboard had a magstripe reader, and you could pay it to press buttons for you. Scripting can be very performant when utilized for mechanically intense combos or near-instantaneous reactions, but it does dramatically reduce the lifespan of your LoL account. We ban because we care, and we care because we believe the only things you should need to be competitive in a video game are your brain and an ethernet cable. 

“NO ONE BUYS TICKETS TO SEE A PIANO THAT PLAYS ITSELF, YOUR IMPERFECTION IS PART OF THE CRAFT.”

Collectively, the scripting landscape isn’t quite what it used to be. Larger providers explicitly make no effort to circumvent our detection methodology, creating a private market for smaller providers utilizing ridiculous price points and promises of undetected cheats. We’ve seen subscriptions as high as $300 USD, some even with the requirement that an image of your driver’s license be included for “verification purposes.” That last thing was particularly amusing, because it’s not like I don’t have access to an entire team of graphic designers with 200 years collective experience in Adobe Photoshop. 

Anyways, I won’t sugarcoat it for the recruits: This isn’t a war we’ll ever win completely. The scripting community can’t dodge a wrench, a ban, or a Blitz hook, but while we’ve driven them underground, we’re now pla

from
http://www.surrenderat20.net/2020/05/red-post-collection-quick-lol-thoughts.html