Riot Games hopes tribunal system will clean up League of Legends community

Riot Games have come up with a new way to single out and punish badly behaved players in League of Legends. They are planning to implement a tribunal system in which high level players can pass judgement on player complaint cases. In return they gain 'influence points' that can be used to buy new gear and characters in the game.

As Kotaku reports, the new system will give level 30 players the option to pick from a random selection of cases. After examining the evidence, the judge can vote to acquit the case or punish the offender. Cases are submitted by players along with evidence like chatlogs. Crimes can range from use of offensive language to disrupting the game by going afk or feeding resources to the opposing team.

The exact nature of the punishments haven't been decided yet, but Riot Games plan to implement a tier system that will award more lenient penalties to first time offenders. Offences that warrant the highest level of punishment will be passed up to Riot Games staff, who will judge themselves if the perpetrator is guilty. Each case page will stay up for a minimum of 60 seconds and a code will ahve to be entered before a player judge can pass their verdict. Riot Games hope that this will stop Judges from creating bots to mine the influence points.

Riot Games decided to implement the system when they realised that they were receiving tens of thousands of complaints from players about other players every day. As a small indie team running a hugely popular free-to-play multiplayer strategy game they knew they didn't have the staff to clean up the community themselves, so have come up with the tribunal system as a way of letting their community police itself. It's an interesting solution to the widespread problem of people being jerks on the internet, but can it actually work?