MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
If you spend any sort of time on the internet you’ve probably suffered at the hands of a troll. MCV knows about this all too well.
But even amongst these cesspools of morons, elements of the League of Legends community have a quite brutal reputation.
Which is why the developers behind the game have formed a Player Behaviour and Justice Team (PB&J) that employs a cognitive neuroscientist and a behavioural psychologist.
"There’s a line, and that line generally is people being mean for the sake of being mean – telling you what to do, telling you how bad you are. And I think we can actually fix a lot of that," producer Travis George told Gamasutra.
"This is going to be a major focus for us. How do we actually more tangibly understand how bad the impact is, or what the impact is, or understand the problem more?
"We’ve actually developed specific trends, and our own set of metrics that we look at for measuring what percentage of times we think that players will encounter a negative experience in a game, and how severe that negative experience is. And then we have to build things or be responsive or message the community in a particular way to address those things."
"And that’s where you’ve got guys who are PhD researchers who can help develop those models, and we have, actually, those models for how we track and trend what we call ‘player behaviour.
"You can apply really good research and science techniques to almost anything. The trick is just finding what you want to actually spend the time on, and that’s where the sentiment for players comes in as a huge guiding factor to that."
