Well, the truth is that the simple act of clicking the mute button is a "defeat" in a toxic player's mind.
Well, assuming that is the truth, I'm curious - which would a toxic player be more willing to do - tank a metaphorical "L" by muting the player, or tank a literal L by not doing so, and suffer penalties on their account for counterflaming?
muting the other person puts the player's mind in a state of unease as they're unable to focus due to potential insults damaging to their pride.
Firstly, that is an issue I'm willing to put more stock in. I've seen a fair amount of people on these boards trying to justify their counterflame as "defending myself" or "defending my pride" - and all those like-minded players need to get it through their heads that they're not defending their pride, they're damaging their own account. There's nothing to "defend" your pride from - whoever's flaming you is just a random player you'll likely never run into again.
And, on top of that, I feel the phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" is applicable. If you mute someone who's flaming, their flame shouldn't bother you, and you should be able to focus on the game.
Instead of having a player manually click on the mute button, any player who has triggered a word from say, the automated feedback system immediately has their entire chat disabled (or invisible to other players) in their CURRENT game.
......No. First of all, that's practically hand-holding the people who you're trying to propose this for (people who think that counterflame is "defending themselves"), which does them a disservice, and it does the whole of the League community a disservice for a few reasons:
- Having the automated system shut off communication in a match will inevitably lead to problems in communication, particularly if it's based solely off of trigger words. Oh, whoops, I said I feel like an idiot, guess I'm not allowed to chat with my teammates.
- Hand-in-hand with number one - that is some serious chat policing that shouldn't be suggested lightly. Like, for real - having your chat completely restricted on a per-match basis just because of a trigger word? Who decides the trigger words? Why not use a speech detection algorithm like the IFS uses for most flaming cases?
- People will find a way around the trigger word system. Already, there are people in the game who will express toxicity in seemingly non-toxic ways - saying "shhh", or saying neutral/negative statements plain-faced and ending with an emoticon, like :) or something. If it's going to automatically police the chat to reduce toxicity, it'd better cover all the bases, at which point...Well, what'd be the use in chat if we can't use it?
- It removes player agency in deciding - in the case of a match and afterwards - who is toxic and who to report. That's one of the biggest reasons the IFS requires a Report to be made, and the reason why the mute feature is a button and not an automatic response. Some people go into the game with /fullmute all, some people only mute when they see someone being negative/toxic, and some just won't mute - maybe they're not fazed by the toxic chat and won't have their morale tested by the 0/4 Riven throwing a tantrum over their Jungler "not ganking"? Removing the agency for players to decide who they want to listen to and who they don't want to keep in the community is a bad idea all-around.
On a side note, Riot also needs to look over their role calling chat in the champ-selecting stage.
...there are cases where two players both see that they called their wanted role in the chat FIRST.
I'm gonna assume you're talking about Blind Pick. Blind Pick is awful and I don't think it will ever not be awful. "Role calling" is a joke of a practice because it's exclusively up to player courtesy who gets what role in Blinds. Draft is certainly better in this regard - everyone getting a specific role to play - but it still has its downsides. ("i got autofilled support, someone switch pls")
Altogether, Muting may seem to be an easy and simple task for some...
It's hard to control our pride, and to quote a cliche meme I found off the internet- "holding anger in is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die" So I hope we can all come to understand these players better and potentially offer more diverse comments rather than just "mute all and move on" in the future.
Now, pride and anger are two different things. Pride can lead to anger, but they're still very different. An issue of pride is being unable to admit you're wrong, unable to admit defeat, unwilling to take second or third place. Anger is holistically different - it's rage, want for expression or retribution through aggressive means.
I can understand both, mind - I'm an extremely proud individual myself, and sometimes I struggle with admitting I'm wrong. Sometimes I'll come pretty cleanly to the resolution that "I fucked that up", but I'm still proud. But I also know that my pride cannot be impinged by some random, tantrum-throwing jerk who I won't likely see twice in a videogame. If you have your pride hurt by someone you don't know, who you won't see again - you need to work on your self-image.
And on the other side of the coin, I have anger issues. I'm practically living vitriol, but I learned how to control it and harness it in constructive ways - and more than that, how to hold it back or release it without causing undue harm to other players or myself. It's easy to be angry, it's hard to rein it in, but over time, one tends to develop tricks to keep their anger in check. Whether it's quick, therapeutic measures (stress ball, fidget spinner, breathing exercises) or short-term release vents (shouting/screaming, cursing, etc. - vocally, mind, not in-game), people develop their own tricks for dealing with anger.
Neither of these things should prevent someone from muting another player, though - in fact, I imagine anger would make one quick to mute others.
