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An Open Letter to Riot Staff, and League Community

Summer Lion·6/8/2014, 9:27:05 AM·14 votes·785 views

Copied from my post here:

http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=4585919

Hi, everyone, I'm a long time player and a first time writer, so I hope you'll bear with me as I work through what I want to say here.

For a long while I've played League of Legends as a casual try-hard. I have a life, work, errands, college and all that other stuff that keeps me away from playing League, but when I play I do my best to climb in ranked, and maybe some day see the the higher tier colors on my profile page; to that end, I've begun watching a lot of LCS streams over Twitch and Youtube, hoping to learn what I can from watching the professionals at work. And I have learned a lot: subtle mechanic interactions, hidden passives, micro-methods, and so on and so forth. But recently I learned something else from my time watching pros training for the LCS. I learned that the toxicity of certain players in the LoL community, which I had believed to be only in the Bronze and Silver (and maybe the odd Gold,) tiers that I had become so familiar with, exists, well, in every tier. Even Professional Play.

Anyone who's played League of Legends for any amount of time is familiar with this topic. I doubt this is limited to League or even just MOBAs, as I have seen for myself (probably most of you have) just how competitive, virulent, and hateful players can be in almost any game. But I feel that I've noticed it even more strongly here in this environment. Players with heavy racial slurring, violent threats and even legitimate hate-mongering are just a few of the senseless, often badly typed toxicity I've witnessed in my time on LoL. Up until now, I thought that hopefully the majority of these transgressors were stuck in my station of the ranked ladder (high silver,) and beneath, and the odd troll or trash-talker in gold. This is not the case.

Let me step back for a moment and return to the bit about pro-players teaching me things through their streams. I happened to be flipping through some solo-queue recordings of TSM Dyrus' when I came about a video of Dyrus and the then TSM member "Reginald" in a heated debate. I'll provide a link here. In summary, Dyrus appears to be playing in solo-queue, and grows tense with a trying game. Reginald is speaking to loudly and animatedly for Dyrus to concentrate, and Dyrus tells him to shut up. This is by no means a good reaction, but what follows is worse. Reginald continues to antagonize Dyrus, egging him on with inflammatory statements and questions, demanding that Dyrus apologize. I won't take up too much time to go into detail on it, so go ahead and check out the video before reading on.

I'm not here to start a flame war on this particular event. I'm just using it to demonstrate how it dawned on me that these were professional players, and that Reginald's heavy toxicity was identical to one of the many forms I had seen even in my ranked games. I asked other, higher tier friends of mine and heard plenty about griefers, toxic players and flaming that went on in their games as well. Up until now I hadn't thought of it much, but I guess for a long time I figured that if you could play well enough to get to Platium, Diamond, Challenger, and even the streamed LCS games, you'd probably not be a hateful, short-tempered player with huge issues and no ability to accept your team, work as a team and handle mistakes and problems in-game (and for pros, out-of-game, with their set team.) I find it hard to understand how a player can have this kind of mindset and still get wins enough to go up in the ranked game, when other players work hard to be accepting of their "randies," trusting of others' calls, and doing all they can to help pull a bunch of faceless players from a random queue into a solid unit with a single objective and a positive atmosphere.

This kind of attitude isn't just in-game, however. I've seen plenty of patches come and go over time, and the kind of reactions I see and hear in other players is astonishing, sometimes. Endless comments and posts and messages, on boards, champion select and even external social media have been repeated time and time again: "My favorite champ _________ gets a nerf? Wow they're worthless now. And also I hate them." Or "Of course ________ gets a buff, cause he/she isn't nearly strong enough already, Riot so dumb." and "!@#% Riot they haven't even touched on _________, garbage devs." Usually followed by a plethora of threats to leave the game and never return. Riot has been creating, editing and correcting content for this game for some time now, and I don't think anyone knows better than them what's happening with champions across the Fields of Justice. In general, anyway. They have systems in place to tell them about stats for champs and items in every elo, at every tier and in every game ever played, worldwide, and many hard working people on teams devoted solely to balance and counterplay mechanics with access to all that data. That being said if you have a problem with something there are far more effective and constructive ways to get your point across. You're looking at one right now (the forums, haha.~)

Even non-mechanical issues I've seen more of the same. When Sultan Gangplank came out of the pipeline onto live, there were an alarming amount of people who decided to write vehemently how terrible the skin was. I recall with some clarity the words "You'd either have to be a complete idiot, or really love Sultans to buy this skin" prefacing a request of Riot to review the skin creator's place on the team, and ultimately, his job.

I can't imagine, for any reason, someone to find so little in their own life to give themselves validation and value that the need to purposefully and voraciously attack developers, players, and forum-posters for a video game. A damned good one, IMO, mind you, but a just a game nonetheless. A game is something people do for fun or relaxation. What brings people to do all in their power to put others down to make themselves glean some small sense of power or self-righteousness or for any reason is beyond me. I'm really glad to see that Riot has put forth some effort into refurbishing the Tribunal to be more effective, communicative and more immediately reactive puts some of these concerns at rest, but I'd like to ask all of you to help me make Valoran a better place.

