Last week, Riot Games made headlines across the eSports community by banning a pro gamer. After coming to trial in its Tribunal penal system nine different times, the pro gamer, IWillDominate from Team Dignitas, was permanently banned for repeated harassment. After suffering from eight previous punishments, the player clearly wasn’t getting the picture. The ban and entire Tribunal system itself wouldn’t be possible without Big Data.
Big Data, the idea of using massive amounts of data to spot previously unknown trends, recently came into common use as computer power and storage has dramatically increased and costs reduced. Popularized by Moneyball and Obama’s reelection campaign, Riot Games has rapidly introduced the practice to its own information for every possible advantage and Slashdot has the inside scoop.
“We were a scrappy startup and wanted to get our game out the door. Analytics wasn’t an afterthought, but we didn’t have many resources for it initially, and so started with one mySQL instance, running queries and downloading them to Excel,” Livingston told Slashdot.
Let’s put into perspective how much data Riot Games is generating and sifting through. Player activity “creates more than 500 GB of structured data and over four TB of operational logs every day.”
Well I say, good. This guy was a jerk and if this data helps them get rid of more jerks, than all the power too them!
It really makes the game much more fun, and takes of a lot of negative pressure of my back. Don’t get me wrong here, constructive criticism is nice, but not when you’re being ripped to shreds because you missed a kill, or something. That just ruins the experience.
I’ve found myself being more like the players I hated, but then when I look back, I realize it’s usually from players who actually don’t play as a team, and don’t listen that I react so negatively against. Especially the players who talk back and then lose.
I’m trying to fix it, and catch myself, but sometimes it’s hard to stay calm in a competitive game where you have teammembers who log on, to just not invest themselves. Hopefully I can improve myself.