Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog

League of legends  a free to play MMO has introduced a tribunal as covered in  Kotaku – and most of the basics are covered in  League of Legends FAQ

In short, sick of thousands of complaints in a growing player base,  they are giving these player reported cases back to the players to decide what they should do. Cases are reviewed by players who qualify and agree to this.  They then get random cases to review, access to the complaint, and potentially a copy of the chat logs of the incident.  If found guilty by a majority the punishment is suspension,  but if a player keeps getting suspended their suspension period goes up, and eventually may get banned.

I bring this up, because its a novel idea, and one that could be applicable to Wow. I’ve not played League of Legends, but I have reported players to Blizzard for misbehaving, or providing ‘a negative experience’ , it doesn’t happen as often as you would think, and I’m pretty sure I have written about most of the times in someway in this blog. That I felt so deeply affected by the behavior of one player that I needed to raise it with Blizzard.  Yes I have been deeply enough affected by a player to vent here, to make a comment to them, in raid, or in chat, but actually bring it up the line to a formal complaint, I haven’t done it that often.

Why don’t I do it more?

Well I have to be deeply affected first.  That your pixel text, or character needs to raise in me such righteous indignation that flames beyond a short burst.

And secondly – There  is no real transparency in Blizzards punishment system as we don’t know how they get punished, and I can think of one example of  a player who ninja’d a significant pot of gold from a GDKP. The players had entered into an agreement, a contract of service, and at the very least of expectation that certain rules would be followed. He broke that agreement ran off with all the gold,   he was reported, and in all appearances,  none of the people who were scammed got their gold back,  and he was back on server within a week.

and guess what, he did it again.

Yes I get frustrated at Jerks, yes I have been insulted, yes I read in sadness the state of trade chat. Yes when people who do jerky things proclaim ” I’ve been reported heaps of times and nothings happened” I feel the current process is ineffective.

“A jury of your peers” is one component of most western world justice systems that I have heard of, but can it work in a game, and is it necessary?

It’s unclear how many people will review a case in League of Legends but I have one major concern

“The gamer judges will be rewarded with “influence points,” one of the game’s currencies with which they can buy new characters and gear in the game. But the judges will only get those points if they vote in the majority, the majority verdict being the one Riot will assume is the right verdict. Those who consistently vote in the minority will lose their tribunal privileges”

I’m not sure I like the idea of being rewarded for administrating  justice ( but what else would be incentive enough) , or punished for not agreeing with the majority.  I can’t imagine that everyone would be paying spectacular attention to all the issues ( even with a compulsory page view time before you can give a verdict) and make snap decisions as they churn their way through case after case. They have the wrong incentive to do that,  a reward. Justice is supposed to be blind, and impartial.  When you add the reward  for majority decision  Your first purpose  – to clean up the community can be forgotten.

We have been taught to grind by the nature of the games we play.  We grind Rep, gear, quests, badges.  It would be very easy for any of us to slip into a Justice administration grind when there is reward to be had.

I think they should have tried to do their tribunal with no reward or public recognition.

I also think you would get enough of the right kind of volunteers that still have an interest in cleaning up the community, and I think that interest  – to be completely fair and impartial needs to be first.  If something of that sort was introduced into Wow consider the people in our greater community who already contribute things of value to the player base for free. I believe it would be relatively easy to get those people involved.