I wrote just a couple days ago that the Tribunal seems like an early success. I still think it does, but there are a few issues that I think are worth mentioning. For starters, I got the same case twice in a row today. It’s not a huge deal once in a while, but it would suck for that to happen on multiple occasions.

There is a much more serious issue, though, and it’s one I’m not entirely sure how to handle. Today I played a game in which the Poppy on my team had a rough start. She died four times early in her lane, mostly because she was playing foolishly, soaking entire creep waves to try to get a little harass on the enemy Ashe. It was bad news. She then left lane and started taking my jungle, openly stating that she wasn’t going back to the lane. That’s a bit of an issue when the lane was 2v2 at the start, is now fed, and leaves our teammate 2v1. I tried to help out where it was possible, but I was also actively counter-jungling and couldn’t just stop and lane.

Things escalated. Poppy started stealing buffs, purposefully stopped helping our team in teamfights, said she was going into “bot mode” and eventually started feeding on purpose. Around the time she stopped helping our team I said something like “meanwhile Poppy farms top” after a teamfight. I also asked the enemy team to please report her for her negligence. The response? “How bout I report you for raging at her.” Now granted, I would probably get pardoned – I never used so much as a curse word – but from that point forward, Poppy was trying to make it look as though I was the troll in chat. To the trained eye it would have been obvious what was going on, but my enemies were quick to assume I was at fault, and so quick to report.

That’s where the real problem lies. When my teammate is purposely feeding and purposefully trying to steal buffs, I don’t want to be in that game. Frankly, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to AFK. But when the enemy has suddenly chosen you as the bad guy, then my AFK becomes bannable, and that’s not so cool.

Hopefully, though, the system does indeed work as Riot suggests, so that the false positives that occasionally get reported don’t make it all the way to Tribunal. I would be willing to guess that I could possibly have been reported in three of my last 50 or so games, and at least two of those would be instant pardons.