Boards›Player Behavior

Support Singed isn't banable, but that's not the point.

ModWuks·11/15/2016, 2:28:47 PM·317 votes·188,294 views

It's been a while since I've done a comprehensive Player Behavior post, so here's a shot at one of the most discussed concerns right now - Singed Support and other off-meta picks.

I'm not going to leave you hanging; no, Singed Support is not banable, and going off-meta is not banable. What is punishable, however, is refusing to cooperate with your team. And I'm not talking about muting other players because they're toxic or because you don't want to tilt yourself, but rather a refusal to explain what the actual heck you're doing to your team and subsequently work with your team to carry out something that they aren't used to and/or comfortable with work with your team even when they are uncomfortable with the position that you're putting them into.

Allow me to explain further. I like to go Swain Support. It gives a good return on value and allows you to steamroll their marksman at level 6. During champion select, I explain that I'm going to go Swain Support and we're going to be an aggressive lane. We enter the Rift. This is an example of playing off-meta (and is hella dirty; give it a shot sometime maybe). Picking the "Support" role, I know my primary responsibilities are to protect my AD carry (death is the best form of crowd control) and to shut down their bot lane control the lane.

Let's pivot to Singed Support. I've done it once. It ended up badly, but I made it clear that I would be playing Singed Support, and I played the role the best I could. Playing badly isn't against the rules, but refusing to play the role is another story. Had I gone smite Singed and just left my AD carry alone botlane AND our AD carry didn't understand that I was going to leave botlane for 5+ minutes, that's another story.

I'm going to wrap this thread up by quoting the Summoner's Code and asking you to put yourself in the AD carry's shoes. You're in series to promote into Platinum, and you see a Singed Support. They tell you that they usually top, and when they get support, they don't spend the first few levels botlane. They don't give you a choice but to comply or dodge. You can't dodge, and he seems pretty confident. The match begins. You're trying to farm, but the enemy botlane is harassing you hard. You're zoned off of the minion wave, and you become irrelevant fast.

The Summoners Code:

(1) Support Your Team

Being a good team player begins at champion select. Be open minded when considering the needs of your team. If you're the last one to pick, try to fill a niche in your team that hasn't already been filled. If everyone's picked and something stands out as a deficiency in your team composition, try asking for another player to fill the gap, or change roles to embrace that responsibility yourself. Remember, that by taking on a role you don't normally play, you'll learn more about unfamiliar champions and increase your own skill level.

(4) Enjoy Yourself, but not at Anyone Else's Expense

Once communication breaks down, the likelihood of victory is drastically diminished.

Additional Links:

There are clearly a lot of opinions on this topic, so if you'd like to contribute to the discussion, don't hesitate to drop a comment below. I'll be checking in throughout the day, and hopefully we can try to understand where each of us is coming from. Cheers!

897 Comments

Lunar Blade11/15/2016, 4:46:39 PM135 votes

This is what I've gotten from reddit and Na Boards

Just to clarify I joined this discussion netrual and I'm going to point out what I think is weird about this after all the information I've gathered.

Things AdellaideSkyhart did :

  • Proxy Duo Jungle Singed (Invades and Split Pushes)

  • Q'ed as Support

  • Leaves his adc in lane alone for 3+ mins

  • Origianlly played singed top, Climbed to Plat 5 using duo jungle strat, played after ban "following riots decision" and dropped to gold 5

Source : https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/5cyde6/3_million_mastery_smite_support_singed_ama_and/

Things people see wrong with it :

  • Adc + Teams experience is ruined due to off-meta role <--- I specify Off meta role because this will be very important later on

  • Adc becomes worthless because they're zoned off for first few levels he claims to return to lane before the adc can be doved

  • He queues for support, but doesn't play support

  • He doesn't communicate with team (Not true, he has a copy and paste written of his strat every game) although, regardless if his team likes it or not, he will still do it

What people said he should do :

"Play jungle instead" - Duo Jungling is all about taking advantage of the fact that you can completely deny the enemy jungler while your primary jungler can apply map pressure to other lanes, the sacrifice being a lane, may it be top mid or adc.

"Just play singed support" - he could, but clearly he is far less successful with that role thus dropping from plat 4 to gold 5.

My Stance on it all:

He doesn't play an Off-Meta pick, he plays an Off-Meta Role, now the issue with all of this is that, you can't exactly, queue for an off meta role, can you? I'm sure if there was a queue for off-meta he'd queue for it (not saying that's the solution) but what I'm trying to say that there's no way he can apply his strat without queuing for the position we all know as support.

