Riot Korea response to Cowsep's Ban

from:	Unknown Unknown <kor-support@riotgames.com>
date:	Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 9:37 PM
subject:	From Riot Games' Korea office
mailed-by:	riotgames.com
signed-by:	riotgames.com
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Hi Cowsep,



I’m a Rioter working on League Publishing in Korea, and I wanted to write to you about the lack of clarity regarding your suspensions, as well as talk with you about your feedback about playing on the KR server. I am compelled by the fact that you are a KR Player yourself, and so I take your feedback about Riot's KR office with humility and with clear awareness that we have a long way to go to provide the environment that all players deserve. We are always trying to learn from our players on ways to further improve our anti-toxicity measures and have already made some additions to our chat filter based on your experiences. I’d like you to know we do hear your feedback, and take your concerns seriously. So let’s talk about all of those, as well as your recent account suspensions.



Reason for your account bans

First, your six accounts, three that are under your Foreign Registration Number, and another three that are under one Korean Social Security Number, were suspended for 30 days due to account-sharing.



As I am sure you already know, account sharing in KR is a serious issue with far-reaching consequences due to the linking of SSNs to every account. As such, we have a zero-tolerance policy towards any proven cases of account sharing. We even regularly publish a list of account sharing bans because KR players demand full clarity on how we are enforcing this policy. A first violation is a 30-day suspension, and perma-ban upon second violation. We only ban accounts when we have 100% proof of account-sharing. In your case, the six accounts that we banned we found to have clear proof of account-sharing. Under this policy, we banned three out of a total five accounts that you have made under your own official registration number, and so two of your accounts are still active for your use.



As far as the other account you mentioned around the issue of account sharing, the reason it wasn’t penalized is because we missed it. This is purely due to the limitation of our system, which is a manual effort. Because of the risk of false positives, we always err on the side of caution rather than wrongly suspend an account.



We also undertook a thorough investigation into your claims that you were using someone else's account with the permission of KR office and we found no such communication. If you were referring to communications that you've had with our office via the privacy mail system, that mailing system is only used for verifying that your personal ID matches your accounts.


How we came to penalize your six accounts

We first heard about a controversy on Reddit from Rioters in North America. Our colleagues wanted to understand your feedback and situation as a player. We also had a discussion in which we agreed that the difficulties and toxicity that foreigners experience on the KR server are somewhat different from KR players. We reviewed your account history and informed our colleagues that you had a clean history of bans aside from some isolated cases of afks.


As part of this, the account-sharing detection team also began a review of your case, which they do as a routine for many cases that go through such inquiries. They found patterns in your gameplay synonymous with account-sharing, and after investigating more deeply, found clear proof of account-sharing. We penalized those accounts because those are the rules and because account sharing is such a serious offense in KR.


Regarding your frank feedback about your experiences playing on the KR server, I would be the first to admit that we have toxicity issues on the KR server, so let’s talk about that.


About Toxicity on the KR server

You've mentioned the toxicity of the KR server, especially toxic language, afking, and chaos in champ select. I don't doubt the veracity of your experience. But the unfortunate fact is that gameplay toxicity is something we struggle to consistently detect and penalize on all servers, not just KR. I can’t offer you or any other players immediate remedies for these problems, but we will keep trying to improve.


For chat, the KR server has more systems than some other regions, including a two layer toxic language filter custom-built for Korean. We also implemented a third-party anti-cheat system which significantly curtailed the use of cheat programs, and most recently started pre-and post-game lobby chat detection system. But we know that all of this means absolutely nothing to a player who has just experienced the pain and frustration of toxicity in game.


Foreign Player Experience on the KR Server

Unsurprisingly, the penalty system in KR is geared towards KR Players and the Korean language rather than English. This is why the type of harassment you see in English goes unpenalized more often than harassment in Korean. Ultimately, you are a KR Player and I totally sympathize with the difficulties you and other foreigners in Korea must face.


Phrases like "Yankee Go Home" are definitely toxic. Whether it is xenophobia, or just simple ignorance, it's not the experience that you or any other player deserves. We are now including these types of phrases within our chat filter, and we will be more mindful of the toxic language that foreign players may be experiencing and include it into our lexicon of toxicity whenever we can. This is a concrete change we’re implementing based on your feedback. If you see more language of this nature that we may not cover today, please let us know. Like other situations, we will never be able to reach 100% coverage, but we will strive to improve.


I hope that the above provides some clarity on your suspension, and gives you some confidence that we do care for all players’ experience on the KR server. If you have any questions or wish to discuss some of these points in more depth, please reach out to us.