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New player review of your fantastic game, but horrible community.

HamrSmshFace777·5/10/2016, 12:07:51 AM·10 votes·1,398 views

I have been playing games for years and finally picked up League of Legends due to friends finally convincing me to trying it. I have played 10 games through three modes and found it to be fun, except the players I get teamed up with. The chat is terrible. Filled with endless taunts, rants, racial slurs, sexual slurs, its really sad to ruin the 30 minutes of play time with no punishment for such behavior. I went to leave a game because I got put against an obviously higher level player that would not stop calling the players on my team racial slurs that I will not repeat. Then found I would be punished for future games for leaving. I now know why this game is free. I will not be playing it anymore because the player claimed he had been "banned" before and still has the same behavior.

I know this may be a single case, but from what I have read and the fact there is a whole whiny section for this board I'm pretty sure its not the only case. Seven out of ten games someone got mad at someone and purposefully killed themselves or aided the team in some other manner. Pinning this on the creators of the game is unfair. Unfortunately you have to blame the community. I will not be apart of that trash. This game is doomed.

25 Comments

Randomonium5/10/2016, 12:23:24 AM4 votes

Sorry you have had such a horrible experience. One of the downsides of the Free-to-play model is that people who are banned can just create a new account with a new e-mail address. I can't think of any way to stop this from happening. That said, once you get to level 30 people are more invested in their accounts and are less likely to be that toxic (though toxicity never goes away completely.) Riot has one of the strictest punishment policies I've seen in a game and they are pretty good at following up on reports. It may not seem like your reports are doing anything but all you have to do is take a look at the player behavior board to see it full of people who got permanent banned. I hope that Riot will be more vocal on the number of players that are punished in the future. They have hinted that a "player report card" is in the works where you can see how often your reports resulted in a player punishment, how often you were reported, and how often the system registered those reports against you as valid.

I highly recommend you just mute people at the first sign of toxicity. This can be done by holding down TAB and clicking the mute button near the player's champion. Alternatively, if you want to mute everyone in the game you can type /mute all. Bot games are also a good option if you just want to focus on learning the basics and leveling up your account.

I hope you will stick it out. Feel free to add me if you want to play with some non-toxic people. This game has a steep learning curve and a lot of childish people but it is also immensely fun and there are a great core group of people who are dedicated to helping others and having fun.

Fovere5/10/2016, 3:35:29 PM3 votes

This is a really massive game.

The term community can be somewhat misleading when you apply it to something that is global and involves millions of people.

The people in the League "community" are the same people anywhere, and everywhere, else.

The only thing that makes the League 'community' unique is Riot games. They set the rules and tone of the game, and by extension the "community", and have tried to control it for some years now.

Jalkan5/10/2016, 8:13:34 AM2 votes

No argument there. The only real way to solve low-level toxicity is making LoL pay-to-play, so people can't just create as many new accounts as they want then play on them when their main is banned. For now, just mute everyone.

Firu5/10/2016, 4:13:34 AM2 votes

To say a game is doomed after it's been around for over seven years is a bit dramatic.

SexySoapTurtle5/10/2016, 12:08:38 AM2 votes

This game has made over 2 billion dollars friend.

elduris5/10/2016, 4:41:12 AM2 votes

most of the community is actually really cool. im sorry you're only seeing a small portion of the community who get enjoyment out of berating others but i promise we aren't all like that. the league community has done some really great things, we really stick up for each other when the time comes.

take a look at this video. sure it was a couple years ago now but look at the amazing thing we accomplished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVDN_G3u3dU

if you wanna leave thats fine and i wish you the best wherever you go next. but if you stay i hope you get to meet people on the good side of the community who want to help each other out and do amazing shit like that. there are more of us than them.

Mister Punches5/11/2016, 7:39:09 AM1 votes

Sorry for the horrible experience, but I do know how you feel.

It's really bad when you have to report at least one person on either side in pretty much most of your games for things like verbal abuse, racism, homophobia, bigotry, etc (Most of the things I listed weren't directed towards me, but it gets really annoying when you see your chat suddenly explode with that toxic behavior). I left Summoner's Rift normal queue because of that; too many toxic people.

Overall, I would say that a good portion of the community has indeed deteriorated in the "manners" department. There are still many people in this forum who are nice, but it's starting to become rare to see that on the forums, and it is definitely a rare sight for me to see ingame.

If you do leave the game, I don't blame you. I've contemplated leaving the game, but the monetary value I have on this account (gifts from friends) as well as my friends starting to come back here after finals and classes are finishing up, are keeping me here. If you do decide to stay, however, my best suggestion would be to go in with friends. Going into a game solo has a chance of you getting paired up with someone who is toxic or someone who will ruin the game experience for you.

Riot isn't completely at fault in why the community they are watching over is starting to become toxic, but it does seem like many people in this community are complaining about the community being toxic, but there is nothing really being done about it, or an employee who wants to come out and say something like "We know this is happening, and we're doing our best to try and handle the situation. Here is what we are trying to do right now: (method 1), (method 2), etc.".

The game isn't doomed, I would say, but the community is starting to become on par with the Call of Duty community in terms of behavior. League isn't a bad game, but the community is making the game look bad. The suggestion I made in this post is one I would heavily follow, if you do decide to come back. Again, sorry for your bad experience.

cocacolalips5/10/2016, 2:13:50 AM1 votes

Level 0-10 is a cesspool of players who were banned over and over and made a new account and smurfs. Once you reach level 10 it should get better, smurfs get mached against eachother and toxic players get banned again.

Once you reach level 30, where 95% of the playerbase is, you get matched according to your skill, unlike before where you are matched according to your level.

Your experience is not representative to the game experience that is vastly different as you play more past the first hours.

To give you an idea, I haven't had a single troll / smurf / anything negative said in chat in the past 1000 games or so.

What you can do is play bots games until you are level 10+ or so.

japan hate acc5/10/2016, 5:08:46 AM1 votes

Welcome to League!!!

Just letting you know, the two worst places to be level-wise are 1-10 and 21-29. Then you get to Bronze, but let's not talk about that. Just soldier through it; at around level 10, 11, and 12 things begin to clear up and it does get better. But hit 21 and especially around 25, it gets so bad. Maybe it's just bad luck on my part, but so many of players my level are worse than the idiotic level threes. Just bear with them, and don't stoop to their level. Be better than them, and if it gets really bad, mute them.

Dario5/10/2016, 9:48:04 PM1 votes

Some games are awesome, great team mates, some others not so much. I tis what it is