Hello Lumia Island Survivors!
In this Dev Journal, we would like to address a topic that has been discussed for a long time: Sanctions against abnormal (soft trolling) gameplay.
In previous Dev Journals, we shared our concerns regarding abnormal gameplay and smurfing and listened to your feedback. In regions where mobile phone verification has been introduced, smurfing metrics are improving, and fortunately, the sanction rate is also rising significantly.
Today, we want to talk about the most difficult area to manage: behaviors that sit right on the line of our sanction criteria.
Consistency Dilemma
Sanctioning abnormal gameplay is one of the toughest aspects of game operations.
To ensure fairness, we must minimize the subjective discretion of the staff; the result should be the same regardless of who reviews the case. However, in trying to maintain this consistency, the criteria inevitably become conservative. Consequently, we only end up sanctioning actions that are undeniably problematic to anyone who sees them.
This creates a blind spot where it becomes difficult to respond to soft trolling, or in other words actions that don’t clearly cross the line of the rules but undoubtedly ruin the game experience for other players.
Issues Under Monitoring
Recently, we have identified players who intentionally walk the line of our sanction criteria, cases where players understand exactly what constitutes a sanctionable offense and avoid them by staying right before crossing the line.
A prime example is "hostage/troll picks”. Normally, we encourage players to experiment with new team compositions and when players are serious about experimenting, they usually ask for their teammates' understanding and play diligently in-game. The problem arises when someone chooses an unusual pick without the intent to win, but rather to threaten the team or ruin the atmosphere. In these cases, the suspicion is clear, but the physical evidence is not enough and proving "intent" systematically is almost impossible.
Until now, responding to these cases took considerable time. The process often required a 3 day ban due to numerous reports, followed by manual investigations. In particular, malicious cases where users evaded sanctions by changing their IP and accounts limited the effectiveness of our existing methods.
A New Approach: Reports as Valid Evidence
Moving forward, we intend to officially recognize the user report ratio as supplementary evidence for sanctioning decisions.
In summary:
Clear Violations: Immediate sanctions based on physical evidence (as before).
Soft Trolling + Few Reports: Enhanced monitoring without sanctions (considered off-meta play).
Soft Trolling + High Report Volume: Sanctions applied after review.
This means that for behaviors that a majority of players generally perceive as abnormal, a high report ratio can serve as grounds for a sanction. This applies to unusual picks for the purpose of griefing, refusing to join the team, intentional dying (where proof is difficult), and other ambiguous, unhelpful behaviors.
Safeguards and Preventing Misuse
We would like to emphasize a few important principles:
First of all, sanctions are not based on reports alone. A high report ratio will make a player a subject for review; it is not an automatic ban system. The final judgment will still be made by a staff member.
Secondly, no punishment will be applied for one-off mistakes. You will not be banned for failing to join the team in a single match. Sanctions will only apply when continuous and repeated uncooperative behavior is confirmed.
Finally, we will strengthen filtering for false reports. We fully understand the concern about multiple reports being falsely submitted. Up until now, we have significantly down-weighted or excluded data from users who repeatedly file malicious false reports and will continue to do so. This is a safeguard to protect innocent players from indiscriminate or organized false reporting.
Reason for Withholding Specific Criteria
We are intentionally not disclosing the specific metrics used as sanction criteria (e.g., the exact report percentage).
In the past, transparently disclosing our criteria has unfortunately led to them being exploited. For instance, after we mentioned IP tracking, we saw cases where players frequently changed their IPs to induce dodges while evading detection. We ask for your understanding, as this decision is intended to avoid giving malicious users any hints on how to bypass our systems.
Implementation Schedule and Appeals
We will revise our rules of conduct and sanction policies based on survey results, and the new policy will take effect immediately.
If you believe a sanction has been unfairly applied, you may file an appeal through Customer Support within 15 days of the sanction date. Every appeal submitted will undergo a comprehensive individual review by our staff.
Survey
Please let us know your thoughts on the current policy.
We are well aware that this is a sensitive topic, and we do not take changes to our sanction policy lightly. Our goal is simple: to ensure that those who play with good intentions can enjoy the game even more, while providing a fair environment for everyone.
As always, thank you for sticking with us.
