Chat Restriction and Honor Locked, How Did I Get Here?

I've been playing League for only about 6 months. For the first month or so I only played unranked games with my friends. I didn't really witness the toxic behavior League was so famous for and I was having a great time.

One day I decided to give ranked solo queue ranked a try. My very first ranlked game ever I was told: I was trash, to never my play my champ again, to uninstall, that I was the worst jungle they'd ever seen... and it got harsher from there. I almost quit the game then and there.

I continued to play ranked though, and now I almost exclusively play ranked, sometimes with my friends, but more commonly alone. I was really surprised to learn how toxic people can be, but the most surprising aspect was it was always coming from my own team. We've all experienced it beforel; every time you have a less than perfect game, someone will call you trash and berate you in every way possible. It even happens when you have a good game. Once when playing jungle, I had 13 kills while the rest of my team had 2 or 3, I wa"Report Udyr, good jungler doesn't kill steal from his team".

I tried to take high road. No matter how bad a teammate was playing i never criticized him. I only ever said anything if someone was intentionally afk or inting. Even then, I always gave my teaammates the benefit of the doubt and assumed they weren't inting unless they said something in chat that proved they were. I tried to be supportive. If someone was playing well, I tried to compliment them even if it was just a "gj". Still the toxic behavior continued and I began to report more and more people who I felt who crossed the line.

Nothing ever happened. Nothing every changed. It got to the point where I reported someone almost daily. Most of the time it was when someone got titled and intentionally quit, when someone griefed like stealing jungle kills from the jungler, or when someone was unusually toxic in chat. I never once got a response from Riot saying this person was disciplined in any way. It became incredibly frustrating and I figured that Riot basically just didn't care. They never looked at chat logs. They never reviewed these games.

Tired of being verbally abused time and time again, I began to defend myself. I never started anything but when someone told me I was trash, I started to fight back. I pointed out that they shouldn't criticize me when their kda was worse than mine and they should focus on their own game. It never really helped though. Eventually I just told them to "go f*ck themselves" and left it at that. Riot didn't seem to care. So I didn't care. At least I was defending myself and I didn't feel like I was just sitting there and taking the abuse. I had realized mute and report just didn't work. Eventually I defended myself more and more and became pretty good at intricate insults that would really push my toxic teammates buttons.

One day I had a particularly bad losing streak. I had climbed to Bronze I and was a few LP away from my Silver promo matches. But then I lost. And lost and lost. I'm not sure what happened. It was probably mostly bad luck. I had teammates go AFK, I had toxic teammates, I had a few bad games myself. After 7 loses in a row, I told my teammates in chat during champ select, "I really want us to win this one. I'm coming off 7 losses in a row". That game wasn't a great game for me, but I wasn't doing horribly either. I was something like 3 / 5. Later in the game, our top, who was 0 / 5 said something like, "our jungle is trash, I didn't get a single gank". and then, "you know you should go play another champ, your a trash jungle, thats why you have 7 losses in row". He continued, I told him to shut up since he was 0 / 5. It escalated from there and some profanity was used here and there. Eventually the game ended with both me and him yelling at each other and neither of us devoting attention to the game. He apologized to the rest of the team because I had gotten him so tilted. My team told the other team to report him and not me. I didn't even report him though. This was just typical toxic behavior. I felt I said what I wanted to and I knew that reporting didn't do anything anyways.

Anyways, within an hour I received a notification saying that I had a chat restriction for the next 10 games due to negative attitude. I could send 1 message every 4 minutes to my teammates and I couldn't talk to the enemy team at all (using /all chat). The irony is that it is never the opposing teams that are trash talking each other so it was odd I was banned from talking to them. I didn't really care about the restriction at first. It did make it surprisingly difficult to jungle effectively, but 10 games is not even 2 days for me.

What was much much worse was that my honor was also locked and my honor level was reset to 1. Ironically, I had just hit honor 4 earlier that day. From what I'm reading it could be a month or two before my honor is unlocked and at least a few months to go from honor 1 to 2, which is required to receive season end rewards. Furthermore, I can't receive keys or boxes while my honor is locked and there is no way to track how far you are from unlocking. Not sure what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll create a new account, or maybe I'll stop playing.

This seems unnecessarily harsh. I'm not sure what a better system would be but whatever Riot is doing now is definitely not working as League is by far the most toxic game I ever played. I've finally get to see how Riot deals with toxic behavior first-hand and I see why it doesn't seem to be helping. I suppose my mistake was profanity in chat. It seems you can be as toxic as you want as long as you avoid certain words. What RIot needs to be paying attention to here is it isn't really the words themselves that is the toxic behavior, it is the attitude. It is the fact that if you make a tiniest mistake, your team will tear you apart. THAT is the behavior that needs to be dsicplined. Banning someone because they defend themselves in chat doesn't help. It makes things worse. I know Riot says they don't care who started it and I understand why they do that. Why they do that is the same reason why your mother punished both you and your brother when you fought when you were little. It's because they don't care enough to pay attention to what is really going on. Who started it IS important. And since Riot has shown they won't discipline those who have a negative attitude as long as they don't use certain words or phrases. we are stuck with this horrible system.