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League feels like it's getting more toxic recently

Nameless Voice·5/28/2014, 3:05:01 PM·2 votes·527 views

Recently, I've noticed that League of Legends seem to be getting even more toxic than usual. Perhaps I am alone in this, but in the last month or two I've seen a marked increase in the number of trolls, ragequits and AFKs, and practically every game has at least one flamer. League was always bad, but it seems to be getting really out of hand now.

Most games seem to be decided by which team has a player who makes a bad play early on. Not because the other team snowballs from the advantage, but rather because the team starts to flame and blame instead of focusing on the game, then eventually someone decides that the game being 4 to 1 at 5 minutes means that it's lost and they need to start trolling / go afk / ragequit.

When asked to stop flaming or why they are trolling, the toxic players will often say that they have no fear of punishment for their actions. They laugh at chat restrictions and point out that the Tribunal is down so they can do whatever they want.

It doesn't actually matter if this is true or not. Even if every toxic player I reported was instantly banned from the game afterwards, it wouldn't make any difference because I rarely see the same player more than once anyway. By the time any reporting might happen, the damage is already done, the game is lost, and 4-9 people have had a bad experience.

Has anyone else noticed this recent increase in toxicity? Or is it just me? Or perhaps it's just limited to high gold ranked games on EU West?

I don't really know what could be done to improve the situation.

These toxic players tend to follow common patterns, which has often made me think that it should be possible to automatically detect them in real-time and apply punishment/compensation accordingly, but that would need a very difficult and complex system.

4 Comments

Sir ArmaMalum5/28/2014, 3:16:55 PM1 votes

I think the toxicity hasn't been increasing but rather the notably positive people have lessened. If you don't already, try starting every game with a "gl hf" and maybe crack a joke or two. I've noticed that the slight bit of tension that complete silence in the beginning of the game can make that first blood seem a lot worse than it actually is, breaking that tension can really help.

Hyrum Graff5/28/2014, 6:02:15 PM1 votes

Subjectively, I find that League's toxicity goes up and down over time - I just came out of a really awesome period of time, and have only started getting more of the players you describe within the last week.

Objectively, we as humans are really really really good at seeing patterns - regardless of whether there actually are any - go look at some completely randomly generated numbers, and I promise you'll find some stretch that you swear isn't random (like, 1-2-3-4-5). And, even if you have personally been matched with more toxic players, it's more likely that you've simply gotten bad luck, than that league's toxicity was increasing.

Although, I do know the tribunal was moving slowly, so it's possible that had an effect.

Nameless Voice5/30/2014, 3:11:28 PM1 votes

After making this post, I started keeping statistics. I played 33 games (yes, it's a very small sample size) and I saw "trolls" in 9 of those games. That's 27% of the games.

Of course, 33 games is hardly a representative sample size, but I did start keeping track only after I'd noticed the increase. There have always been some amount of trolls, but I'd usually only see them in maybe 1-5% of games before.

Just to be clear, I had better explain my definition of a troll:

  • Someone who ragequits or goes AFK
  • Someone who intentionally tries to lose the game (e.g. starts building random items and roaming around the map, or outright says they don't want to join any fights because they want their team to lose.)