Not all s1 players are addicts, you know. :P
But nitpicking aside, you still hit the nail on the head for us older players: we don't really care about prestige skins, or most reworks (some of us are very anti-rework, and some of us actually like a few of them a lot...my own bias, screw the Akali rework in particular but most of the rest are fine.) as long as the actual gameplay isn't garbage. But more importantly to your topic: "As long as we can play "our" game in peace." Before getting any further into my rant here, notice I said "our" game in quotations. I personally love to promote the idea of new players being able to have fun playing, and I don't consider this as some sort of exclusive-to-us game, as long as we can all get along. But I admit at by this point, I'm definitely the stereotypical "grumpy old veteran" more that I'd see myself as an "addict", hence my denotation and nitpicking. Not everyone who fits this category is like me, I am probably in the minority in claiming this (as opposed to just outright denial of the term addict and claiming I have no place in the group at all) and you pretty much have to generalize this kind of thing, so I get it. But, since that's my claim, go ahead and catch this "war vet's" tale of woe and my personal take of it, and maybe it'll help at least one of your generalized minorities within this category that actually do care about the game as a whole sympathize more.
My main was perma'd in mid s8...pretty much 8 full seasons of playing the game, and while there is a timer for "repeated offenses" I will hold firm from my own experiences to the point that the fall-off from time between punishments is FAR less than the speed at which they build up, ESPECIALLY in the last few seasons. I do not blame Riot's system for this, more than its blatant and frequent abuse...I'll get more in-depth with that later, but in synopsis, regardless of the reasoning, the system, though not unfair itself, is made to be unfair by how people are in recent seasons.
If I had to pin it down I'd say the majority of my punishments were in two windows. One was in season(s) 2/3 due to my campus wi-fi in college and the league server not getting along well. Basically, I had to load into almost every game twice if on the campus wi-fi...and as a broke college student, it took me a couple of weeks to get a cord. Still had good WinRate despite the setbacks, but LeaverBuster doesn't care about that. So despite me not counting that as people being ridiculous, it still counts on my record. The second started mostly in season 6...I say "mostly" because this one didn't really stop, more than it happened in great waves.
I'll be the first to admit that my account deserved its ban, don't get me wrong. But what generally led up to the perma were essentially moments such as what you're describing in this example: I'd be mostly ok, with the occasional slap on the wrist for saying dumb things once in awhile...but in the later seasons, I found more and more that whenever I had a bad game and told someone to chill when they started in on me for it, they'd immediately start saying I was "toxic, inting and trolling." I'm only human, in a lot of those situations I'd just use the mute button, but in some (especially on days near end of season, when I was JUST short of gold) I would just let them have it, and I was far from pleasant by that point. Same thing if trying to tell someone else to play more passively (in an attempt to stop their 5th death in 12 minutes to a now-fed top or mid), or trying to communicate basically at all with my support/marksmen in those seasons. I mained bot lane - adc or support, as long as I was down there I was half-decent, but I could do something as simple as tell them to "focus on _______" (Strategy that had nothing to do with K/D/A or how good/bad I thought they were) and it was still in like 7/10 games "stfu, stop being toxic, muted/reported."
Uhhhh....what?
Then of course it was followed in like 6 of those 7 games by them pointing out every single "mistake" I made for the rest of the game instead of even attempting to play, which of course breeds more issues.
I was freaking tired of it by the time s8 came around, which is why I got perma'd. I knew it was coming. But I guess in a roundabout way, by that point it was more about me not bowing to people whose first and only line of defense for their bad attitudes was to be the first person to use that gods-forsaken word and smash their report button. I felt like I was losing everything over a bunch of hypersensitive, immature ninnies, and to a point, I'd still defend that statement. My way of handling it left a lot to be desired...but bottom line: I just want to play the damn game without all the petty melodrama. If I seriously have to mute the entire game, EVERY game, in order to have even a remote chance of having a good game...there's got to be a line somewhere. If I can't even attempt to TALK STRATEGY with people, without the instantaneous "stfu toxic noob" response, this game will inevitably die out, even to me and others like me. It's petty, and in about 5/6 games I was punished in from s6 onwards, I wasn't even saying anything (at least at first) that should have resulted in someone being upset. I'm again only human, so on a bad day, yeah screw them, I'm gonna let them know how I feel about their outrageous response, and where they can shove their opinion of me. I fully accept responsibility for letting them know it. It's not a badge of honor that I got punished for getting back at them, it's that to me it was an evil I no longer cared to hide, borne when a demand for mutual respect as teammates was completely ignored. I'm not going out of my way to ruin someone's game...until I'm going to already be labeled as someone who's going out of their way to ruin their game every time I lose my lane, at which point (on a bad day) I am fully capable of getting just as toxic as the passive-aggressive troglodytes that can't take a single word of criticism claim I was. I said "focus on farm" as a strategy meant to mean "we're going to lose a full-out fight against their early game damage so we need to get our items first", not "Noob, you're playing the game wrong, focus on farm you boosted ape."
It's not my fault if people get offended by me trying to strategize...but the report-o-bot doesn't care about that, and neither do the people who abuse it. The bot ESPECIALLY doesn't care when you don't press mute, and instead choose to lose your mind. I will stress this: there are PLENTY of times I deserved the reports...but for every time I was a legitimately "toxic" person in game, there were almost 5x more that I hit the mute button and moved on, to be reported anyway. I covered all the bad stuff about myself, and wrote of myself at my worst, because my best is irrelevant - I'm not getting that account back.
This account is one I made originally to try and get a friend into the game with me. he played pretty much exclusively during S4, and now this account is essentially the last chance I'm giving this game. If it's deemed "too toxic" by a bunch of people who can't take anything being directed at them, then I will deem this community too self-absorbed to work with any further, and try to find a different MOBA...probably HotS cause I hate DOTA. Simple as that.
