Why does riot promote toxicity?
Let me name some of the systems that directly promote toxicity or mentally unhealthy gameplay before I dive in:
- Mastery Emote
- Taunts/Dances/Laughs/Jokes
- Emoji Emotes (upcoming)
- All Chat
- Spam Pinging (specifically, the time in between pings)
- Banning Other's Pre-Picks
- Using a bot to regulate reports
Mastery Emote - So first we have the mastery emote. A mastery emote should be a self recognition thing that makes a player feel good about his accomplishment. Not something you spam at enemies....The only thing people realistically use emotes for is to spam them at enemies to piss them off. Killing someone and flashing a mastery sends a little tilt signal to the brain on sight. There is literally no healthy reason enemies can view your emote.
Taunts/Dances/Laughs/Jokes - Same as above. They serve no purpose and most people either use them to troll their enemy or just act silly while minions are spawning and dance. It has no healthy addition to the game.
Emoji Emotes (upcoming) - Same as above but even more rediculous. So as if mastery flashing when you kill someone didn't tilt them enough, NOW YOU CAN SPAM A SAD FACE AT THEM WHEN DIE?!?!?!??!?!?!? RIOT! ENOUGH!
All Chat - Why does this feature even exist? Every single coach and high elo player tells you to automatically turn it off because of the lack of gameplay it adds....You either use all chat to tilt your opponent or tilt your team by bitching to the other team or tilt yourself by bitching because they are taking your bootyhole in lane. Like why? All Chat is never used for constructive chat except for the pre-game "gl hf" and even then you could just limit all chat to the first minute of the game or something. I don't need to see "outplayed dumbass" if I get ganked and die.....
Spam Pinging - The time delay between each ping is wayyyyy too close together. In my mind, you should not be able to ping within 5 seconds of your last unless you are target pinging something such as focusing an enemy in a teamfight. There is no scenario in the game where I need to spam ping where it won't tilt the person I am pinging at. Not only is spam pinging toxic, it makes you tune-out future pings trying to ignore the toxic guy so you end up missing important information. Boy who cried wolf effect.
Banning Other's Pre-Picks - Here's the thing guys. One of three things happens when you ban someones pick. They troll you, they afk or they BM the entire forty minute game. Why go through a 40m game of one of these 3 options when you can just dodge and get a better game in 5m??? Make everyone's gameplay including your own a lot happier and just leave a game you don't like in champ select instead of griefing your team.
Using a bot to regulate reports - I realized that riot now solely uses bots to regulate toxicity after being punished 5m after the offending game and the bot says "League players reviewed the following chat and found it against the summoners code". Bull Crap Riot. 5M to review 40m worth of chat logs. OKAY. Anyway, why is this bad? It promotes players in a group to start an argument with you then report you for toxicity. Think about it. 9/10 your teammates and enemy team instantly leave the post-game lobby and don't report you, even if they say they do. Meaning that the duo/trio queue just got 2/3 reports on you and you only get one on them. The bot counts up these totals and now you are closer to a ban than them even if they STARTED THE ARGUMENT. Reading through the chat log this bot provided, everything I said was in direct response to the duo attacking me. I never said a single word to them unless they attacked me and the chat logs proved it but since it was evaluated in 5m by a bot, the bot didn't care and cared about the duo reporting me x2. Appeal tickets also take ~7 days to work after going back and forth with them so by the time they give your account back your unbanned....well played riot.
Overall, these are systems that cause avoidable toxicity that riot chooses not to fix.