Many online games boast systems for reporting players toxic to the game’s community. Whether this really improves anything, I’m not sure. Other games have self-regulating systems like privately hosted servers where local admins can give the worst of the rabble the boot. But I have never seen a company implement a system specifically designed to give positive feedback to players who make the community better by their decency, helpfulness, and civility. Until now, that is.
Personally, I want to applaud Riot Games, creators of League of Legends, for their “Honor Initiative” which is designed to do just that. If you’re familiar with League go ahead and skip to the next chapter. Otherwise, here’s a quick rundown of how the game works. League of Legends is a free-to-play, team-based “MOBA”–which stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, which is not very informative, I know. In the classic mode, two teams of five players each select one unique champion out of over a hundred and fight alongside waves of simple, AI-controlled “minions.” (Apart from a weekly rotation of free champions, it takes either a time or monetary investment to unlock any champions permanently.) There’s a lot to learn for new players, and the skill curve gets pretty steep as you level up your account and start fighting with more experienced players.
In any case, your team absolutely must work together in order to win, and therein lies League‘s greatest strength and greatest weakness: other people on the internet. A group not generally known for their warmth, civility, and ability to play nice with others. (Excepting, of course, readers of this fine publication.)
Riot Games’ Honor Initiative experiment is still in its infant stages at this point, but they recently released some very interesting figures indicating a significant improvement in the community overall in just one week. The newly implement Honor system allows you to Honor your teammates after a match for being either Friendly, Helpful, or for showing strong Teamwork. Alternatively, if your opponent is “humble in victory, and graceful in defeat,” you can Honor them for being an Honorable Opponent. Despite the fact that, at present, these honor points have no real benefit other than showing that you’re not a huge jerk, and might be a totally nice dude or dudette, the community has seen a decline in reports of negative behavior.
To quote figures posted today by Riot Games’ Lead Designer of Social Systems, known on the forums as Lyte, they have seen a decline in negative reports about players across the board:
- Negative Attitude reports: -29% in normals and -11% in ranked
- Offensive Language reports: -35% in normals and -20% in ranked
- Verbal Abuse reports: -41% in normals and -17% in ranked
Okay, so those stats represent only a week of data, and we could certainly see a regression toward the mean as stats are calculated over a longer term. But in any case these numbers are very promising.
They’ve also designed systems to catch anyone unscrupulous enough to try gaming a system with no tangible rewards–for whatever reason, a small percentage of people were doing this. More imaginary internet points, please! The minutia isn’t all that interesting, suffice it to say: Honors from strangers you’ve never played with before are valued more highly than ones from your regular gaming buddies; the system tracks and compares your Honors with your Negative Reports, since the two will most often be incompatible; and the system also tracks Honors interactions between people. In one case, “a player received 100% of his Honor from a premade friend. Both were … also toxic players and both were punished.” (Full details here.)
I want to applaud Riot Games for this concept, and this whole experiment. It’s one of those things that, once you hear about it, makes you smack your head because it seems so obvious in retrospect. We spend so much time trying to weed out the bad apples of our online communities with deterrents and punishments, but no one ever stopped to think that maybe the best way to better the community is to recognize the best participants among it. So bravo, Riot Games! And I can only hope, for all gamers’ sakes, that the Honor Initiative continues to be a huge success and subsequently leads to similar systems of reward across the gaming spectrum. As all online gamers know far too well, the bar is pretty freaking low at the moment. Here’s hoping we’ve collectively taken a step in the right direction.
[Connor Cleary is an author, video game columnist and critic, and a freelance web-slash-graphic designer. His writing has appeared on GameShark.com, and the Gamasutra family. His freelance design business is Four Stair Multimedia and Design. You can follow Connor @The_Blue_Key, or at fb/TheBlueKey, or check out his writing archive on Tumblr, The Blue Key.]