Toxic Players, Trolls and General Asshat-ery

Okay so let me just preface this by saying that this is mostly just a rant. I know that this happens to everyone and that Riot is not seemingly doing anything to remedy the situation and that this is just another post among hundreds of thousands of posts about toxic players but this is just something that ruins my entire game experience. It makes me just not want to play anymore and so I need to talk about it because I love league fundamentally but I hate about 50% of the people who play it, roughly.

There are people in this community who are incredible to play with and some days I just have so much fun meeting people and playing the game and learning about champs and it's just the best. And then there are days where I log on and literally EVERY SINGLE GAME there's at least ONE smurf or ONE toxic player who is only there to troll or there's BOTH. And the situation that happened just minutes ago is honestly the tipping point for me. I'm at the point where I don't even want to play games by myself anymore. I'd rather just get a bunch of my friends in on the queue because it's more fun to play with people I know versus being potentially matched up with a bunch of douchebags.

This friggin guy.....

Okay so I main Tristana ADC, right? I just got her legendary skin and I was super excited about it so I was like "I need to play a game with this skin it looks so fun when I watch videos of it" (and I was right, it's incredible but that's another story). So I'm in the bot lane after minions spawn and I'm sitting there waiting for the jungler to need a leash. Jungler is nowhere to be found so I'm like whatever I'll just start killing minions while I wait for my support (who was Vel'Koz, like of all the champs to pick for support....whatever). A couple levels go by and he's still not there. So I ask "hey where's support? It's no big deal I'm doing okay, but I need you down here soon." Team is like "dude chill okay, it's just a game." When I'm very calmly just asking for help. So I only pinged once after that. Jungler shows up finally (jungler was Vi) and she's like "where's support at?" I'm like "hell if I know." I MAKE IT ALL THE WAY TO LEVEL 6 AND SUPPORT IS NONEXISTANT. And of course, I can only keep up the lane by myself for so long against Alistar and Ashe, and I die. I ask again politely "Hey supp can you come help me?" he says "Well I don't want to be down there I would have died too..."

Um. What? How? You let me go 1 v 2 in bot lane for 6 levels by myself because you claim you don't want to feed or get a high death count?? Wouldn't it be better to go 2 v 2 and have NOBODY DIE?? YOU'RE JUST FORCING ME TO FEED BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT HELPING ME AND NOBODY ELSE IS HELPING EITHER. THEN HE HAS THE NERVE TO SAY (mind you he is still at level 3 while the rest of us are at level 7) says "Wow Trist you're trash." after I died one time because HE DIDN'T HELP.

So naturally I start to get pissed. And when I get pissed I get flustered and I start playing poorly because I'm so focused on being mad that I can't focus on the game itself and the opposing team knows my support is missing because it's been a long enough time that they can observe so I'm the perfect person to gang up on to help their team get fed. So my blood is boiling at this point. And I get it, it IS just a game, but I love league and I'm trying to win my lane and this guy is ruining that for me.

This guy literally did nothing the whole game and just kept telling me how terrible I was. He did not help at all (even when he wasn't completely ignoring our lane---he was like 4 or 5 levels behind the whole time and just telling me how much I suck and he kept going to other lanes to help them because he said he "didn't want to die" and how he was just "trying to have fun"). Meanwhile my teammates are getting just as pissed because he's ruining the game for me and everyone else because he's farming on their lanes, stealing their CS and just being an overall nuisance. My teammates started to badger him about helping me and he just refused. Even Vi nicely explained to him the importance of support and how the position works because she assumed that he never played it before. He knew, he just liked watching me struggle because he thought it was funny. And he was very clearly throwing the game.

It got to the point where Ashe (from the opposing team) sent me a message like "dude what the hell is going on over there?" and I was like "bro my support doesn't want to help me" and she's just like "dude that sucks I'm sorry you had bad luck"

When you can talk to your OPPONENT and you get along with them better than your own teammate that is sad.

I am so TIRED of toxic players. It makes me sick that there are people whose only purpose in life is to troll and throw games and screw up the experience for everyone else involved. You not only ruin the game for your teammates, but you ruin the game for the people you're playing against as well because it's not fun to play against a team that isn't working together due to someone throwing the game. Every position is important. The game is only fun if you actually have to try to win.

But I don't even bother reporting anymore because I know nothing will happen to them. They won't be banned. They won't be prevented from making new accounts. This is just the nature of it. And that's really sad to me because this game has so much potential to be 10 times better than it is. But because Riot is more concerned about the quantity of players over the quality of the game play I guess this is how it's going to be and I need to get over it. But it sucks because this was my one opportunity for a game this evening and this one individual ruined it for me. I get that League is the most played game in the world, and that's all it needs to stay afloat, but that shouldn't be an excuse to plateau and not try to improve the experience for the players and succumb to mediocrity. A fancy menu screen doesn't do shit to improve game play. Filtering out bad apples does. I would rather League of Legends be P2P if it meant that I didn't have to deal with toxic players as often. And I feel like most people in the community like me who want to play the game, win and have fun doing it, would feel the exact same way.