The League of Legends community sucks - and it could be FAR better

**We’ve all had the experience. ** You miss 4 hooks in a row because how the heck are you supposed to hook an with good reactions, and your begins to get mad at you. Or you’re playing jungle and top starts getting pissed at you cos he’s 0:3 before you’ve even hit level 4.

In league of legends, players are constantly bombarded by negative attitudes and toxic behavior. We know that in many of our games someone is going to cause problems. We know that games where everyone is friendly and looking to have a good time are far rarer than games where an argument breaks out.

And yet on average, our individual personalities aren’t extremely negative at all. Most of us are pretty cool people to hang around with and chat with.

So why on earth does the league of legends community seem so negative? Why do we feel constantly bombarded by players spamming curses at each other and getting extremely pissed about the littlest things?

One of the reasons is toxicity. When one player gets mad or has a bad day, they’ll come into the game with a negative attitude. This negative attitude can affect others if he vocalizes them, making their attitudes worse and causing the overall toxicity of the game to rise through the butterfly effect. Considering the amount of players league has, that’s a lot of butterflies. I am going to go ahead and state that I believe it is a fact that the MOBA genre pulls down a playerbase’s attitude and causes a community to become worse.

Riot games has done a lot to attempt to improve player behavior, the recent free mystery gift of a skin being one example, the currently unavailable tribunal being another. I believe that, as good of an effort Riot has made, they could be doing an even better job and possibly even turn our general frowns at the attitudes of our teammates ingame upside down with a change in perspective.

This might take a while, so just...bear with me alright? :D

Here are 2 Riot ….what should I call them...sources? where Lyte discussed the league community and what they’ve done so far in order to improve the community. The dev blog: http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/player-behavior/exploring-player-behavior-design-values And the GDC talk that was mentioned at the end: http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player

I highly recommend that everyone look at both of these if they have the time, they were quite fascinating to me….look at them after you’re done with this :P

For those of you that don’t have the time/will, I’ll be picking out some points that I’ll be using: The league behavioral team has 5 core pillars that they try to follow: -Shield players from negative behavior -Reform or remove toxic players -Create a culture of sportsmanship -Reinforce positive behavior -Create better match chemistry I think these are all pretty sweet and well-selected goals.

A behavior chart can be drawn for each player, showing their toxicity over time. For a toxic player, there are a lot of points where negative attitudes appeared. For an average player, there were a few points, maybe 3, but no more. This is perfectly fine, we are all human after all. However, matching these normal players together resulted in at least one player having a bad view of life NEARLY EVERY SINGLE GAME.

From the tribunal, presenting people with players who have said something negative results in the average player recognizing that this player is at fault. After being punished, players who were punished without knowing why worsened their behavior, while those who were shown the tribunal reform cards improved their behavior.

About 95% of the league of legends community will never see proper punishments (Apart from the odd leaverbuster mixup perhaps).

“our current thinking is that, over the course of a year, we’ll introduce light rewards every few months such as the recent IP boost for positive play. One or two times a year, you might earn a more substantial reward” like the recent mystery gifts handed out.

Riot doesn’t have as great of a desire to give out skins and RP (at least of ~2 months ago). They don’t think it functions well as a reward. They want to spotlight awesome players, not bribe negative players to change their ways.

So now I can actually start talking about things properly. **I believe that a place where Riot’s perspective should be changed is in what constitutes a “positive player”. **

Let me start drawing up these little scales here. http://i.imgur.com/kIgorjo.png This represents a players attitude, and it can be viewed as either average or at the moment. In general, averaging everyone who plays league, our collective average should be in the middle. http://i.imgur.com/pJ13bfj.png Due to the nature of the game, there is a constant downwards drag on player behavior. http://imgur.com/WusZ6Zc Riot has, by implimenting punishment systems, essentially established 2 walls at a point along the scale. http://imgur.com/dj8e10n The first wall causes anyone who begins to average beyond it to get a warning, helping them bounce back slightly, but the bounce diminishes the more often you reach it. The second wall gives out harsher punishments and also helps bounce back, but if you stray beyond it too long league will just kick you out.

This is kind of what the system is like at present. How fast a player reaches a wall, or whether they reach a wall at all depends on their attitude towards life, real life situation, amount they play, resistance to toxicity, and a ton of other factors I simply can’t be bothered to list (Damn this post is getting long….comeon don’t go D: ).

So far, every reward Riot has given out has appeared to everyone who has not passed the wall. But the issue is, these people aren’t positive. They’re neutral.

Riot has nothing which drags players upwards from the neutral position. The rewards they’ve given out simply help provide a counterdrag to the constant overbearing drag of negativity up to the neutral boundary. http://imgur.com/sPvevvg I believe that this is an aspect which is sorely missing from the player attitude improvement system. A game where everyone at that exact moment in time is neutral results in pretty much nobody talking, everyone is playing the game on their own. We may as well be playing with AIs, it’s just humans are a greater and more realistic challenge (and the bots suck).

