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Poor Behaviour Among Low Levels

Omnipherious·9/20/2013, 12:43:25 PM·10 votes·700 views

Preface
My girlfriend is currently leveling up. I spectate her games on a regular basis to give her gameplay tips as she learns at her own pace.

It doesn't bother me that she encounters smurfs or duos (30 + low level) because she needs to hold her own and it is a good learning experience. The smurfing issue is a separate issue altogether anyway.

The Issue
What bothers me is the attitude of some players in her games and what seems to be a general lack of action / awareness about the reporting system and its effectiveness.

Observations I've made over her 100+ games since hitting level 10:

  • 2 out of 3 games have at least one bad mannered player on each team
  • I only see All Chat, so I ask what these people are like in team chat, post-game lobby, etc, to get a better picture before passing judgement
  • Most of the time (50~% of incidents) poor behaviour seem to start from misunderstandings / petty arguments about champion choice, lanes or roles and even *gasp - adhering to the meta
  • Often times (35~% of incidents) it is just the one player that begins to be bad mannered, causing others to react similarly in retaliation
  • It is rarely (15~% of incidents) two or more players specifically behaving poorly for the sake of it
  • Quite a few of these players seem to be young (early teens?)
  • Based on language use (confusing racial, homophobic slurs for friendly / competitive trash talk), their choice of names / insults, spelling errors, etc
  • However, about 1 in 3 are aware of their negative behaviour possibly resulting in punishment and almost immediately change behaviour to avoid reports
  • The nature of their worrying and choice of words when reporting is brought up has generally strengthened my assumption that they are young
  • Premades seem to house the worst of the toxic players
  • Less common - Bad mannered smurfs or previously banned players that are part of a premade (Quite common up until about level 15 or so)
  • Uncommon - Two or more that seem to make getting a negative response their mission (More common from level 20+)
  • Very common - Just the one person in the premade that goes wild while the friends do nothing to contribute / discourage their behaviour
  • About half of the players (between levels 10 to low 20s at least):
  • Are not aware of the reporting / honor system
  • Do not think it has enough effectiveness to merit use
  • Are not aware of the mute / ignore feature

The amount of poor behaviour that I have seen in these pre-30 games concern me. When I was leveling up prior to season 1 and while accompanying my friends leveling up during season 2, things were never this bad this consistently. It is painful to see and worrying to think that these people are going to add to the cesspool of bad mannered players already at level 30.

It's a good sign that many players at least start out neutral and stay neutral until and unless antagonised. The teamwork video (whether you think it's silly or not) was a step in the right direction and more of this type of encouragement should be present throughout the game via the client.

However, something needs to be done about poor behaviour at pre-30 levels.

The behavioural alerts are a good start. Consider going a step further and imposing light punishments whose impacts can be immediately seen or felt.

For example - You behave poorly, you get an alert. You continue to do so, you get reduced IP gains for x amount of time or lose your first win of the day. You continue to do so, you get chat restrictions or queue penalties such as the inability to queue alone / require 1 or more honorable queue partners.

Address toxicity before it bubbles up to level 30. Make reports at lower levels count for more or something, I don't know. It is not about designing a perfect system to fix the problem. It is about addressing what you can as soon as you can then improving from there. Taking another year to design a system is not going solve anything. Get something simple and implement it by the pre-season.

10 Comments

Doomsie9/20/2013, 3:52:04 PM4 votes

Excellent, well-organized observations on this issue. I've smurfed with new friends before, too, though I always direct them to beginner bot games, then when they're comfortable with that, to go to intermediate bot games. (I know smurfing adds problems for other new players, too, but with the toxic low-level environment, I worry about sending my friends alone into live SR games alone. I'M SORRY T_T).

I also always warn my new friends that once they get into low-level live games, they WILL get trolled or raged at, and to ignore it, or use the tools available to reduce the negative interactions. I hate that I have to frame it that way for them, but it is very blindsiding to be learning a new game, exploring how fun it may be for you, then to have some crazy just explode with insults and negativity at you.

I wanted my boyfriend to learn the game so he could play with me, but he was so turned off by the community (it only takes a few bad apples to make a terrible impression, and the bad apples are very vocal and untamed in the low levels lol...).

I have recruited a lot of people in to try the game (many more than my recruit-a-friend shows), and I'd say about half quit because of ragers and/or trolls as the reason they give to me. It isn't the semi-large learning curve that sends most of them away, I worry about the toxicity in the low levels. If they survive that, then my friends tend to stay.

