Riot didn’t make much of a stink about the League of Legends birthday last year, but it seems this year there’s going to be something of a celebration. As part of the festivities, Riot put together a timeline that follows the development of the game since October of 2009.

I think this is a pretty cool tribute to the development of the game, but I hope Riot sees the timeline like I do: a reminder that they can do better. When I look down the list of developments I see several things that I never use, a couple things that were hyped up and underwhelmed, and one real thing that has the potential to extend the life of the platform for a player.

Twisted Treeline

Twisted Treeline started out strong but quickly dried up when players realized that only so many champs are actually viable on the map. With the rise of Tanky DPS I’ve been playing Treeline again, mostly because there’s more variety there, but Riot stopped worrying about balance for that map a long time ago. This one doesn’t add any life to League of Legends. It’s an occasional diversion from the big show.

Season One

Season One also looked pretty cool at the beginning. Ranked play brought us draft mode, a feature that I had really been missing prior to its release. But Season One went on so long I forgot it was even happening. In that time the game remained relatively unchanged, seeing just a few meta-shifts along the way.

Riot did start to develop a spectator mode for the game, which helped the visibility of the larger tournaments. This would be a nice injection of life for the platform, giving each player more ways to learn how to improve at the game. On the whole, though, Season One doesn’t add much to the platform for the average player.

Battle Training & Co-Op vs. AI

I have never used Battle Training and never will. I’d also say chances are good that once a player has seen the mode a couple times, they won’t be going back either.

As for Co-Op vs. AI, my experience with the mode was poor enough that I haven’t gone back. My allies constantly flamed me for any and every decision I made. I’d rather have the ragers from ranked than the trolls from this game mode. That said, I know some players enjoy it and it’s certainly kid friendly. This one seems okay for a very small subset of the player base. I would love to see more data on who is playing Co-Op vs. AI.

The Tribunal

I’m still surprised the Tribunal made it to the live feature list before things like achievements or spectator mode. I realize Riot must have been swamped in complaints about player behavior, but for me, the Tribunal just isn’t worth the time. I can’t even imagine the amount of management it takes on the back end. And frankly, my games haven’t improved dramatically since the Tribunal released. People are still rude. People still afk. There are just too many players for this kind of system to effect dramatic change that we can see on a player by player basis.

Dominion

This is the big, shiny pot of gold at the end of Riot’s timeline. When Dominion launched I played it like a fiend. I haven’t played a ton in the past couple weeks, but a few games here and there have still been fun. It’s obvious that Riot is committed to keeping this game mode balanced, which puts it ahead of Twisted Treeline as far as diversions are concerned. I don’t think Dominion is perfect, but it’s something new with totally new gameplay and I think a lot of players are enjoying it.

None of this is to say that I don’t like League of Legends. I love it. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on it, both in playing and in writing for this blog. The day is coming, though, when some shiny new toy will steal me away from LoL. When I look at this list, I don’t see much that will pull me back should my new toy grow stale. I hope Riot has a few tricks up its sleeve.

When the Tribunal first launched, I was pretty impressed with the whole system. The reports were and still remain easy to read, easy to understand, and it was novel enough to keep me coming back, for a time anyway. Well, that time has passed, but I’ve lost interest in the Tribunal for another reason – I’m not sure I have the same standards as many of the people both reporting and judging cases.

I logged into the Tribunal last week to find a case of reported Verbal Abuse. The chat log was three lines long, with only one word from the player in question. Yes, the reported player said one word that match – “shitbags” – seemingly unrelated to the other chat in game. Without any context, it was impossible for me to punish the guy.

That’s exactly the situation that likely prompted Riot to include multiple matches in each Tribunal case, but what about the players with just a couple matches. I had an Alistar the other day with 3 matches in his case. Now granted, sometimes three cases is plenty to merit a punishment, but those players also typically rack up far more than three cases. I pardoned the guy, but it made me wonder why he was in the Tribunal in the first place. I also had a few cases that were less than clear for punishment. I pardoned, and later found out that I wrongly judged a couple cases. Most of my punish cases are so clear that I can only imagine it was the pardons.

