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The cause of League's reputation for having a toxic community.

Jaeus·6/21/2015, 6:48:58 AM·6 votes·1,250 views

It is pretty well known that the community for this game has a reputation for being "toxic" (thanks Riot for coining that overused term), a reputation worse than pretty much any other online game currently. While being popular is always going to enhance negative reputations, I've never seen it so prevalent as with this game.

And after playing for quite a while, I've figured out why. I've figured out what it is that causes this. And it's actually very simple: The Report system itself IS the cause.

Obviously, the immediate reaction is "That's crazy, how does a system that punishes "toxic" players and so forth make the community more toxic? That's stupid". But it's actually true. The system is fundamentally flawed. Primarily, it simply punishes anyone who criticizes or expresses any judgment or dislike for others on any level whatsoever. Teammate intentionally feeding? Better not say anything, because YOU will get reported for "verbal harassment" and nothing will happen to them for griefing. They can always just say "But I was having a bad game" and play the victim card.

And that's the problem, everyone plays the victim card and reports everyone else for ANY amount of criticism or disagreement. And this system is COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.

There's been a long history of very popular and major online games with open chat systems. Taking two of the biggest as examples; Starcraft and World of Warcraft. Blizzard doesn't have a system to report every little petty grievance you have with someone's chat, it's a massive waste of resources. If you have an issue, you IGNORE that person. If they do anything excessive, like ACTUAL "harassment" (not the reporting category this game has), then you can absolutely report so that ACTUAL offenses are dealt with. Somehow, all the minor bickering and criticism and disagreements magically sort themselves out when players are simply allowed to ignore or not ignore other players of their own accord.

I know that openly stating this for people who did not realize it will change nothing.

But, this one's directed straight at Riot, the reason your game has a reputation for a massively toxic and unpleasant community is not in spite of your report system, it is BECAUSE of it. When you give trolls and people who are too immature to either take criticism or ignore someone... when you give those people the power to punish others and not be punished themselves, YOU CREATE THE HOSTILE AND NEGATIVE ENVIRONMENT by enabling the rampant abuse of your unnecessary system.

If you removed the reporting system entirely, this game would become less hostile almost overnight because griefers and trolls and people who are too petty/immature to interact with others would not have a weapon with which to bludgeon others. If someone is bothering you, you can ignore them, it's very easy. Players have sorted things out online among themselves for about 2 decades worth of major online gaming just fine without a report system, and those games don't have the horrific reputation this game has. And there is no mystery what the inflaming factor is in this game.

8 Comments

Xonra6/21/2015, 7:22:15 AM4 votes

This is actually very true, as far as the report system giving the trolls a tool to abuse, not the other way around.

Far too often I will see people intentionally feed, troll people in game, grief with spam pinging, etc etc. I can't say to stop, I can't get annoyed, I can't say a single word, because all the system picks up is direct stats (which as you said they can just claim "bad game") and I would get punished for talking, even if what I said wasn't all that bad.

Many times I get frustrated not just with the way people are acting, but frustrated with the fact I 1) can't do anything about it 2) muting doesn't stop people who are acting a fool and 3) I can't say anything about it because the system actually punishes me, not the actual guilty party.

I mean, imagine if someone walked into a store and started just kicking over shelves and you said "Hey, stop that shit, what are you doing you crazy person?" because...that would be sort of crazy. The cop shows up and the person says "Oh, I didn't kick anything over, I just fell a lot. Sometimes people fall. But that guy points at you he was rude to me" So the cop arrests you and leaves the person to walk into the next store and act the same way.

That is pretty much how the current system works, and that is why I basically went from someone who enjoyed this game so much a year ago, to someone who has to mute their team when they go into games, because I'm afraid if I even respond nicely I will be reported because someone took it the wrong way and get chat restricted.

Jaeus6/21/2015, 7:15:03 AM2 votes

To add a little bit of clarification, I think people are just people, in any environment. But, when given a weapon like the report system to attack others with over every petty disagreement, people are simply going to abuse THAT instead of either sorting out their own problems (and even potentially turning things around into a positive interaction) or just ignoring someone.

And it is because of that weapon that interaction in this specific game is so much more generally negative and has a reputation as such. People can be quite reasonable when left to their own devices to sort things out for themselves, and people tend to learn and be better off for it. The report system gets in the way of that.

1011001110006/21/2015, 8:18:10 AM2 votes

Just as a quick side note, you're attributing this to the Tribunal, which is a system which we haven't had in effect for, what, a year now? The Tribunal was largely player-run, and it was effectively scrapped at this point and replaced with this garbage automated system for who knows what reason.

Nameless Hero6/21/2015, 8:51:00 PM1 votes

Dude, league of legends is currently the most played online game in the world.

Firstly You are right when you say that League has more assholes than its competitors but that is because it has a LOT more players than its competitors, and therefore, it will have proportionally more assholes too.

Secondly, I don't think that you have actually done any research because if you played HALO online, Call of Duty or DOTA2, you will see that the players can be just as bad or worse because open mic chat is almost required and everyone is racist and sexist.

Thirdly, and this is important, the guys at Riot published a scientific paper to explain what they learned from toxic plays in online games and the report said that on average, MOST PEOPLE ACTUALLY DONT REPORT TOXIC BEHAVIOUR. They suffer from the bystander effect and don't care much if an enemy player is flaming their own team mates and even in a team, most people don't bother reporting if it doesn't concern them directly.

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~syhan/papers/pn2213-kwak.pdf

It's on page 5, bottom left. You are welcome.

Therefore, your theory that people abuse the report button for any reason is quack because the data actually says that on average, most people don't bother reporting even if someone is being an asshole.

Finally, the reason why SC2 and WOW are calmer is because SC2 is mostly played in 1v1 and WOW requires very little in actual cooperation. There's a reason why they are criticised for being multiplayer games where you play alone.