Where does the toxicity come from at entry level in League?

HalcyonDweller·Jul 26, 2017·3 votes·414 views

I see players complain about toxicity in the early levels after starting accounts and I'm genuinely curious as to where it all comes from?

Why is there so much apparent toxicity experienced by players just now joining the game? Are players who are smurfing being toxic and harassing them? Are there just a lot of people joining up who are toxic and get filtered out for the most part by the time players reach level 30? Is it because of players making alt or replacement accounts when their account gets banned for toxicity?

What are your thoughts on this?

EDIT: Follow up question - It seems very harmful to the business if there is such a difficult barrier to entry for new players wanting to join the game. What could Riot do to better control or prevent this?

10 Comments

WoonStruckJul 26, 20176 votes

People 'smurfing'.

And by 'smurfing' I mean making a new account because their original account(s) got suspended/permabanned.

PennsJul 26, 20174 votes

toxin prayers that got banned and made a new account hehe xd

ZelorxonJul 26, 20172 votes

People don't know how to play the game and don't care either, this game is designed to punish more a mistake rather than reward a good action, and this way the game loses by itself and people don't understand why, since most league players are low IQ anyway they don't take responsibility and look for something else to blame to defend their weak ego, people don't like to be accused unrightfully and try to defend themselves but don't know exactly how.

There explained the birth of toxicity in a nutshell.

Add on top of it that riot promoted this in order to ensure a "always moving goal" since you can't really win with people that are clueless about the game so you're stuck in an endless RNG of which team has the less amount of retardation and there you go.

For example, do you know what wave management is? Do you know that the worst thing you can do is not push after level 7? Do you know that the game loses by itself if you don't do that without having the enemy need to do anything? Why you must push after lv7? What are rotations? How do i learn mathematically what's best and what's not?

There is an enormous amount of essential details people don't know. and refuse to learn.

Edit: oh, and underaged cancer, never forget about that.

McsquzzyJul 26, 20172 votes

Smurfs or players who were recently banned or bored of their current poison

DemainaNyxJul 27, 20172 votes

Smurfs and/or recent bans are probably the biggest contributor. They know how the play the game, so whenever someone doesn't play perfectly, "you must be trolling because I know how you should play that and you didn't do it right." The big thing with this game is you are punished for misplaying, and it's harder to come back from that. So if you see a new player running at the enemy, dying under the enemy tower without attempting to escape, all these experienced people see is someone hurting their chance at winning. I'm sure you've had games where your enemy does something where you say, "why did they do that?" or "they messed up now." You play long enough and you start seeing, "if they use X ability and miss, that's a free kill." If you make a new account, you'll see people using heal after taking 100 damage, whereas if that happened in ranked, you'd hope it was a misclick or you'd think that person is trolling.

You also have people imitating the streamers they see. Streamers may ? ping a teammate for trolling them (jungler smiting red from ADC, support intentionally stealing penta, full health teammate flashing away to not block a Caitlyn/Jhin ult), but the teammate is a friend who knows what they did and did it on purpose. You can sorta be a dick to a friend (especially if you know you basically can't lose this game), and you're friends will just give it back to you without getting too mad. So they want to be cool and do the same thing, not realizing that it's toxic in a non-friend environment.

Very Hard EngageJul 26, 20171 votes

children play league, when you make a new account you happen to get lumped in with them until you play enough games to prove yourself better than all of them.

statistically, they are the majority and they are scattered at all the ranks, they exist in greater numbers at the bottom of the ladder where you start out when you make a new account.

it also just so happens to be a very unfair start where the only question/filter being "do you have moba experience" to influence your elo. giving a wider discrepancy of skill among all 10 players in the room making for a very volatile experience until you play at least 30 games of it.

HalcyonDwellerJul 26, 20171 votes

I wonder if Riot could do something like be harsher with chat restrictions early on for accounts, just to help catch and prevent this problem from happening as much.

Very Hard EngageJul 26, 20171 votes

but then its not fair to the one eager teammate who wants to be competitive but whos also new to the game.

sure its a one size fits all siv, which may be appropriate, but ultimately restricts him unfairly and prevents him from giving his all if he wants too.

HalcyonDwellerJul 26, 20171 votes

I suppose. I just don't know which way is better.

Definitely BaitJul 26, 20171 votes

Banned players on new accounts
Not my main -> No cares about chat restriction / bans
Lack of game knowledge at the most basic level -> blame everyone else and flame to fulfill ego
They don't get filtered out at all. The toxic low levels tend to get away with it for hundreds of games. I've had only a single message saying a recently reported player got banned from a report between all my low level accounts that I generally don't chat on (On low level accounts there is basically someone to report every other game).
The game design itself makes you toxic and the community makes it worse. At some point if you don't mute all on a consistent basis you will wonder how your account hasn't been suspended or chat restricted.