The Toxicity of our city.

I would like to take a moment to step back and discuss the toxic level of the community. I know this has been brought up 1000 times over but to this day... LoL remains the number 1 toxic game on the market. And I want to bring up my experiences with this and see if we can come to a resolution.

Let me just start by saying if you are yelling at people for doing bad in 5v5 blind then you are the bad person in that group. It doesn't matter what your score is at the end of the game. 5v5 blind is essentially a practice area for people to hone their skills.

When I first started (several years ago) you couldn't play a single game without someone screaming at you for screwing up. Or why are you taking that character to that lane you **** noob.

You can't learn a game without playing it.. And if you are playing in a practice mode and you expect everyone to be as "good" as you are then who is really the idiot here?

And I hear you saying it in your head.. "5v5 blind isn't a practice mode.. There is custom bot games and co-op vs ai so you can practice." And while this is true this is merely a stepping stone in learning to play. You don't learn anything about which lane you should be in.. You don't deal with jungle ganks.. You only deal with the basics of mechanics. As someone who can 60 and 0 against bots I can tell you that this does not make you able to know all that you need to know to play 5v5. Because when I graduated myself to 5v5 from bots people would tell me to go back to bots and that doesn't help when you could literally destroy every game against bots. You have to play with real people to learn what to do. You have to experience it to learn it. And the next step after bits is 5v5 blind.

Toxic players go into 5v5 looking for easy mode kills and free wins. When they are losing or someone does bad they start being toxic. Happens almost every game. If you want to win in 5v5 blind all you need is voice chat and 4 friends. Heck even having 1 person in voice can make all the difference in a game vs randoms. The pros in tournaments all use voice chat.. Why do you think that is. If you want to practice a character... Practice a character.. If you don't want to play with random people.. Get a team. If you don't have a team or friends to play with. Then play 5v5 but don't expect to win every time. And instead of being toxic. Help people.. Give them advice. Then... Maybe you will actually make friends and can build a team and can stop trying to be hardcore in a practice mode. I've made several friends in game helping them out and we play together a lot now across multiple games.

Now I've been playing long enough that I can play several characters without triggering the Toxicity in the group.. But lately I have been playing with my son who is almost 12. He wants to learn.. So I installed the game again a few months ago and we have been playing games. We got to where he can wreck Ai and we moved into 5v5. But like I expected.. Every mistake he makes he gets scolded by players who don't realize they are not in a ranked game. And I had to show him how to hide his chat so he didn't have to see what people were saying and instead could focus on learning the game.

I feel like one of the biggest downfalls is the community design as a whole... The game is designed to let you punish other players.. And riot even built in a system to help create that level of judgement that can often be exploited to report someone for doing bad even if they are just learning the game. Which is just sad.

One thing that used to make it so much better was the role select mode. You pick what character and role you wanted and you searched for a game that would match you with other players to form a complete team. This was the ultimate way to practice. You could focus on one champion and wouldn't have to bounce back and forth cause someone in chat called "dibs" on a lane. Until this feature is returned I basically have to ignore the "dibs" etiquette from what people say in that chat if I want to work on learning a character past the "bot training" stage. Or I have to try to hurry and type a role in the chat and hope I get it or play a different champ. Which I don't like to do.. This is on riot not the community. Riot also needs to re-implement the item list creation tool again. This was immensely useful for new players and would help me teach my son about item choices. As it is now.. I have to tell him what to search up over voice.. Which takes time cause he is sitting at the store typing up names and finding items.. When he could be back in the game. I could sit and make him an all scenario gear table in game that he could use to buy gear efficiently and get back in the game and reduce the amount of time he is away from minion stomping so he does better in the end game.. Not to mention I would love to see this feature back myself because I used it with every character.. And used multiple load outs for each character. And this tool helped me learn a lot about my character and about my choices in game and over all made me a better player.

So to me.. It seems like riot doesn't want you to have quality of life tools like the role select or the inventory creation.. And they just want new players to suffer through.. Creating players that through no fault of their own.. Feed the toxic players.

In summary {TLDR} If you want to play with players that are good. Get friends and get voice chat and stop playing 5v5 blind. Stop yelling at the people in there who are learning their characters. This is the only place to get real practice anymore. So if you play 5v5 blind you should expect to play with people who are new or who are not good. Help them learn and make friends.. Or don't say anything at all. And when your losing a match.. Quit crying about FF @ 20.. The best practice that you can ever have is coming back from a deficit.. Everyone knows how to wreck face when your up against scrubs.. And that doesn't help you be better.
And bring back inventory creation and role select. Edit: clarity and typos (on my phone) :) Thank you for your time.

Dustin.