LoL: Riot bans an employee after using the game’s worst hero 20 times in a row.
League of Legends system engineers put a lot of effort into creating technology that can detect bad player behavior. Whether it’s their comments in chats or their poor performance in the game, algorithms are responsible for punishing the worst-behaved community members.. It’s something Riot Games is counting on heavily, striking historic deals with rival companies to make it happen. However, even though the way the system works is now accepted, sometimes the “machines” make mistakes and end up punishing the wrong people.
When a Riot Games employee gets banned for playing too many Ryze games
The latest player to be affected by the “false positives” that detection systems in League of Legends can generate is a company employee. This is Riot Phlox, who works on the team responsible for designing the gameplay for the main modes of Summoner’s Rift. This happened after he played about 20 matches with Ryze, the champion he failed to get good results with. After reaching scores of 0/7 or 0/10 in some games, the systems decided it couldn’t just be a bad streak.. Maybe after his teammates used the report function.
The information was made public and since then this Riot Games employee has preferred to treat it with humor. Ryze is indeed one of the strongest heroes in League of Legends. Although he has improved with the arrival of the Age-Old Staff, he was the worst champion in the entire 12th season and is currently the fifth least effective.. It should be noted that Riot Phlox usually plays the role of a jungler, so he also had to adapt to a new role. In addition, he had to face Master level players and others of very high rank.
The ban lasted only 48 hours for Riot Phlox. Like any other League of Legends player, he had to contact player support. On this service they discovered that it was indeed a false positive caused by a system failure. The employee was able to recover his Platinum 2 rated account and continued the Hero Test. His results have improved since then, though he still has matches where he fails to make the champ work.
The League of Legends developers claim to have kept false positives to a minimum and aside from the anecdote, there is no need to dwell on it. In fact, the developer’s behavior can reassure us. If they were able to ban their staff and have them go through the usual procedure via support, they wouldn’t mind banning other media or even professional gamers.. Also, it never hurts to have a team member try out the effects of the Ryze experiment on their own to see if there are any improvements.
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