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League of Legends' Formula for Best Behavior
Riot's Jeffrey Lin talks about setting the stage for sportsmanship in League of Legends.
Heimerdinger Noob
© Riot Games
"Players are inherently good."
That's the guiding assumption behind Riot's approach to its players. The League of Legends community has a reputation for being rude and unforgiving, but Riot does not get cynical about their playerbase. And Riot's player behavior specialist Dr. Jeffrey Lin has the data to back it up.
In a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, Lin explained what Riot have done in the past year to improve players' experiences in League of Legends and create a culture of positivity and good sportsmanship. But what was surprising is information about who actually causes the problems in the League of Legends community and why.
By The Numbers
About 78% of all LoL players have a handful of negative reports of players, and they've also racked up a lot of Honor (Riot's system for letting players give kudos to people who have been good sports). There is a small core of toxic players in the League of Legends community, but that number also means the other 78% are all pretty good to play with, on average. So why doesn't it feel that way in practice?
The answer is context. "We all have our bad days," Lin said. "It might be traffic, it might be work. It might be school. When you enter the game, and you're frustrated already, and you give a poor performance, you might lash out."
Even if that only happens once in a great while, the problem for Riot and its players is that there are 10 people in every match on Summoner's Rift. Suddenly that one-in-a-hundred "off-day" that most players experience at times turns into widespread problem.
"We asked ourselves this question: if we remove all players who are persistently negative, do we solve the player behavior problem?" Lin said. "And the answer then, and the answer now, is still no. The real question we should be asking is, how do we prevent players from flipping tables because of context?"
Riot's work has focused on inflection points in the process of matchmaking and playing in League of Legends. They've tried to identify the places where the game starts to go off the rails. Unsurprisingly, one of the big areas of improvement is in champion select.
Lin explained that whenever there are negative pre-game communication between players, the number of reports following the match goes up by 15%. In a way, the conventional champion select process "primes the pump" for a negative experience.
Team Builder to the Rescue
That's why Lin and Riot worked to develop the Team Builder, and one of the things they realized was that the countdown timer into the match was helping cause the tension before game. So they did a study and realized that only 3% of players actually said, "Getting into a game quickly" was the most important aspect of matchmaking. 50% said they wanted to be matched with sportsmanlike teammates.
Riot's new team builder now lets players choose champions in advance, before they see anyone else in the lobby.
"Now, when they get to the lobby, they can clearly see everybody's intention. What they're trying to do, what they intend to do, in this type of match. So with no time pressure, players organically focus on the next related conversation: team strategy," Lin said.
The other thing that Riot wanted to take advantage of is the way people tend to follow through on verbal commitments. When someone says, "I will do X" out loud to you, there is a stronger chance that they actually will. What Riot wanted to do was find a way to simulate that effect.
So they went back to an old feature of multiplayer gaming: the ready check. Now, it shows up when the entire team is filled, giving players a final chance to look over what the rest of their team have chosen.
"Each of these changes had a huge impact on the player experience in League of Legends," Lin said.
Teams that used Team Builder saw a 4% bump in positive communication, regardless of whether they won or lost. Nice, but not earth shaking. But the really good news was that there was a 23% drop in negative communication on winning teams, and a 36% drop for losing teams. This has held true across languages and cultures, in Riot's experience.
Lin said, "It's as if now in game, if something frustrating happened, players were more committed. They were basically focused on trying to make this work. Instead of abandoning the match, raging at their teammates, or just giving up on their strategy. They were now just acting more like a team.
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