Suggestions:

  1. Throughout low levels, maybe in-client player behavior pop-ups (to anyone, not just reported people) could show up at each new level achieved making some positive suggestions about player behavior. This would mean that the lowest level players would see the pop-ups more frequently.

  2. Or low-level information blurbs at load screens and at the start of each game could primarily be information about player behavior.

Bubble Butt Lulu9/20/2013, 1:05:41 PM1 votes

Hi there, great post. I've noticed those things as I've leveled up smurfs with friends over the years and it never really changes. I've come to kind of learn to just ignore it, focus on my own play and move on to the next game, which can be hard for some people, but it really is the best thing to do.I'd encourage you to make your girlfriend aware of the mute buttons. If you or your girlfriend ever want to queue up in normals as a 5 man premade let me know in game and I'll come play. :^)

slusho9/20/2013, 5:46:30 PM1 votes

A very well constructed post. Recently, I have made a smurf account for no major reason, but I have noticed the levels of nasty behavior is unbearable. I see people say hateful things primarily centered around a single source, which then later spreads to /all chat. I fell /all chat is used as a method to have people "defend" their stance when they feel that their own team is beyond their control. In a game where you have a substantial actions per minute, chatting should be used as a core method for communication to enhance the gameplay rather than take away.

Also what /all chat allows is the enemy team to take an advantage. Usually when someone speaks in /all chat about his team, the enemy team can assume that the team is not working together and is on tilt, which means the enemy team can play in a way to best take advantage of this. There is very few times when /all chat is really needed. I can think of the start of the game, commenting on something insightful, friendly, extraordinary, or funny, and at the end of the game. Other than those cases, there are few situations outside of people defending their point or saying report xxxx that are needed for the game in /all chat, especially for lower level accounts.

LilYonsan9/23/2013, 7:04:49 PM1 votes

Really awesome observations on your part, it takes a lot of dedication to assemble that sort of information.

Unfortunately, I am afraid to tell you that I have some bad news for you. No matter what Riot does, no matter how the tribunal works, no matter what kind of methods of monitoring things on LoL, there will never truly be a way to get rid of toxic players. It's a sad fact of life. What I've noticed though, is that the more you play this game, the more you learn to mute/deal with this sort of thing, and because of that, I am more able to focus and even win more games. I would be very interested to see what would happen if knowledge of the mute button and, more importantly, why you should use it before the problem starts, effects the gameplay of the lower leveled players.

Personally, I think what riot could do is to just give a tutorial on negative behavior before you play even your first game, and leave it available throughout the rest of your LoL career as you know it. It might even be fun to create a nineteen sixties-esque instructional video in black and white explaining what to do in case of a "toxic player dun dun dun"

As far as we the player go, we should have some resources on hand (such as a youtube link) that we found especially helpful when we learned how to deal with toxic players, and then use that to immediately share with newer players of the community.

KakiroShiro9/23/2013, 11:25:48 PM1 votes

I can't believe I read it all , you went directly to the point and gave us exactly what it is happening most of the time , mm putting myself right on this topic , well I've been playing for less than a month and half and I have already hit lvl 30 , and so I I started to get bothered by others b/c of my low quality gameplay or people telling me that I'm a noob or other things and so , as soon as it happens I just choose not to help those players during the match ;/ , I know it wasn't right , but umm well < something I do now is just blocking these players and just continue helping >, another thing would be that I got added to the Ignore list of some some players just because I couldn't assist them on time or I was playing really bad and it was all before I even get near lvl 15 and so nobody gave me any good feedback at that time even told me what should I do to avoid certain things or to be careful with that champion and blablabla , instead I got negative comments on chat and other things .

mmm and about when you're selecting your champion , I didn't like at all when people were just telling me what to choose , mostly b/c I had no idea of how to use other champions ,and I'm still seeing it happening , not to me anymore ,but to other players ,I would prefer to see new players choosing what ever champion they like the most or that they kind of know how to play with it.

  • And well again I really liked your post .
Ender Dottingtru9/25/2013, 3:52:40 AM1 votes

These are fantastic points, The language block that is in place when you first start is also a big help as it hosts a wealth of words that are blocked even a few that are only off by a letter or 2. This is just something i thought i could get behind as i just recently made 30 im not entirely sure about the smurf issue, it seems to die down the higher you get.