New Patent Filed By Riot Games Hints At Bringing In A System Similar To The Old Tribunal

Cover and thumbnail courtesy Riot Games 

• A New Patent By Riot Games hints at them bringing back a system similar to Tribunal

A patent filed by Riot Games hints at the developers bringing in a system similar to that of the old League of Legends Tribunal as reported by segmentnext.com. This may be a result of the devs taking on League’s toxicity problem. In a recently published patent, Riot Games describes a method to manage user-behaviour through player-based arbitration. This basically describes what the Tribunal was.

The Tribunal was a system developed by Riot where the judges were players themselves. It was a separate platform where players could pass judgement on their peers and vote to punish them for their toxic behaviour. Players would go to the Tribunal and read over the reports to pass judgment. They were given access to chat logs of the game as well as scores, but the information was presented anonymously. 

To further incentivize players, rewards were given out for accurate judgments. Players judging would say whether the one in question was worthy of punishment but final control of what the punishment was rested with Riot. The system tried to ensure that players who went through the reports and spammed guilty were not likely to receive any rewards. However, it didn't always work out so the system was eventually scrapped altogether. 

League of Legends’ communications lead Ben “Draggles” Forbes stated a few years ago that the Tribunal will not be coming back any time soon. He noted that the system was “slow and inefficient” and “sometimes wildly inaccurate” since the promise of a reward had led to biased judgements. A high number of inaccurate punishments were doled out, ending with the playerbase turning against the Tribunal. Now, however, it is possible that the developers intend to bring the reward system back but in a different way. 

Riot Games is also considering adding an in-game positivity feature, meaning players could report their peers being helpful or encouraging. Such reported players could be voted to be rewarded in the newly suggested Tribunal. While it is still unclear if and how the new system would work, however, as Riot deals with the toxic behaviour, such a system could contribute to keeping the game toxicity free.

Update: Details of the Tribunal-like patent were obtained from a story broken by Saqib Mansoor of segmentnext.com. We regret the earlier lapse in citation.