Game Time Is The Largest Contributor To Toxicity

I have been playing a lot of League and SMITE, and the toxicity level in SMITE is far lower than it is in league. I have been trying to figure out why that is (beyond the simple factor that in SMITE you can type less since you need to move around with your left hand). I think it comes down, ultimately, to time, and game structures related to time. For comparison (using Summoners Rift and Conquest Mode):

• Average game time: 45 min vs. 30 min
• Average laning phase time: 10-15 min vs 5-7 min

Why are these times important?

For the laning phase, the longer it is, the more impact a single bad player can have on the outcome of the game. That is because the longer the laning phase, the longer individual players are alone and the more potential for truly out of control feeding there is. With a shorter laning phase, players in SMITE group up sooner, so any one player has less opportunity to singlehandedly feed so hard that a hypercarry can become insanely powerful just from winning lane. Hypercarrying still exists, but you have to get kills both during laning and during teamfights to do it, so dominating a single player is much less of a factor in the games outcome. This in turn means players who are bad in lane but good in team fights can contribute more as well, leading to less frustration from both the player who is losing lane and their teammates, and more situations where laning does not decide the game.

For the Total game time, the longer it is, the more of a chance there is for people to become fed up with playing. Also, the longer the game is, the more time you spend dead, which removes the feeling that what you do matters, as you are not able to effect large changes. Very often in League, you go through 5+ surrender votes in a game that players feel is being lost, with play becoming progressively worse as more and more players decide the game is a waste of their time and get fed up with the players refusing to surrender, or spend more time yelling at each other than playing. This leads to a far greater amount of leaving, AFKing, and toxicity in chat in league. In SMITE, by contrast, you will on average have only a couple surrender votes in a game, DESPITE THE SURRENDER OPTION UNLOCKING 10 MIN EARLIER! This is because generally speaking games that are lost in SMITE will end faster. This leads to far less annoyance, as players know that they won't have to keep playing a lost game for another 20+ minutes, so they don't become toxic.

The last issue is anti-snowball mechanics. SMITE's mechanic is the aforementioned shorter laning phase. In other words, they prevent snowballing by shortening the time players have to snowball off single opponents, so if snowballing occurs, it is the entire team losing hard, which leads to a game that ends quickly with the better team victorious. League, by contrast, has external factors, such as tower strength, regen, etc. that for the most part, rather than stopping snowballing, merely lengthen the game overall; they do not increase comebacks in general because of how league is structured. These extrinsic crutches slow the game down REGARDLESS of who is winning, while SMITE's intrinsic mechanic of just forcing teamfights to happen and letting the team that wins them win shortens the match if things get uneven. In league, if you are behind by 4 towers and 10 kills, the game can still go on for another 20+ min easily, while in SMITE, if you are that far behind the game will in general be over inside of 10 min.

In short, the very structure of League works against civility and player tolerance. The only really good way to lower toxicity is to lower game time, particularly laning time, and to remove extrinsic crutches. If you are going to lose, it is better to lose fast and move on than to drag it out.