Toxicity in League of Legends

Hello all,

While this is my first post on the League of Legends Board, I hope that at least some of you will read this and comment your own experiences if you want, as I am using this opportunity to vent a little on a topic that I have seen more and more of. A little about myself, my IGN is OneHiveCash, I am a pre-lvl 30 player as of right now but I will start playing ranked sometime in the next few days as I am fast approaching lvl 30. I have played League off and on for months, and lately have been enjoying the game enough to put some work and effort into my gameplay so that I can start my ranked climb. I consider myself to be a pretty decent player. At 19 years old my reflexes are still sharp and I have an analytical mind that loves logistics and strategy, so League has always appealed to me. In playing over the last few days. I have become very discouraged due to some of the players I have run into. The majority of these players are Silver I or above that I have stumbled upon in Normals. They are some very good and some very bad players in this elo range from my experience, but one thing that has remained constant is the incredible amount of toxicity that I have experienced from these players.

I will use a specific example from today to illustrate my point. Today I was playing a Normals game, in draft pick just like I always do. I have been playing quite a bit of Kindred lately in the bot lane and she was up so I locked her in. My support was a random Heimerdinger that didnt say much in chat except his role. Now, I have never played with a Heim support so I did not know if this was a good or bad pick and decided to roll with it. In game we were up against a Sivir and Thresh combo, a very good bot lane combination that has been tried and tested. Heim... well lets just say I would never recommend a Heim support because he is incredibly squishy and his turrets make it impossible to cs tho I am sure many experienced players already know this. He died early twice, for First Blood at 3 min, and a second time a few minutes later. Thresh was able to completely zone me out when Heim was dead, and even when Heim was up it was difficult to cs. The game progressively got worse and Sivir snowballed into a monster at around the 18 min mark. When we ended up losing I was left with the abysmal score of 0/8/1. Now, I obviously did not mean to feed, and I genuinely wanted to do well but with zero support early I was completely shut out of the game. Normally I would shake this off as a bad game and move on, but throughout the game the Sivir from the other team was constantly telling me in all chat that Kindred adc was terrible, and that I was trolling both teams, and a couple other people from their team chimed in to that effect as well. Ironically, the best player on their team as far as I was concerned was the Thresh, and he took my side in the matter by defending me against his own teammates. In the lobby after the game, I wanted to talk and apologize for a bad game, but I was repeatedly flamed by the Sivir and his teamates to the effect that I was a complete waste of time and should quit the game. While I am obviously not going to quit and I will probably forget all about the incident in a few days, it did make me think.

The amount of toxicity in the game, is an incredibly negative aspect, and to be completely honest being flamed for a bad game does no one any good and it just hurts the game as a whole. I do not understand why a stronger policy is not taken against toxicity as I am sure it has made many good players with positive attitudes quit the game as a result of constant flaming and abuse. While I understand you can report for toxicity, I have never heard anyone paying any consequences for their attitudes. Instead, I feel like I will be more likely to pay consequences for "intentionally feeding" as I was told I was reported for, when I definitely did not intentionally feed and instead did my best with the circumstances I was given. This aspect of the game sickens me, as I would like to believe that most players are not like this. Yet the farther I advance it seems the more of these players I run into and to be honest, it really does tun me off to the game. I will probably not quit the game as I enjoy it more than I care about people's attitudes, but i must confess I wish I could have a positive thing to say about the games overall attitude instead of negative.

This is my little rant, and im interested to hear how the attitudes in different elos compares to each other and what you all have to say about the subject so please feel free to comment and rant and do whatever you need to as I would love to read your responses.

Thanks for reading :) Cash