As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Renekton, it’s been a busy few days. I finally got to catch up on the forums a couple days back and found a strange post in the Announcements forums. The post gave us the first look at Riot’s newest disciplinary strategy: crowdsourcing.

Here’s the gist from ByronicHero:

Permit me to introduce the Tribunal, a revolutionary system by which you, the players, are empowered to evaluate cases of bad behavior. Soon, when you log into your account on the League of Legends website, you will be presented with the option to review random player reports. Bundled with each report will be supporting information relevant to the case, such as chat logs and game stats. With these materials at your disposal, you will be asked to vote to either punish or pardon the reported player. Once a case receives enough votes in either direction, the case will be resolved. In accordance with the verdict, the reported player will receive either a pardon or be subject to disciplinary action.

So why should you take part in Tribunal? Well, for starters, you will have the opportunity to help clean up the League of Legends community by ensuring that reports of player harassment are handled in a quick and timely manner. But if civic virtue isn’t incentive enough, we’re going to throw in an IP reward for each case in which you’re part of the majority vote.

This is a strange system, though I’m not quite ready to pass judgement. This is definitely the most direct way I’ve seen a company deal with the complaints about disciplinary panels. Has anyone played another game with this type of system?

There are a couple potential problems. First, by rewarding IP for the majority vote, it doesn’t necessarily encourage people to act fairly, just to act in groups. Granted, the easiest way to do that would be to vote on the evidence, but it wouldn’t exactly be difficult to organize large groups of voters to farm up IP. If the reward is large enough, I could easily see people doing just that.

Then there’s the simple fact that you can grief players you don’t like. I’m hoping there’s some sort of pseudonym system, whereby reported players are given an alias for the review. Without that, it seems like your’e really asking for people to abuse the system.

Those problems aside, though, it might be a decent way to get things done. The ban process is notoriously long and seems a bit useless when the bans don’t happen for several weeks or even months. This could make a things much quicker, which means players feel the penalty for poor behavior close enough to the behavior that, hopefully, they’ll wise up.