The more I think about it, the more I think Lyte's hitting the wrong angle

Not because the "good people do bad things more often than the bad people do bad things" which the data shows. I'm talking about the conclusion that these good people are just having bad days and being on edge. With a small population, this isn't reliable. People don't have bad days every single day. League is not a small population, even just the NA server. But with the population so larger, there will be a few initial cases. So now it has to go through transmission rates. What about everyone else? People also don't have perfect days. People take shit all day from a variety of sources of varying degrees and don't let it affect them. Why would League be any different? Let's say it IS different. These is something different about League that perfectly normal people who take it up the ass everyday suddenly explode because they didn't get Annie mid in a normal game.

That's a strawman, but it does cover almost all the edge cases of getting set off, so take it with a grain of salt.

But what motivation do they have to do this? Environment can be very powerful, but it is trumped by conditioning. I am very skeptical of the idea that ranked games are still THIS toxic after FOUR YEARS since I began playing. I know it's better but come on. There are countless stories of new players quitting league within two weeks because of smurfs.

And then there's the fact that bots < normal blind < draft < ranked have increasing amounts of reports. Someone wants to play Annie mid (I use this because this is Lyte's or Wookiecookie's example iirc) but doesn't get it and they REALLY love Annie. Off to a bad start already. So they introduce Team Builder.

But then Team Builder is about as bad as draft. Ranked is the king of shit but let's not pretend that's the only source of grief in League. If people want to relax after a hard day of work with League, why do they not play bots? That shit is relaxing as fuck. Saying you relax after work by playing ranked League is like saying you relax by going into the Korean server of Starcraft versus diamonds.

It doesn't make sense to me.

What does make sense to me is what also explain why reform doesn't seem to work. I have OCPD: Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. If you want more detail, wiki it, but in a single statement, if you believe that there is one perfect solution or one solution better than everything else and you are obligated to follow it, then you are almost certainly OCPD. Extra points if you believe you need to help others learn this solution, too.

About 1% of the US has OCPD

More than half of the population of what most would consider "highly successful" have OCPD. Businesspeople, athletes, scientists, engineers, high salary workers, etc. Wanna get some proof? Go sample some groups of "highly successful" or competitive people like business owners or college sports teams and administer an OCPD inventory. Most of them will exhibit OCPD traits if not be diagnosable.

OCPD can range on a spectrum. Some are very controlling over others and some have accepted that people are not really able to be controlled and shouldn't be. People do what they want. We have a very rigid view of the world. We may accept the world as imperfect shit, but we believe that there is an ideal and not just a vision of a better world. There isn't just a better world; there is a BEST world.

What does this have to do with League? Replace "world" with "meta." Replace "world" with "how people should act". Replace it with whatever suits your fancy, but realize this: Ranked is the most competitive environment in League; it is going to attract OCPD individuals. How do I know this? Because information about the meta and what's up and up to help you climb is EXACTLY what we want. OCPD is the only disorder that is valued to be a positive contributor to Americanness. It fosters hard working individuals that hold themselves and other people to a high standard. It also causes depression, anxiety, and control issues but that's not important right now.

This thread began with saying Lyte's going at this all wrong. Why is that?

Because if I didn't have Social Anxiety Disorder in addition to OCPD, I'd be telling people how shitty they are. And you know what? I wouldn't care if I were punished. I would say that people need to be told they suck for building certain items on Ashe. How else are they going to get better? The OCPD people who say these things are either NOT going to reform because they believe they have a MORAL obligation to help these people get better and trying to hold their hand doesn't work OR they are going to reform, building up that anxiety and anger because people aren't doing what they're supposed to do in their mind.

THAT is something reliable. You have a population of people that is heavily biased towards OCPD, and each person has their own "one true way" of doing things and are either going to try to control other people or bottle it up inside? Keep in mind, OCPD isn't just a one off. If my friend asks me to get him a coffee from Starbucks, and I know he wants a certain blend, and they cashier charges me for the coffee but tells me they don't have something that I feel is crucial for the coffee,

That fucking sets me off.

