Battling Toxicity by rewarding Kindness

The chat mute system that is supposed to fix toxicity in the game doesn't work. In my experience, people are just as toxic, they just avoid using the words that would ban them from the chat.

So instead of focusing on punishing toxic behavior, we might solve the problem by rewarding positive behavior. The way to do that is a Commendation system. Here's how it would work:

Next to the report button you add a "Commend" button. It opens a dropdown with a few options like "Helpful", "Team player", "Leader", "MVP" and so on. Of course it's only for your team, you cannot commend enemies.

So, the way you reward people with it is by giving them bonus XP based on the amount of Commendations and Reports they received during the match (or after it in the post match screen). That XP can either go towards your active hero contract or your account level. Let's say the starting XP value is 250. So if you got 0 Commendations and 0 Reports you get 0 XP. But if 2 people Commended you, it would give you 500 XP. On the other hand, if you got reported by 3 people, you get -750 XP. If you earned 900 XP from the match, with the reports it drops to 150 XP. Of course if you got like 400, you don't earn negative XP, you just drop to 0 XP for the match. So the multiplier is calculated by the sum of Reports and Commendations. 1 Report + 3 Commendations = 500 bonus XP.

A few problems this system and how to fix them:

  1. You and your friends can hop into a game and Commend each other for the XP. So the "Commend" button should not be available for people in your friend list.
  2. People can abuse the report button so that others lose XP. The thing here is that in order to make someone lose XP you have to report them, so that report has to be reviewed by the devs. If they find out the report is unjustified they give you the XP back and "mass reporters" get punished.
  3. People just Commend each other without deserving it. The way to solve that is by monitoring accounts that "mass commend". So if a person Commends the whole team every match it means he abuses the system, so give him a penalty. The penalty could be "You cannot Commend or be Commended for a week" or something like that.

I think with a system like this, kindness would be rewarded and toxicity punished. The AI doesn't detect toxic people most of the time, but their teammates do, so giving them a way to punish toxic behavior is the way to go. Of course that wouldn't fix toxicity, since a lot of players don't care about XP, but it would definitely be a step in the right direction. What do you think?