When games go wrong, or mistakes are made, offer constructive criticism to your faltering team mate, or accept it with grace when it was your mistake. Send your requests and arguments on mechanical changes to Riot in effective ways like well-thought out comments/posts on the forum, with explanations and reasoning describing how you feel a better change or reverting a change can be made. I'm not asking for people to be perfect, because we all have bad days and limitations. I'm asking for all of us, myself included to bring our best face to the best game we can. So much negativity can be completely dissolved with just a little bit of positivity.

So I hope that maybe this small motion to the community of developers, posters and players alike can help to dissuade toxicity, even if only a little. The next time someone in game fumbles, or says something discouraging, I intend to do all I can to retain a positive, team-like atmosphere, and work with that person to bring home a win. Or at least have a fun loss.~ And anyone else here, Riot staff, or Summoner, who wants to help preserve that kind of atmosphere for this game, -our game,- and our community, I'd like to personally offer my thanks to you, and wish you the best.

In closing, GG WP,

-MasterKuro, NA Server

8 Comments

Can Cause Cancer6/8/2014, 10:03:45 PM3 votes

tl;dr

7hreshprince6/9/2014, 5:50:24 AM1 votes

Kind of off and on topic, it would be nice if there was a mechanic that made it so you did not get matched with people that you have ignored. (If there is one I would love to know it) I have gotten to the point where if someone is just raging or saying mean things in chat I mute/ignore the player now and personally if I never got paired with them again I would be happy.

JackYAqua6/8/2014, 6:34:47 PM1 votes

I think you forgot to post the link?
Edit : Even without it this post is awesome :)

Nssheepster6/9/2014, 8:52:33 PM1 votes

TL, but I did read it...I agree. I do. But it's....naive, I guess that would be the way to put it. You aren't the first to say this, many others have as well. Some pros have even said the same kind of thing. It hasn't changed anything though. The tribunal changes will help somewhat in ranked, but with the ease of making a League account, banning someone won't keep them from normals. It would be nice, as others have said, to be able to ignore someone and never get matched with them again, either as an ally OR an enemy. I'm unclear as to why that doesn't ALREADY happen, since the ignore function is really just a mute button without that. Overall though, there will always be jerks in any kind of MMO. The things that makes that bearable are the methods to remove them from our sight.

...Tl;DR? Saying it won't help. Nothing can change the negativity. What can change is how we ignore it, both as players and through the ignore function.

Not trying to be harsh, just pointing out the obvious.

Angry Monster6/9/2014, 9:50:56 PM1 votes

for anyone who skipped the post to see comments and see if post is worth reading, its not.

So your example for Pros is darius getting mad at the team owner.... Talk about ignoring the outside dynamic. They were obviously on VOIP (keeping it out of game) and since they are so close they are going to be harsher with each other.

Also using pros as an example who play 12 hours a day is stupid. Everyone gets mad, it called being human. The pros spend most of their life in front of a camera. They are going to be human from time to time and mess up.

These posts about how we all need to get along are a joke. Try to be civil fine but unless you are diamond level you will not see the other players that often or at all again.

Terchio6/12/2014, 7:11:12 PM1 votes

Not that being aggressive is somehow non-toxic in things like patch notes, but it does have the positive side-effect of actually getting some attention at times when needed. Often the flavorless posts about "you guys are really trying, but..." look hypocritical and dull in the end, as though you don't really mean what you say. Also, it's easy to ride those harsher feelings when I picked my champion out of 118 champions, and they pick my champion to fiddle with and decide that his path was unhealthy, or some balogna (R.I.P. Skarner).

Some champions just get undue attention at the wrong times, and the decisions made almost always either feel antiquated, or just plain insulting to me as a fan of the character. Viktor is the same way, and I've had some stints with him as well. However, for whatever reason, both still ride the shallow end of the power pool to this day, and seemingly forevermore.

The irritating thing about it all is that champion tweaking seems to be a long-litigated process that never sheds out results until the problem has exploded. Never minor tidbit fixes unless it was a very unintended bug. Then, after that, it's a case of dousing the fire and putting a rug over it. It very much reminds me of the legislative branch of this very nation; Problems can't be solved because action won't happen until a budget crisis hits its final day, and then people are all relieved that we barely made it out of a supposed self-caused disaster.

ThePureOne6/9/2014, 10:08:23 AM1 votes

I agree with your post to some extent but what i found to be the best solution is to just ignore everyone during chat focus your lane and ping only when necessary i know im a bronze and all but i've had better gameplay by doing these things. So anyone looking to have a better relaxed game just ignore everyone on team and have fun with it :)