Every single moment of every single day I have to be on guard so that I don't say something awful to someone for something that doesn't really matter, and a lot of the times, I drop the ball and go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds because someone is sitting at 10 health and doesn't pick up the health pack that they are looking at RIGHT NEXT TO THEM. To "normal" people, that's frustrating but you just shrug it off because whatever. For OCPD who believe that TF2 players should grab health packs even when healed or when close to death regardless, it's not just not smart, it's stupid and therefore morally wrong and therefore doubly stupid. Everything that doesn't agree with THE (read: "our") paradigm of how the world works or the people should act is morally wrong and therefore doubly stupid.

So now think, you get two OCPD people in a game. One plays Jax and one plays Graves. The Graves builds IE first and the Jax builds BoRK first. The Graves player thinks Jax should have rushed TF, and the Jax player thinks Graves should have rushed BT. Never mind the circumstances. If these people are on the higher spectrum of OCPD, this is an automatic shit show. This is GOING to devolve into a toxic game. Because even if neither of them say anything at first, as soon as one person fucks up, the other is going to be on top of them like a vulture. Because NOW they have evidence this person REALLY sucks and is therefore a bad person.

I hypothesize that THAT is the reason for a significant if not most toxic games in ranked. Yes it's stupid. I know it's stupid, but it's part of the Almighty Paradigm. Each of us has are own, and we will adhere to it as tightly as possible. That does not mean we can't change our paradigm; we do so frequently. But to have abandon the idea that a paradigm exists is out of the question.

Now onto the meat: how I think we can fix it. In my opinion, OCPD individuals need counselling because the world isn't a paradigm no matter how much I want it to be. But that's beyond Riot. What Riot CAN do is work with the community to promote a larger paradigm.

Examples:

1. Stop it with the Armory bullshit. This kind of view on the population is EXACTLY what OCPD would come up with. This isn't "I am higher ranked than you so I am more knowledgeable than you, listen to me" it's "you are worse than me. STFU and don't you dare spew your unenlightened bullshit, pleb." Quite frankly, if you are a Diamond player were to go into a bronze game and use your diamond tactics, you'd probably lose because the environment is different. You know full well that you not only choose to play differently, you HAVE to play differently in order to win. You would make correct decisions fighting bronzies you'd never dream of in diamond.
2. A promotion of more inclusiveness in the League community strategy. This sounds like "sheep breaking." It is. if an OCPD doesn't know what to believe, they will follow the crowd and then stick to that if it works. Showing that there are many, MANY ways to accomplish your goal at whatever skill you're at is crucial.
3. A promotion of more inclusiveness of personalities. There absolutely HAS to be public transparency of people who are borderline toxic as well as things that may seem toxic to a few people but aren't compared to the rest. I would bet a lot of people in the League community feel like a positive contributor to the game is someone who shuts up and never speaks because they're going to get banned.

Riot, you can do number three. Fansites and Riot can also do number two. Who does number one? Us. And Riot, but mostly us.

Wanna know something interesting? Riot should pick some lower ranked people and do an article about their play. To be "Fair and inclusive"? No. To show that you don't have to imitate the top 0.01% of a region to win. It can be an article of 5 people from Gold V to Gold I who all player Lulu support even though they are statistically at a disadvantage in winrates.

Hell, get some bronzies up in here. If OCPD is a huge factor in toxic games, then we have to break it. Punishment and reform doesn't help. Breaking the paradigm helps. How can we do that? One way is to break the caste system of Bronze to Challenger. How do we do that? By treating bronze players and everyone else like they actually matter. How can we do that? We put them in fucking articles just like pros. Keep the articles about LCS, just add another section that's more relateable to the average League player.

Well that was cathartic. This is all my hypothesis. I have taken a few surveys by Riot but none of them about personality. If Lyte's already done an inventory on a portion of League players, then I'll move on. It just struck me as odd that the conclusion about good people having bad days was so automatic. Feel free to up/down vote. Comment or leave blank. Hell, feel free to rip me a new one in the comments. This also happens to be practice for dealing with Social Anxiety Disorder.

tl;dr: I think Lyte's wrong because League is full of people who believe there's a best way to do things and they clash with each other. Toxic games should be able to be managed by changing perception through policies and promotion instead of purely through direct punishment and/or reformation. Also, come at me bro.