Boards›Player Behavior

Teamwork

rujitra·7/29/2019, 7:35:31 PM·2 votes·3,800 views

Curious as to players’ thoughts as to where “teamwork” versus “not teamwork” becomes an issue. This is in cases where intent cannot be proven, as intentionally neglecting your team for selfish reasons is already punishable (albeit hard to prove).

Should players who play with a selfish play style be punished for doing so? As an example see the following:

  • Continuing to split push as the main damage dealer on your team if your teammates are asking you to group.
  • Refusing to assist the jungler when the enemy jungler is counterjungling/in the jungle/easy to kill in the river.
  • Neglecting a tower in another lane simply to go back to your lane to CS/farm/whatever.
  • Going off on your own expecting your team to follow you, then getting picked off.

If this sort of behavior should be punishable, there’s a few concerns:

  • How does Riot “teach” this sort of teamwork to players?
  • How does Riot punish players who are not trying to fuck their team over but end up doing so because they don’t know proper teamwork?
  • Who gets to define when this behavior changes from legitimate play to “intentionally screwing over your team”?

The goal of this is to see if there’s any ideas to improve how this sort of thing may be detected automatically or by simple human review - not to discuss cases like Nubrac where extensive human review was required.

3 Comments

Zardo7/29/2019, 8:23:24 PM1 votes

None of this is really "selfish play"

Continuing to split push as the main damage dealer on your team if your teammates are asking you to group.

You can be a huge damage dealer and be terrible in teamfights- see fiora for example

Refusing to assist the jungler when the enemy jungler is counterjungling/in the jungle/easy to kill in the river.

There are valid reasons for not rotating. For example---> You'll lose more than the jg will lose, the enemy jg can escape, someone on your team is dead meaning you'll probably be at a numbers disadvantage

Neglecting a tower in another lane simply to go back to your lane to CS/farm/whatever.

Sometimes you can't defend a tower, heck, sometimes you can't even path to the tower without dying.

Going off on your own expecting your team to follow you, then getting picked off.

This is more poor communication than anything.

Here are things that I consider actual selfish play:

  • AFK farming when we could be pushing objectives

  • Stealing lane farm after clearing the jg(not taxing, literally just walking into lane to take it)

Kei1437/29/2019, 9:19:32 PM1 votes

From a gameplay perspective, you win and lose as a team, every decision you make will have an outcome to it.

If you chose not to help your jungler when he's getting invaded, but instead, get that canon minion for the bf sword, recall and teleport back to a frozen lane. Now you can zone off the enemy bot lane. Their bot lane is down and so is your jungler. So would better jg have a more impactful outcome than better bot laner?

The answer to the impact of the outcome (assuming all the players have the same understanding of macro and skill level) will be dependant on whether the current Macro META favors the bot laner or the jgler. In the Ardent Censor meta, getting that bot laner ahead was pretty important. In skuttle crab meta, jg control was more important.

Now the important thing to note for 98% of the playerbase dont have enough macro understanding to say that one decision alone would have a had an impactful outcome towards the game. Most the time it's a series of decisions that end up getting you the outcome. Those decisions could be small micro decisions like deciding to side step that lux bind or macro decisions like not collapsing on the enemy jg for tour canon.

Realistically speaking, if you make a decision that favored an outcome (like ganked for that garen who was losing like crazy and killed the enemy teemo), but the person whom got the advantage in that scenario doesn't know how to press the advantage (please buy that Spirit Visage garen, and not the IE. Also please stand in exp range of the minions and not get zoned out for no reason) then your decision for that action (gank for garen in this example) may not have been the Most Effective Tactic Available in that moment.

All in all, an action that may be considered as griefing in one game may not be considered in another game. Supports (looking at you brand / zyra) sometimes should take CS if their lane partner is sucking, so they become the carry instead.

Sound Chimera7/30/2019, 1:24:44 AM1 votes
  • Continuing to split push as the main damage dealer on your team if your teammates are asking you to group.

its a mix of teamwork and exp

something like that happends alot and i think most players just dont understand why they shouldnt splitpush and group

usually they stretch the game for so long that they just throw and lose

if this happens with low platin players and below i dont report them because they just dont understand it but for dia+ players i report them for griefing

  • How does Riot “teach” this sort of teamwork to players?

  • How does Riot punish players who are not trying to fuck their team over but end up doing so because they don’t know proper teamwork?

make ranked harder i like to see 10 divisions not just 4 so many players just have no exp but still climb because they play the game not because they improve

not everyone is like that but holy moly there are so many dia+ players that should be in gold/low platin [slayer-pantheon-popcorn]