This means people will say "he queues for support but doesn't intend to play it". Well ask yourself how is it his fault? He can't dm riot and ask them to add a new role. If riot want the meta to be as it is forever, they should clearly add "You can never play anything outside the realms of ADC, TOP, MID, JUNG or SUPP." They've designed ranked/draft to support this idea but have not clearly stated that it's the case. Meaning that the rules are vague.

I won't deny the fact that I personally, think his tactic is absolutely stupid and if you were to do that in diamond or above, they'd be at your nexus in 15mins but it works for his current elo and maybe he can evolve it to work in higher elos (probably not tbh xD) but you really never know what can happen.

Also about the part about ruining peoples experience, that's subjective and really can't be used as a strong argument, people could get frustrated for hundreds of reasons.

I probably won't be responding since I'm doing my uni work byeeeeee

Gromp12311/16/2016, 9:01:51 PM124 votes

EDIT: grammar

Okay, so we got together with game designers, player behavior folks, and player support agents to take a hard look at this player, the penalties, and the support tickets associated with it. It's clear this wacky Smite, Support Singed plays to win. It’s also clear the player struggles to effectively communicate intentions and strategy to teammates. In this case, unwieldy communication and the wacky Smite, Support Singed pick are tightly linked. So let’s pick them apart some.

Innovative and unconventional approaches to League keep the game fresh, and finding new ways to win motivates a ton of players. We 100% support the opportunity to innovate with surprising picks and strategies in League. The only real condition we place on that right to experimentation is that you play to win. However, sometimes unconventional approaches to the game have costs that outweigh benefits. This player might have a respectable(-ish) winrate on Support Singed with Smite and no Sightstone, but the pick and build also nets them a frankly enormous number of reports and probably gives their ADC high blood pressure.

That leaves us with two tricky questions:

Q: If intentions are clearly aimed at victory, is there an outer boundary for too unconventional a pick/build/strategy? A: No.

This is where we break from the Support ticket linked in the original reddit discussion. Real talk, this player is far from the only support in Gold V to skip out on a Sightstone. No one should ever get banned for skipping Sightstone. On the other hand, asking an ADC to lane alone while their support farms the enemy jungle truly pushes that teammate out of their comfort zone and that should mean something. We can all sympathize with the lonely Miss Fortune facing down Lucian and Alistar at her own turret, and it makes sense to us when they report this Singed player.

Q: Do unconventional picks/strategies increase the burden of communications for the player and their teammates? Y: Yes.

If you're gonna throw a curveball at teammates, you also need to communicate your intentions to teammates. You shouldn’t just expect everyone to "get it", so tell them what's up. To be clear, this player does attempt to communicate intent and strategy, but a good chunk of teammates across hundreds of games just don’t want to sign up for the plan. That lack of agreement on the new plan makes for a pretty chaotic game and leads to a huge share of this player’s reports. If a teammate in champ select says, “pls no, this is game 5 of promos”, maybe stick with something conventional and skip tilting your teammates off the face of the earth. In short, argue for your idea, but stay ready to be flexible.

In the same vein, teammates should be willing give unconventional picks/strategies a fair shot. They could surprise your opponents more than they surprise you. We need to leave plenty of space for experimentation in League (Hi Support MF), even if it sometimes leaves us in less than perfectly comfy games.

If you're about to play stunbot Twisted Fate tank support with Talisman, Righteous Glory, and Protobelt, let your team know the special kind of hell you're aiming to create for your enemies, and how they should adjust their expectations and approach to the game. If, instead of that, you wholly fail to communicate, or completely disrupt game after game, it makes sense that you’d rack up a ton of reports, net manual reviews and even potential penalties from Player Support.

The net result is that players, if playing to win, have a fundamental right to experiment in League. It’s good for the game. At the same time, common sense and good sportsmanship say that experimenting players need to clearly communicate intent and win conditions to their teammates.

In this Singed player’s case, the two-week ban’s already expired. For what it’s worth, we believe the penalty was warranted because in literally hundreds of games the player inflicted a huge amount of disruption on players who didn’t agree to their chemistry experiments. On the other hand, the player’s communication issues fall well short of permaban territory, and in retrospect the threat of a perma in the Player Support response was a bit much. We also see marked improvement in their efforts communicate with teammates in more recent games. It’s worth mentioning that cases like these are handled by humans and any player in a (pretty dang rare) situation like this can request further detail and a full review from Player Support.

Still, with intent to win confirmed, gameplay experimentation and innovation is something we stand behind even if it ruffles feathers. After all, conventional picks lose half their games too. We think this player could still do a much better job of communicating with teammates, but we also believe players should be more tolerant of different approaches to the game. The line here is the player repeatedly showing no flexibility in the face of resistance to their strategies, and consistently forcing teammates into a wildly different bot lane experience hundreds of times.

