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Believe it or not the community is on the toxic side

Urgonnalearn2day·12/18/2015, 6:19:41 PM·12 votes·3,905 views

But but but...

Exibit A) our forums. Funny how we're little love muffins in game, but are pretty horrible to each other and the Riot staff. Calling someone an idiot because they ruined your champion is toxic.

Exibit B) When someone gets banned we almost cream ourselves at someone's downfall. That's toxic...that's like taking joy at someone being sent to prison. It's one thing say "good justice was served" it's another to talk about drinking their tears like you're Eric Cartman.

Exibit C) Riot doesn't believe the community is positive. Ideas are turned down because it'll lead to more toxic behavior. For example: allowing games to end without penalty due to AFK or DC. Basically they believe if implemented non meta champ players and feeders will be bullied into AFKING or DCing. How does that work if the community is mostly nice people? Or are we admitting there's likely more jerks than we want to admit?

I believe the community needs to focus on sportsmanship and tact.

19 Comments

Deep Terror Nami12/18/2015, 6:31:02 PM16 votes

A. The forum is not necessarily representative of the whole community. Most people never visit the forums, and most of those that do don't even contribute to them much; Toxic players are a minority, they're just really loud about it. People that are content about their situation don't tend to go making a big deal over it.

B. If you really read the threads about people being banned, there are a lot of people that actually try to explain to them how the system works and what they did wrong. They turn against that person typically only when the person decides that he has done nothing wrong and starts insulting everyone (though sometimes they start right in the OP).

C. What? Maybe they ignore some ideas because it'll lead to negative behavior, but allowing games to end without penalty because of DC/AFK is actually something they consider. I'll even cite my source for that; https://ask.fm/RiotLyte/answers/132562353346

TL;DR - You're right that people need to be more positive and sportsmanlike, but the majority of the community is neutral or positive, not negative. Negativity bias just makes you notice and remember the negativity far more.

RiotSlumber Jack12/18/2015, 9:36:00 PM12 votes

I'm on a plane right now, but I'll drop in real quick (ish) to give some insight.

A.) Our forums, and other sites like Reddit, are a passionate and vocal bunch but are not representative of how the greater community acts/thinks. Can't determine the health of the entire community based off a small data set.

B.) I can understand why this might come up; we've created a place on these forums that are specifically meant for players to talk about their punishments and for others to review/discuss it with them. This is intended; most of our player base understands what is normal/acceptable behaviour and can shine light on what might be a confusing situation to a punished player.

Of course, having a solid understanding of what is normal can also mean a player might look at a punished player and say "...really, dude?". It can be difficult to empathise with a punished player.

C.) I mentioned this in the point above, an overwhelming majority of our players have a very good understanding of what is acceptable/good behaviour and have never been punished. Of the players who have? Almost all of them reform and are perfectly fine afterwards.

Also, we're exploring the idea of surrendering early in certain situations, but we're still prioritising new champ select at this exact moment. We want to make sure you actually have that for the 2016 season ;)

RiotRiot Whiskies12/18/2015, 6:46:34 PM9 votes

When I think of the League Community, I remember most fondly the times I was privileged to interact with players IRL. Most recently, I attended the All Star event in LA, and it was a truly thrilling experience. I sat outside in the rain with several others, and we joked about how even the rain would show up during a drought to watch the 1v1's, we took silly selfies in our ponchos sipping our hot chocolates [with cinnamon! mmm], and in general had a really great time. I even saw fans helping to pass out hand-warmers to strangers.

I hope when you think of this community, you can remember to look outside of what is easiest to see in-game and on these boards :]

TheBadness12/18/2015, 7:40:04 PM3 votes

{quoted}

But but but...

Exibit A) our forums. Funny how we're little love muffins in game, but are pretty horrible to each other and the Riot staff. Calling someone an idiot because they ruined your champion is toxic.

Exibit B) When someone gets banned we almost cream ourselves at someone's downfall. That's toxic...that's like taking joy at someone being sent to prison. It's one thing say "good justice was served" it's another to talk about drinking their tears like you're Eric Cartman.

