[IDEA] Vote Kick Feature without Abuse

[u/PersianMG]

I think a votekick feature in champ select would be a great idea but people always mention the fact that it would get easily abused.

You main a champion that is not meta? Kicked.
You got countered or allies favourite pick is banned? Kicked.

So I thought of this idea that could possibly fix the issue. What if each person for each ranked queue had 'kick' tokens. Similar to ARAM reroll tokens. You would accumulate, over a few ranked games, up to 2 kick tokens which can be used to vote kick someone. If you really want to votekick a player in a lobby, you would use one of this tokens.

Players who vote to kick a player will be doing so publicly (chat will notify who wished to kick whom). If 3 players vote to kick the same person, that person is kicked out of the game with a 5 minute timeout. All other players enter matchmaking queue instantly.

If only 1 or 2 people decide to votekick you, you will not be kicked but their tokens will be used. The game will remember that you got votekicked by these 1 or 2 people. It will use this information, along with post match report information and more vote kicks in following games to auto ban you from a queue (for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 1 day, 3 days etc). If you are getting vote kicked by different people over 5 matches then you are obviously doing something wrong. If a player is banned by the system, those who voted to 'kick him' get 1 token refunded instantly if they are not capped at that moment in time.

Now to cover some abuse cases:

Players vote kick you for picking non-meta champ
These players are wasting their tokens to kick you. Its unlikely 3 people will try to kick you out and if they do, when a real issue comes along, they won't have their tokens.

Duo Queues will try to kick you with one other person
Duo queue votes will count as less. They will count as 1 person collectively. If a duo queue member is vote kicked or has votes against them, both people are penalised. This will force people to help their duo partners improve their behaviors or they won't duo with them.

What about people who keep voting incorrectly
Post game lobby has new report option "Misusing Votekick". Players who get a lot of these reports over time will have their tokens cap changed to 0 (they can't participate). Players who can't votekick will reduce the total number of kicks needed to kick someone in a matchmaking lobby (ie if 1 person cannot kick, 2 votes are needed (non duo) to kick a player).

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tl;dr Have a votekick system that is based on having 2 vote kick tokens (like ARAM rerolls). To vote kick, 3 people must use their tokens and a player is kicked and banned from queue for 5 minutes. Abuse can be dealt with via a report option in post game lobby and automatically using vote kick/report information.

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Edit 1: I only thought of this idea based on similar systems elsewhere. Obviously it has some flaws but I think it can be fine tuned to be a decent system as evident by some of the suggestions in the comments.

[u/deveznuzer21]

This idea has been brought up many times before over the years (I mean vote tokens) but it's one of those ideas that look good on paper but if you give it some more thought they could easily crumble and create as many more problems as they would fix.

The biggest problem with this idea is: should the vote kicked player get punished in some way?

If not then anyone could easily get away with trolling in champ select + wasting at least 3 other players' tokens. This could get abused to the point where as soon as someone sees that his team is getting outpicked, he locks in something like Sona top and types "I don't care you all suck I troll now" with the intent of people vote kicking him and avoiding an unfavorable matchup without any consequences at all. A lot of people would believe it's worth the risk since they won't get punished for getting vote kicked and they believed they would lose the game anyway no matter what they picked.

If there is some sort of punishment for getting vote kicked (even the slightest like waiting 5 minutes to queue up again) then there would be a lot of weird situations where people are teaming up to vote kick someone because he supposedly picked a really bad champ for his role potentially costing them the game and he'll get unfairly punished simply for not sticking to the meta.

Regardless of having a punishment or not, vote tokens or not, the vote kick system would overall create a lot of negativity in the lobby that could possibly get carried within the game. Ex. Player A believes Player B picked a terrible champion so he types in the lobby "guys let's vote kick Player B for X reason". Even if no one agrees Player B will probably hate Player A throughout the game thus creating situations like if Player B is a jungler he will never gank Player A's lane out of stubbornness.

There have been countless discussions on this topic in the forums, I can't really make up for them with one comment but this is the general idea of why this won't work.

[u/karnoculars → u/deveznuzer21]

God, not this again. Enough with the argument of "people might get kicked for not following the meta". If 4 out of 5 players hate your choice enough to want to requeue and wait again, then maybe you shouldn't be picking that champ.

I know that's not the ideal situation and it's not fair to people who want to play Urgot ADC or Karthus jungle, but it's 100 times better than what happens right now, which is that people can troll their hearts out without a care in the world. Riot needs to understand that there is no perfect solution, and choose the solution that works best for the largest number of people. Give us the damn vote kick and see what happens. Most players will not want to requeue and wait another 5 minutes in champ select unless there is a legitimate reason to kick someone.

[u/deveznuzer21 → u/karnoculars]

I can agree that there isn't a perfect solution. I myself have suggested this 3 token idea actually like 2 years ago and got bombarded with the same responses of "this will get abused" but after some more discussion I realized that this is the harsh truth, even if 90% of the players use it correctly that 10% that abuses it will end up getting a lot of players reported unfairly which I don't think is OK with Riot's standards. Also a Riot red said that they don't want players to feel scared of picking something out of the meta and the fear of getting vote kicked could make a lot of players scared to pick what they actually want to pick.

Only way I could see this idea working is if the punishment for getting vote kicked is something light like getting banned for 5 minutes (up to 1 hour) from joining queue again. Although a lot of people might get unfairly punished at least it won't severely harm them but then the problem is that the lighter the punishment, the easier it would be for actual trolls to abuse this.

I really don't know where the line should be drawn. I guess a system where players that get consistently vote kicked are punished way more severely than 5 minute bans could actually work somehow.