Suggestions for dealing with trolls.

Hi there!

I know this looks like a massive wall of text, but it's not as bad as it looks, I promise.

From the title, you may be thinking that this is going to be some rant about trolls that play League. To a certain extent, you would be correct. Anyway, just now, I played a ranked game, and in Champion Select, this is roughly what happened:

Bans went ahead as normal, nothing odd there. First person called jungle, locked in, again, nothing odd about that. Around this time, the person to pick last, started insisting that they go mid, even though the third person to pick had already called mid. Second person to pick went top. Third person went mid , then the enemy team chose. As soon as it was my and last person to lock, they locked in instantly. I knew that they wouldn't go bot and doesn't make a very good support. I asked the rest of the team what I should do and they basically said go whoever I wanted, so I locked , 'cause, you know, skilled champ.

Tl;dr - we had a crushing defeat, and both flamed and it seemed to be 's first time playing.

I don't normally get angry about trolls/feeders, but this game got to me. It got me thinking, in the lobby, we all knew that it was going to be a bad game ( was screaming for someone to dodge). So, rather than someone have a time/match ban for leaving, how about having a voting system to avoid trolls before the game even starts? I know that there may be lots of problems with this, and it would probably have to be a 4 vs 1 vote to skip, but I feel that this would be a fair way for people to have some degree of choice over who they play with, without having to incur a time penalty. I'm sure that we've all had that game (Normal or Ranked) when someone locked in Attack Speed Support and claims it works because they tried it in a custom once, and everyone on your team begs them not to troll. In that situation, surly it would be worth giving the teammates a choice of whether to play with them or not. I see that this may cause some Champion comps/builds that are a little... odd, not to be tried out, thus making the community less creative, but Ranked is not the place to try a new build on a Champion that you've never played before.

But what about that game when locks mid and you and your team think "Ok, we'll give them a chance because it seems like it could work" and then they go 1/28/4? In the lobby you didn't know they would be feeding (yes, they may be unskilled, but I've got an idea about that later) so if there was a dodge feature, you wouldn't use it because you thought that there may be scope for a new way of playing. My idea is that if in your team there is one (or more) player that has a horrific score, then the players with a 'normal' score could be given some kind of compensation. I'm not talking a free skin whenever you have a feeder in your team, but possibly an IP boost or fewer points knocked off in Ranked. Again, I know that there would be balancing issues, but it would make that loss that was totally out of your hands that little bit less sour.

So what if they are just a bad player? I'm using the term 'bad' quite freely here because there is no definite definition of skill in a game so widely varying as League. We all have good game and have... less good games. Hopefully you would all feel bad for your teammates if you had one of your less good games in Ranked or even Normal (been there, done that). But it would be unfair to judge someone on one of their games, unfair even, to judge someone on ten games in my experience. But if someone consistently loses games, could they be given a mark (similar to the honour banners) to show people that they have gone on a bit of a losing streak. Just to make it clear, I am NOT saying that all players that have lost a couple of games should be given a red warning sign saying "I'M BAD AT LEAGUE :D", I'm just saying that there could be some kind of 'warning' to people, especially in Ranked. There could, of course, be some rewards for sticking around and playing with them. Something small like an IP boost would probably be fine for most players.

These are just some of my ideas born out of frustration of trolls/feeders and I understand that they may be complete verbal diarrhoea in a long winded rant. If you have made it this far, thank you for reading, have a Poro Snack <3