However, a game where 1-3 people have a medium-high positive attitude going into the game http://imgur.com/6RvXv4n Can result in an amazing game which is enjoyed by everyone. A game I had earlier was one of these. In champion select 2 of us began by joking around and having fun - the other person’s username had “Squirrel” and so we were playing around with him being adorable (Squirrels are adorable in the EU ok!). From there, teammates attitudes were wonderful, with everyone cooperating and asking others where they wanted to go, and we went and let irelia play irelia mid without any flame, just supporting her and wishing her luck. The game went on to go back and forth between the two teams, and everyone having a ton of fun while it was also challenging and engaging, with one of the best teamfights I’ve had in a while which had 3 GAs popped and 2 teleports blown and it was absolutely chaotic and beautiful. Best game I’ve had in about a month. The link to the game, for those interested: http://matchhistory.euw.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/EUW1/1922919994/204101764?tab=overview

The thing is, people are always influenced by other people around them. Neutral simply means everyone is completely expressionless and so nobody can be influenced by other people, leaving everyone to stew in their own thoughts. And in league, someone always has to die, someone always makes mistakes and ends up paying for it, and so over time effects like those can stew in neutral people’s thoughts and end up lowering their attitude as well. The trick is, get people in the game to have a positive attitude and acting positively, and suddenly other people will start having a positive attitude in the game as well, and those who may have been pissed will start enjoying themselves, and the game will be much more fun for everyone. Irelia was kind of pissed in champion select, but soon after the game began she began to be pretty chill as well.

The butterfly effect would mean that if there is a majority of negative players, then the game will drag down the overall player attitude. However, if there are more positive players than negative players, the game will increase player attitude. This is of course assuming no other factors affect player behavior.

In league, there are other factors which also pull down player behavior - like the one I outlined when discussing everyone being neutral. I won’t go into much detail here though, I think I’ve said everything that needs to be said for this part.

IN ORDER TO IMPROVE THE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS COMMUNITY, WE NEED TO GET POSITIVE PLAYERS. AND LOTS OF THEM. WE NEED INCENTIVE TO BE TRULY POSITIVE, RATHER THAN SIMPLY INCENTIVE NOT TO BE NEGATIVE. http://imgur.com/QQzW77R This is the main point of this text, to draw attention to this point. However, I believe it wouldn’t be finished unless I state at least one idea to fulfill this goal.

Here’s what I’d do: I’d reform the honor system, report and ban system as follows. Combine all the honors received into one overall stat, and this stat determines whether players get a ribbon or not. In order to get a ribbon, players need to reach a flat amount of honor in the past 30 days, and be in the top 15% of positivity in the game. This would equate to about 1.5 ribboned players every game, which the game would attempt to separate into the 2 respective teams when making the team. Reports would counteract honor, and the progress bar/”positivity rank” would be displayed on a page only the person himself could see, so that he could see how close he is to being ribboned. Ribboned players would act as “Moderators” for the game, fulfilling multiple roles: -Their general positivity will act as a beacon of hope to players. They will not want to lose the ribbon, and they’re likely generally positive players anyway, so they’ll improve player attitude in the game and make the game more enjoyable anyway. -They will have the ability to “Punish” a player directly. Punishments are like mini-tribunal punishments, but applied immediately after a player has done something negative. The punishment ranks work as follows: After receiving one, the player is chat muted for the rest of the game and 3 next games. If he receives another punishment during that time, he is banned from league for 3 hours. From there, he would be on “punishment watch” for the next 12 games, where each time he is banned again, scaling from 3 hours to 12 hours to 24 hours (Max). In order to remove punishment watch, the total accumulative time spent in punishment watch would need to be played off in 1 game per hour. Under punishment watch the player is not muted.

So what would the result of this be? The goal of getting a ribbon would be a massive incentive to improve many players behaviors, for multiple reasons such as the fact that they rarely have to deal with ragers/trolls, players look up to them, etc.

Of course, there would need to be adjustments to make sure that premades and trolling ribboners wouldn’t do...stuff, but that’s just polishing the system.

More important, what would this do: Unlike the current system, which only bounces you back once you reach a wall, this one would be more the kind that gives you a time out once you drop into the negatives, to let you reflect and calm down. The response would be immediate and instant, allowing players to see what they’re doing wrong the second they start, and preventing them from having a further negative influence on other players while it takes time to progress reports. Think of it as a child who wants to take cookies from a jar. What we currently have is the mother coming home and finding the child having eaten some of the cookies, punishes him with no video games for a week. What I’m proposing is to change it to whenever the child reaches for the cookies, the mother slaps his hand away. What’s the difference? The child never actually eats the cookies, which is kind of the more important of the two in this situation IMO.

This has a lot of other side effects, mainly positive from my perspective at least. Worst case scenario would be the polishing of the system doesn’t work, and ribboners would cause players to be unnecessarily tempbanned for a couple hours. But best case scenario? Everything I have described, except far far better.

That’s everything I have to say. What does the league community say? Right? Wrong? Good idea? Horrible?

Also, @rioters, this topic concerns us all, no matter what your expertise is, so post! However, I would appreciate it if someone shoved this in Lyte’s face :3