@Riot: Toxicity, Losing Streaks, and First Win of the Day
tl;dr I believe First Win of the Day is toxic and should be replaced with a different form of daily IP bonus. If you've ever had that one frustrating day where you kept losing and just couldn't get that damn First Win of the Day, you should upvote and bump and agree.
tl;dr #2 What if every day you get 150 bonus IP EVERY win, but only until your first loss of the day?
Let me start off with a little story of what happened to me a few weeks ago in ranked. Skip to the next horizontal line if you want to get to the meat of it.
It was a stressful moment of the year, with work and college midterms and labs to do and little time for leisure. I had been working all night to finish a midterm, and I thought that one or two games of League would help break up the stress and exhaustion. I was in the middle of a fairly moderate losing streak from a couple days before, but I knew that that didn't mean squat for a fresh game. So I opened the client and queued for ranked.
First game, I do fairly even in mid, keeping up in CS and not giving away any kills, but the other lanes lose, making my team overall weaker for teamfights and ultimately resulting in a loss. Alright, I say to myself, fairly common, it's not like I was in a position to carry, try again next game. I fill as Jinx and play aggressive, pushing the enemy botlane to their tower and building a solid CS lead. However, my support doesn't ward, and their enemy Nocturne ults in from fog of war, granting an easy double kill to the enemy ADC. Said Nocturne then does serious work, snowballing all the lanes and giving the enemy team an easy win. Okay, I say to myself, it was my fault I was pushed too far. I queue up again, filling as Jinx once more. This time I freeze the lane, leading up in CS and even getting an early double kill. Great, I'm in a position to carry.
As my support and I engage a level 6 fight, though, a gigantic shield appears on the enemy ADC. A surprisingly tanky and overlevelled Shen appears, and since my Flash was down from the early double kill I die fast. Apparently, the Shen had outplayed my top and jungler in a catastrophic early dive.
I still had a lead from the CS advantage, but that disappeared quickly. A Zed that had been killing my midlaner repeatedly goes to splitpush botlane, and nigh instantly kills me under tier 2 tower as soon as I arrive to defend. The Zed saves his ultimate for me every fight, and my already-behind team can't offer the peel to let me survive. Turns out the Zed doesn't like Jinx as a champion on principle.
At this point I'm a little annoyed at my small losing streak, but I'm a fairly positive player, slow to anger, and I never do anything to ruin team morale. After all, every game is a fresh set of people. So I queue up. I luckily get to fill as my best role, but we lose teamfights due to sloppy play. Another loss. Next game, I play a little too aggressively and get punished for it and never catch back up. Another loss. I start going on tilt, playing sloppy, and start feeding a little myself. As calm and controlled as I usually am, at this point I can't help but do a little rant at the end and start of every game. Nothing insulting or especially toxic, just letting off some steam about how ridiculous this losing streak is, and usually how bad I'm doing myself. I call my best role and play my best champion, getting early kills and roaming botlane for a double kill... and then my computer restarts itself for an off-schedule Windows update.
I log back in to avoid leaver penalty, and get in just long enough to watch the enemy team dismantle our base. I'm on full tilt at this point, I knew that. But I queue one last time.
And go 28-3 as Draven, easily 1v5-ing their entire team.
So what's the point of this story? No, it's not yet another rant about how elo hell exists or doesn't exist. There's one and only one reason why I kept playing for so long, even after such a long losing streak and after I knew I was on tilt. I dropped 2 divisions over two or three days, and it was because of one thing only.
First Win of the Day.
First Win of the Day, as far as I can tell, exists for two reasons.
One, it's a natural way for players to self-moderate the amount of time they play every day by being a strong gate for IP gain. It discourages playing for an unhealthy amount of time every day, yet gives players a daily routine, which helps retain the player in the long term and is better for their personal health. IP gain is overall much more controlled over time across all players.
Two, it encourages people to win. You don't get any bonus from playing a game and losing other than the regular IP reward, so there's never any incentive to play a game and lose just to get a daily bonus.
But how many times have you seen someone on the losing team say, "I just want my first win of the day, dammit"? First Win of the Day encourages a player to win a game every day for optimal IP gain. For a common player, who likes to play just a couple games a day, this results in the following daily pattern: Every day, play until you win a game.
There's a problem with this, though. Assuming this common player plays, one of six things happen every day.
- The player can win, then go on a winning streak. This feels great, but then again, we've established that the player doesn't often play many games a day, so this doesn't happen often. If anything, any real winning streak is more often spread out over several days, which makes the deal feel much more diluted.
- The player can win their first game of the day. They can then call it a day, or play a few more, win or lose. Getting a win feel nice, but overall, it's a fairly okay day. But only fairly okay.
- The player can lose one or two, then win one and call it a day, not suffering from any real losing streak. No real progress in terms of LP, but not too bad overall.
- The player can lose several games before they win one. Losing streaks feel bad, even if you win one in the end, because usually you've only undone one of the losses in terms of LP. Even on a small losing streak, it's a lot more likely that the player becomes toxic with frustration. Positive players can avoid being toxic, but overall this situation feels pretty bad.
- The player can lose several games and give up trying to get First Win of the Day. This feels absolutely terrible, and is quite likely to make the player toxic in some of those losses. This situation should definitely be avoided.
