League of Legends developer Riot Games is taking new steps to handle problem players more quickly and automatically, introducing a system to identify and ban players engaging in "verbal harassment" as quickly as 15 minutes after the end of a match.

Riot explains how the new system works in a post on its Player Behavior blog. After teammates or opponents report a League player for "homophobia, racism, sexism, death threats, and other forms of excessive abuse," Riot's automated system will validate those reports, determine whether they're worthy of punishment, and send a "reform card" that pairs chat log evidence of the behavior with an explanation of the punishment. "These harmful communications will be punished with two-weeks or permanent bans within 15 minutes of game’s end," Riot promises.

In a thread on the League of Legends forums, Riot Lead Designer of Social Systems Jeffrey Lin goes into a little more detail on the machine learning behind the automated system. The system tries to learn which phrases frequently lead to player reports, rather than just looking at an assigned "bad word" list, Lin writes. "Every report and honor in the game is teaching the system about behaviors and what looks OK or not OK, so the system continuously learns over time," he writes. "If a player shows excessive hate speech (homophobia, sexism, racism, death threats, so on) the system might hand out a permanent ban to the player for just one game. But, this is pretty rare!"

Lin started testing the algorithms behind this kind of "instant feedback" system last July . Previously, though, those automated reports were simply escalated to be manually reviewed by the Player Support team, which could take significant time and effort in a game with 67 million players every month. The new system seems to remove that human review step from the process, allowing for nearly instant punishment.

Riot said it would have its moderation team hand-review the first 1,000 cases handled by the instant feedback system as it rolled out on North American and EU servers last week. In any case, Lin writes on the forums that Player Support representatives previously "saw false positive rates in the 1 in 6000 range. So, we know the system isn't perfect, but we think the accuracy is good enough to launch."

The roll out has predictably received over a thousand comments on the League of Legends forums, with plenty of people pushing back against the idea of automated punishment without human review (or of player chat moderation in general). On Friday, Lin tweeted that Riot has already "tuned the NA/EU reform systems slightly more conservative while we observe over the weekend." Lin also cryptically tweeted that "one case of the system being overaggressive is not a reason to shut the system off. Let's be reasonable everyone!"

In the future, Riot hopes a similar system will be able to automatically punish other types of in-game behavior (such as "intentional feeding") or even offer rewards for positive play.