Shadòw11/15/2016, 2:34:20 PM68 votes

there is no clear line on what's bannable and what not.

until today i always thought you can play what you want as long as you try to win (he had >50% winrate)

imo he shouldn't get banned.

picking off META should never be reportable even if your team doesn't agree with you.

theArtifacts11/15/2016, 2:32:42 PM60 votes

THANK YOU

N Pelosi11/15/2016, 2:42:48 PM40 votes

{quoted}

Once communication breaks down, the likelihood of victory is drastically diminished.

Yet the player in question maintained a respectable win rate. I'd go so far as to say his winrate was actually depressed by the intolerance of the people who reported him, rather than his own actions.

{quoted}

(4) Enjoy Yourself, but not at Anyone Else's Expense

Now that is an awfully subjective basis for anything. I hate supporting Ezreal players because their playstyle doesn't match mine. I hate supporting Vayne players because....reasons. Does that mean they should get banned for ruining my enjoyment? Absolutely not. I don't have control over what my team is and isn't allowed to do so long as their efforts are made in good faith to win the match, and their chat conduct is within reason.

This decision is seriously disappointing. It is catering to a majority that refuses to, or is unable to, handle when things don't go how they want them to go. It will drive creativity out of the game, further stifling an already stagnating meta. Riot already works hard on balance issues to keep the meta from being overly stagnant, and this decision from the player behavior team is in direct opposition to that.

Stating that off meta isn't bannable is all nice and well, but this is exactly what many of us perceive has been punished here. Meta isn't strictly champion, it's also strategy. Riot is playing semantic games. By banning that player, they are in fact banning off meta because the number of teams that will accept off meta strategies in practice is all but nonexistant if you give them the ability to reject it. It's the same logic that has been used to strike down many laws. Allow one thing, then place legal barriers in front of it such the thing that is supposedly allowed is unreachable in practice. Usually those barriers get removed by higher courts.

Masterkerfuffle11/15/2016, 5:35:51 PM17 votes

http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/Be9Zbj6O-riot-is-this-breaking-the-summoners-code

Take a loot at that thread. About 6 months ago, I asked whether it was okay for me to play Smite "Support" Roaming Shaco and counterjungle. Wuks replied and said that's okay, as long as I got my team's permission.

This situation isn't new.

Chamuel8511/15/2016, 2:53:03 PM16 votes

I cannot find it now, but wasn't there a communication from Riot saying "You may want to play Singed support, but your teammates don't want you to play Singed Support." That doesn't sound much in line with everything else that I've heard. I'm unsure how I feel about a Riot employee even mentioning this in any sort of communication on why you are banned. It makes me feel like I'm reportable if my teammates don't like my choice (regardless of the fact that he wasn't even 'supporting' in the traditional sense).

I'm also unsure how I feel about the 'my primary job' is to protect the ADC. As a low ELO (silver 2 on my main account), there are more than enough games where my ADC is quite possibly new or just flat out having a bad game. In these scenarios my best bet is not to spend most of my time (outside of laning phase) with the ADC as a lot of those games he'll be a non factor. Isn't the primary job of the support is to make sure your carries get fed and engage or peel? Making it seem mandatory that you must do this for your ADC just makes me feel like it's tying my hands even further when climbing as a support.

While supports 'carry', it's a carry by proxy where you carry by spoon feeding the people who'll do the damage and get the kills. Without that, your carry style can't / won't happen (unless you're an AP Mage Support like Brand Zyra Velkoz etc).

Also, Support isn't necessarily about shutting down their bot lane (unless you think certain support champions like Janna aren't supports as while you can do a lot to protect your adc in bot, but really she's good at going even in lane... Especially if you're Ezreal + Janna vs like Jhin Morgana... just won't be a lane you do well in)

YondorDaChrusher11/15/2016, 3:12:55 PM13 votes

Those two codes are very fuzzy and opened to interpretation. The first one basically says, pick what your team needs. Well if singed is what get you wins, it's probably what your team needs. The second simply says communicate with your team. Does that mean chat? Pings?

Personally I've played all roles and encountered a variety of playstyles. As an ADC, if I've encountered off-meta, I just adjust my playstyle accordingly. Being able to adapt to situations as they arise should be a skill any decent player can utilize. If singeds off-meta style is winning the game, then I don't see anything wrong with it. You'd think supporting a winning strategy, no matter how unfamiliar, would be a positive experience.

AFK Push11/16/2016, 12:09:04 AM11 votes

Before the alleged singed support main chooses his pick he tells his team what his intentions are everygame. He is a complete victim, because he does in fact communicate. Research into the subject a little more before you post this stuff.