Riot Should Be More Avid About Healthy Team Atmopshere's & So Should We

The game is slowly getting to a point where I only want to play with friends. I don't know where people can get off blaming someone else. With friends from home or elsewhere I know we can take a loss and not rage at each other, because being the friends that we are we wish to grow not tear each other down. Also as friends we naturally try to do our best every game so we don't let each other down. Sadly not everyone is friends in solo queue or normals and more often than not we get paired with people on their own agenda with toxic mindsets.

When it comes to enjoying a game it can all depend on if your winning or losing, merely because the way most players respond to the situation is unhealthy. If you're winning, a lot of players tend to get lax and be nice. This is ok and while it may be better if they stayed focused the atmosphere isn't filled with contention. However becoming too lax will end up costing your team the game and this is where toxicity rears its ugly head. Players will be quick to blame their fellow comrades, bad mouth players who may have even been playing fairly consistently until a single mistake and so forth while making it seem as if they were playing as the most professional elite player having made no mistakes at all.

It's a shame that such a well put together team oriented game can bring the worst in people and selfishness seems to be an underlying common factor. Everyone has a role to play in your teams loss even if you made the **LEAST **mistakes. Reason I say LEAST mistakes and not **NO ** mistakes is because to lose you have to do something wrong for the enemy team to exploit. If you played perfectly you would have capitalized on the enemy teams every mistake and would have secured the win while looking like god in the process. Players seem to think they can achieve this sort of status no matter what elo they are in, just because they have warped perceptions of a flawless game, despite making many minor mistakes themselves they overlooked.

**Players need to realize you did not play perfect and played a role in losing: **

• If you hadn't severely denied your enemy laner or jungle (if you are the jungler) cs and killed them at every opportunity you had you did not play perfect.
• If you hadn't cleaned up every mistake your fellow players made and turned it into a step towards victory for your team
• If you didn't have the most gold accumulated out of all players in the game
• If you weren't able to secure or nullify every enemy baron and dragon
• If you didn't destroy the enemy nexus and won the game

If you didn't do all the above

Im sure many of us myself included have had monster games where we felt the team lost the game for us because they never got on track while we were playing clean up the entire time. But what keeps me from thinking I am god and deserve to be playing with winners is that I know I lost because I failed to perform well enough to win when it mattered most. Hard as it may be to swallow if my team gets demolished in a team fight 40 minutes in because they can't engage or peel and im tasked with defeating 4 enemy champions at full or half health; if I want to win that game I need to stop those champions.

If I couldn't I played a part in losing the game by not being extraordinary well. This may be what separates the truly world class elite in such situations from the average player or even the above average player, the ability to have a chance at making a miracle play that leads to a come back. It's not something impossible to aspire towards doing, it's just something that many people need to realize, that if it isnt done and doesnt secure you the win, they contributed to the loss even if they "carried". Of course some situations are pretty impossible to win and it may be easy to say you did not cause your team to lose.

That argument can very well be made to an extent, but at some point or another many players need to realize that if their loss was inevitable despite their perfect performance, that they are limited and must play within the teams needs. Once again proving that something could have been done with their dominant performance at some point earlier in the game to mold a better and possibly victorious outcome. The game should teach people that through the experience of defeat, they can bring ingredients for success into their next game by learning from their mistakes in the previous one.

Sadly progression isn't made this way because there is this false perception of teamwork and accountability. So perhaps Riot can do something proactive to preach this message to the masses during popular tournaments casts, or paid commercials featuring the pros, Youtube videos, etc. something needs to be done to improve the atmosphere of the game beyond just clicking that report icon or having generic leaver ban systems. There needs to be a philosophy that Riot actively endorses so that even casuals can once again feel at ease even if they lose.

I hope someone out there hears me on this, maybe Riot can send this message through to the masses with a Pro PSA, with the subject being on player behavior in solo queue and normals. Even if it doesnt come to that I hope one day the majority of league players will take losses and failures as learning experiences rather than contested debates seeking glory or validation.