Exibit C) Riot doesn't believe the community is positive. Ideas are turned down because it'll lead to more toxic behavior. For example: allowing games to end without penalty due to AFK or DC. Basically they believe if implemented non meta champ players and feeders will be bullied into AFKING or DCing. How does that work if the community is mostly nice people? Or are we admitting there's likely more jerks than we want to admit?

I believe the community needs to focus on sportsmanship and tact.

someone making logical sense....in the league of legends community? Holy shit![slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

ModUlanopo12/20/2015, 3:15:33 PM2 votes

Exibit B) When someone gets banned we almost cream ourselves at someone's downfall.

While there are definitely a few people who enjoy the schadenfreude too much, I know a lot of really dedicated people who volunteer their time to help people keep their accounts. There's a lot of effort and passion there.

Photos of Ghosts12/19/2015, 1:12:17 PM2 votes

Humanity is evil, so League players are evil. The fuck are you expecting.

Jubbinaut12/18/2015, 8:12:24 PM1 votes

{quoted}

Exibit C) Riot doesn't believe the community is positive. Ideas are turned down because it'll lead to more toxic behavior. For example: allowing games to end without penalty due to AFK or DC. Basically they believe if implemented non meta champ players and feeders will be bullied into AFKING or DCing. How does that work if the community is mostly nice people? Or are we admitting there's likely more jerks than we want to admit?

I found some things you might find interesting regarding this particular exhibit.

##I honestly don't know if this will be answered, but I actually have a pretty interesting question. Since chat is non-essential to winning in league (since you can communicate all the essential things through pings) why is there even chat in this game instead of a system of automated messages?

This is actually a great question.

We agree, chat COULD be non-essential, and we could start building the systems and tools to completely replace chat, such as the feature you mentioned of putting in short-cuts to automate messages, or systems like the "chat" system in Hearthstone. However, our design philosophy is to not completely remove a feature just because there is a potential for toxicity--we always assess the pros and cons, and try to see if we can figure out a design that is net positive. For example, although there is far less verbal toxicity in a game of Hearthstone, there's also less meaningful interactions and dialogue. In some games that remove chat, it's even hard to tell whether you are playing versus an AI or a human and that makes a difference in your connection with the game. It's nearly impossible to get to know someone without being able to express yourself organically through conversation, and if that's impossible, it's really hard to make friends. We were just reviewing data today that a majority of players have made a real, online friend in League and play with them a decent number of games a month--that's awesome. We think there is huge value in chat and some of our best experiences are those matches where you're chatting it up in games and become friends after.

To us, that positive experience is so valuable that it was worth trying features like Chat Restrictions and All-Chat Filters to try to reduce the negativity of chat, while still keeping the benefits.

Emphasis in the above quote is mine - the key sentence felt lost in that giant paragraph.

##Have you ever thought about making an automatic loss forgive mechanic for games where someone DC's for most of the game/the entire game or never connected?

We have a few changes we'd like to make to the Surrender System in 2016, including a mechanic that allows players to reset the game with no penalties (except for the player that DC'd) if a player fails to connect to the match. More details in 2016.

Daedalus87112/18/2015, 7:50:40 PM1 votes

{quoted} Exibit B) When someone gets banned we almost cream ourselves at someone's downfall. That's toxic...that's like taking joy at someone being sent to prison. It's one thing say "good justice was served" it's another to talk about drinking their tears like you're Eric Cartman.

I can't get excited about justice?

Exibit C) Riot doesn't believe the community is positive. Ideas are turned down because it'll lead to more toxic behavior. For example: allowing games to end without penalty due to AFK or DC. Basically they believe if implemented non meta champ players and feeders will be bullied into AFKING or DCing. How does that work if the community is mostly nice people? Or are we admitting there's likely more jerks than we want to admit?

Just because Riot believes something doesn't make it true.

macromite12/19/2015, 4:45:36 PM1 votes

toxic players get responded to toxicly, if your having a major recurring toxicity problem, its you.

Korillo12/18/2015, 8:24:14 PM1 votes

The majority of the community has not been toxic in my experience.

[slayer-pantheon-thumbs]