The Tribunal is definitely a cool idea – giving the community a chance to weigh in on behavior management is pretty fascinating – but without a focused, clear definition of what is acceptable and what isn’t, Tribunal cases can take a decent amount of time to judge. Intentional feeding and blatant racism are obviously punishable, but someone saying “shitbags?” There’s a language filter and an ignore function, and I don’t think doling out a ban for something a player can easily avoid makes much sense.

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.

I had a lot of doubts about the Tribunal when it was first announced. The idea of incentivizing players to punish one another seemed a little odd to me, even if I had played with hundreds of players who deserved a little wrist-slap. After using the system for a couple days, though, I have to admit, I’m kind of impressed.

The only reason I use the qualifying “kind of” is that the Tribunal’s real value can’t possibly be assessed until we can see some results. When Riot first starting banning players for bad behavior it seemed like games were about to get a whole lot nicer. However, the League of Legends playerbase was growing much faster than Riot and so the need for justice quickly outpaced the execution of that justice. The Tribunal has the potential to turn that around, hopefully expediting the punitive process for Riot and giving everyone a look at just how foolish the rage sounds when it isn’t spewed in the heat of the moment (it also sounds ridiculous then, but I can understand getting steamed here and there).

That said, it seems the Tribunal is an early success. I’ve completed my three cases in each of the past two days and actually enjoyed the process. It’s interesting to see the kinds of information that can actually be used to punish/pardon a player and the different ways each player in a game understands another player’s actions. I’ve already seen a couple complicated cases that involved a lot of bad behavior from all parties involved. It can be tough to reason out who, if anyone, should take the hit, and if the reported party is actually to blame.

Of course, I’ve also seen some very cut and dry cases. You don’t die 20 times in 20 minutes without trying, and you certainly don’t die that often several games in a row without some sort of effort. I’ve also been entertained and amused by the things people share on the forums. Part of the problem with ragers is that they disappear once the game is over and very few people are exposed to the ridiculous things they say. The Tribunal bumps that exposure by not only being thrown into the pool but also because players that see it are so keen to share it.

I’m really hoping we see results. It’s a cool system with some great potential. It would be a huge bummer if it didn’t work out. How has it seemed to you guys so far?

If you spent some time on the forums today you might have noticed a higher than average amount of unrest about Riot’s development cycle. Among the many lessons the internet has taught is the fact that the internet and its denizens do not forget a date, a time frame, or anything that sounds vaguely like a promise. It’s the reason developers are unwilling to lay down release dates that aren’t absolutely set in stone.

One of the more prominent threads today asked for a timeline on achievements, a feature that has had a tab in the PvP.net client for quite a while but hasn’t received a whole lot of airtime. Phreak stepped in today to quell any hopes that we might see achievements soon, pointing out that balance changes and features like the Tribunal are higher on the totem pole. The thread quickly filled with complaints that even those features high up on Riot’s to-do list haven’t been done, that is until Riot did something I never saw coming: Riot released the Tribunal.

Technically, the company is calling it a pre-release as it will only be accessible to summoners that have achieved level 30. I use the future tense because shortly after the official pre-release it seems interest in the feature rocked the Riot servers and brought the website crashing down. So now we sit, patiently waiting out a 4-hour maintenance window to see what this new feature, which was first announced in January, is all about.

It seems like a strange confluence of events that Tribunal would release on one of the most active forum complaining days I’ve seen in months. I’m not saying Riot made the release based on the griping, but rather that Riot’s timing is either perfect or perfectly awful.

If Tribunal works, if summoners really get behind the idea of doling out justice to the grouchy bastards that ruin so many games, the system could be a real boon for the community. I think it could definitely lift spirits enough to carry people into Season Two at the least, about which we’ll hopefully get some news over the next couple weeks. There’s also a solid chance that it will generally improve behavior in game, which I think everyone would welcome.

Tribunal could be a flop, though. I know a lot of people who have been waiting a long time for the League’s gameplay to evolve, something that hasn’t happened in quite some time, at least not for veterans of the game and genre. While Battle Training and Co-op vs. AI are certainly gameplay features, the first has no value to seasoned summoners and I would consider the second situational at best. If Tribunal doesn’t capture our collective attention, I can already hear the gnashing of teeth about the informal priority list Phreak served up today. As I mentioned earlier, the internet doesn’t forget, and they certainly won’t forget this one, even if Phreak was just giving an example.