Accomodating Toxic Players

League is a toxic game.

At least in my experience, every two games, at least one person is toxic on my side or theirs, either having tirades of cussing, going afk, or any number of fucked up things.

And you know what? I'm used to that. As sad as it is, I'm used to that in my ranked experience, and I just take it as it comes. Every twenty reports or so, one might even come up as successful, and I take some pleasure in that, but it's this sad stockholm syndrome that it's become normalized to see this behavior in my games.

But today, I met something that made me angry. Apoplectically angry. As usual, someone was being toxic. We had traded top turret for bot turret (each side took two kills; our bot, their top/jung) and the support starting calling me a fucking retard and saying he'll go afk because I didn't TP bot lane at 25% health in full view of them to dissuade bot's push while I was in the middle of a fight to take top tower.

But that's not what tilted me, oh no. Because there is something much, much rarer than mere toxic players. It's when perfectly fine players have to fucking bend over backwards to accommodate these fucking childish pieces of shit.

After it became clear that our support wasn't going to do anything, our midlaner switched tactics. He started insulting me, criticizing my play, even though we both knew that I was playing perfectly fucking fine, and eventually he said something along the lines of "he's a fucking idiot, he doesn't know what he's talking about, I'll honor you if we win this game." (Not an exact quote.)

This tilted me so fucking hard. I literally had to use my emergency key - the one that deactivates my enter key - so I wouldn't explode into a fucking angry tirade at him. And the worst part is, I understand our midlaner's thought process. Fuck, I've used similar ones before, though not as drastic - appealing to the toxic player, telling him it'll be okay, he's fine.

It's fucked up. Now that I think about it outside of my competitive haze to win, the mere idea makes me unbelievably fucking angry, enough to waste ten minutes writing up a shitty pointless post on the internet. I was doing this. I was sucking up to these wastes of humanity. Why the fuck should regular players who are perfectly fine have to accommodate toxic players, to coddle them so that they don't ruin our games? How fucked up is that shit? Putting up with their shit is one thing, but fucking REWARDING them for being fucking pieces of shit on the internet? I can deal with toxic players that go unpunished despite their reports. I can't fucking deal with having to kiss their fucking shoes just so they would fucking play the game and not ruin it for everyone else!

Jesus fucking christ, I'm going to get wasted now.