Team Builder and Toxicity
Hey, I've never posted on the boards/forums before, but I have been playing LoL about 4 years now, and did not know exactly where to put this Discussion. Normally, this sort of thing doesn't bug me, but it did tonight. Sometimes, you run into players who have nothing better to do than trash talk, and honestly make the game an unwelcoming experience. I was playing with random people in a Team Builder game, and we ran into a premade team, of players much higher in rank than us. That being said, I was wondering how Team Builder actually finds opponents... It seems when I play in Team Builder, I'm always matched with people far above my ranked skill level, or when I'm Team Building with friends, the opponents are knocked down a notch. Does Solo Team Builder act differently? Anyway, back to the toxicity... They took this opportunity to rail us with insult after insult. Now, normally this doesn't bother me, as I see it more frequently nowadays, sadly. But one of my teammates was talking about how they felt like they should stop playing this game because of how much this sort of behavior arises. That just does not seem right to me.
The Tribunal is an amazing thing, to me. I love the idea of it, and I love how it tries to reform players, instead of just "banning" a username from use. However, it seems one of the players we ran into is abusing this system. He played with a name similar to "7a0dc5f8nt2". (I'm not trying to shame post or get this Summoner Name witch hunted, so the name given has no likeness to any known Summoner Name). Now, I don't think that's a very common way of making a Summoner Display Name. It looks like someone just smashed a keyboard and clicked "Ok". In the game chat logs, he boasted about how many accounts he had banned. But the group he was playing with seemed to have regular Summoner Names, and checking their account info pages showed they had played a multitude of games. However, here they were, being as toxic as toxic can be. And I don't just mean a few messages, they were verbally harassing us for 40+ minutes. I wish I would have captured a few pictures from the In Game screen and blurred out names, it would have been a lot more telling of just what we went through. I have some of the post game here, with names and likeness blurred out, as well as the post game stats. It's obvious we were not as good as them, again the Team Builder issue, and also just about ~30 seconds of taste of what the 40 minute game was like. From the pictures, I didn't report Darius, I gave Ahri honors, and I tried to keep everything color coded. I also cropped a little bit out of what I was trying to say which was "All of them or just Lee and Vik?" in reference to the reporting offenses of "Verbal Harassment/Abuse".
Basically, it is just sickening sometimes what this community can be like. However, not everyone is like that. My team was very well behaved during the game (mostly, my team's Garen got a little angry at how much they kept talking and how absurdly rude it was), and he even complimented the one player on the toxic enemy team for being kind. It's obvious they were better than us, and were matched up with us for whatever reason, but that is no excuse to derail a perfectly fun, competitive game into half an hour of depriving messages and toxicity. Hopefully other Summoners out there are having a better time on the Rift, and don't run into this sort of thing. And if someone you're playing with has a bad experience like the players on my team, I like to keep a good attitude and remind them they can mute anybody in the game if they feel they need to. Nobody should feel like they are being talked down to when they are trying to relax while playing a game, or practicing something new they wanted to try.
So, what can a Summoner do besides report the offenses, and try to console their team? This particular game didn't affect me greatly, but if it had been a ranked game that someone else was taking more seriously than I would, I most certainly would feel attacked by this sort of behavior.