- The player plays a non-ranked queue for First Win of the Day, such as normals, Dominion, or Co-Op vs. AI, where the stakes are lower and often it's easier to win. Well, alright, you got the IP bonus, but the games themselves weren't very satisfying, now were they? This also often happens after the player just can't get a win in Ranked, which still ends up feeling pretty terrible.
It's as if every day the player is playing a Martingale, only the final win in the end doesn't at all make up for the potential string of losses.
First Win of the Day makes players feel obligated to get a win once a day. This means that players aren't encouraged to play more while on a winning streak, but are encouraged to play more while on a losing streak. This means that First Win of the Day encourages losing streaks, and since losing streaks promote toxic behavior, First Win of the Day encourages toxic behavior.
There, I said it.
I'm surprised that I've never seen a Rioter discuss First Win of the Day and its consequences in terms of toxicity. I'm sure everyone has experienced that horrible day where you just couldn't get a win after First Win of the Day came up.
It's very easily solved, too. The underlying problem is that First Win of the Day promotes the pattern of play until you win. All of the problems can be fixed by promoting the pattern of play until you lose.
This is because the phrase "quit while you're ahead" doesn't apply to League at all, because most of the time, one loss isn't going to destroy several wins' worth of effort. In fact, if you're ahead, there's little reason not to keep playing, because hell, you're on a roll. By promoting the pattern of play until you lose, the game encourages winning streaks and discourages losing streaks. And since players are often less toxic on a winning streak and more toxic on a losing streak, the pattern reduces toxicity twofold.
This new system still has to accomplish the goals of First Win of the Day. It must be able to gate the amount of time a player wants to play, gate overall IP gain, give players a routine, and encourage players to win (and discourage them from losing).
So here's an idea: Replace "First Win of the Day" with a thing called "Daily Win Bonus". As long as you have Daily Win Bonus active, you gain flat bonus IP for every win in any queue. This flat bonus is different for every queue: normal games give a moderate amount of bonus IP, say 100, Co-Op vs. AI games give a low amount, say, 30, and Ranked games give the greatest amount, say, 150. Custom games don't apply. Overall, if you maintain a 50% winrate, mathematically, on average the bonus applies once per day. I feel that it's important that this bonus IP be flat and not diminishing returns, or else problems of First Win of the Day reappear.
The clincher is: losing or leaving a game on any queue disables Daily Win Bonus for the rest of the day. Obviously, custom games don't apply. Daily Win Bonus resets 22 hours after the first game played while the previous Daily Win Bonus was active. In other words, if you play some wins and some losses in a day, Daily Win Bonus resets 22 hours after the first game you played that day.
Maybe even if your Daily Win Bonus lasts past the 22 hours, it'll last through one loss. Or maybe it takes 2 losses to disable it, or maybe after the first loss the bonus is halved. Maybe the Ranked bonus should be 200, or 250, or 300, maybe Normals should be 150, or maybe all queues except Co-Op vs. AI should have the same bonus of 150 IP per win. Riot can figure out what combination is the best.
Daily Win Bonus accomplishes several things even beyond the goals of First Win of the Day. A player who loses Daily Win Bonus is discouraged from playing, allowing themselves to self-moderate. Since it resets every day, players look forward to having a chance to gain lots of IP every day, giving them a daily routine. IP gains are more random overall, but mathematically average out to the same 150-per-day for normal queues. And it clearly encourages players to win.
What's more, it discourages players who don't often play Normals, Dominion, Twisted Treeline, or Co-Op vs. AI from playing them just for an easy win, since IP bonuses are reduced. This discourages players who have an abnormally low normal game rating from pubstomping less skilled players, and lets the players who do play those game modes regularly to have their fun. This is especially important for Dominion and Co-Op vs. AI players, where players from Ranked queues are often a nuisance.
Since this will reduce IP gains for Dominion players (Twisted Treeline players can play Ranked 3v3), this is also a great time to introduce Ranked Dominion, hinthint. IP bonuses for Co-Op vs. AI players are reduced, this is true. However, these players very rarely lose their games, so it more or less just means that every game has a moderate IP boost instead of just one big boost per day. Overall, not too much harm done.
Daily Win Bonus even encourages players who don't play non-Ranked to play Ranked. And, well, that's always something Riot has wanted to encourage.
As far as I can think of, there is only one point where Daily Win Bonus could result in toxicity, and that's that as long as it is active, the stakes in any queue are a little bit higher. Losing your Daily Win Bonus on the first game of the day feels pretty terrible, this is true, and could result in slightly more toxicity if the player decides to play more. However, I feel that the possibility of gaining the win bonus several times a day makes up for this. A day where you lose Daily Win Bonus early can only ever set you back 150 IP per day compared to First Win of the Day, while a day where you go on a winning streak can set you ahead several times 150 IP and can make up for several days' worth of losing the first game of the day.
There is only one real flaw to this system that I could think of, and that's that MMR boosting would have the benefit of the boostee receiving lots of IP along with the MMR. And that does make MMR boosting quite a bit more appealing. Well, personally I think this is a small price to pay for all of these benefits, and Riot can always remove the bonus IP when they crackdown on MMR boosters. It's your call, Riot. Maybe the more experienced designers at Riot can come up with a system that accomplishes the same thing without this problem.
Thanks for reading. Upvote for Riot response, I'd really like to have a discussion, even if Riot thinks my ideas are terrible. I also have a discussion about the problem with Ranked that I'll write up some other time. Ehhehehhehh.
