Chat Restrictions, Toxic Behavior, and Penalties: Why They Confuse Me
So, I am confused. About a lot of things, admittedly, like life, the universe, women (including my wife), among other things. One such thing is toxic behavior in the wonderful world of league of legends, and how riot handles such behavior. Now, I myself am not always the most pleasant of teammates. I am too competitive, take the game too seriously for a video game, and I don't like losing. That's not to say I can't take losing well, but I prefer when it's because my team and I were legitimately outclassed, and not because Joe Schmoe (no offense to any Joe Schmoe's out there) decided that he didnt like getting autofilled to support, but gosh dern it, he's certainly not going to dodge, so guess y'all are going to have to make do with his wonderful AP Master Yi Support. with 5 rabadon's and a tear. That's a bit of an extreme, exaggerated example, but you know what I mean. I'm all for having fun, but especially in ranked, I want to win, and I'd prefer if everyone on my team wanted to win too. I mean, it seems logical to me, but if you're going to queue up for ranked, you should have some aspirations toward seeing a "VICTORY" screen at the end of the game.
The amount of people who queue up for ranked despite obviously not having those aspirations, astounds me. And it confuses me why there isn't a system in place to prevent people who are obviously not interested in winning, from joining the ranked queue. Are those kind of shenanigans not fun in normals? Does it not provide the same satisfaction if you're not ruining someone else's fun, destroying the LP that they've been grinding so hard for?
I know I sound like a butt-hurt (excuse my language) angry ole' curmudgeon, but I am a very passionate person, and heaven-save-my-soul, I am passionate about league of legends. Now, I've never posted on these forums before, because my passion is mostly competition-driven. I don't have a whole lot of time in my life for league anymore, so whenever I have the time, i'd rather play a game than peruse the boards. But I had a game recently that brought to light a serious problem in my eyes, one that like I said, confuses me greatly. And i'm hoping that someone over at riot can illuminate the situation for me.
Also, I have a bit of a flair for the dramatic, so I'm gonna lay the scene out for you:
It's Friday November 30th, approximately an hour and fifteen minutes before I have to go to work. I probably shouldn't play another game, especially since I just lost the last one, but I'm boosted and don't know when to stop, so I decided to queue up again. Champ select comes around, and everything is going fine. I'm playing jhin as usual and my support locks in veigar. I'm thinking, "sweet, support veigar, we do ton's of damage, this game should go pretty quick." We load in, buy, walk to lane, and its only when minions arrive that I realize something is wrong. Veigar starts trying to stack q on my cs. Kind of rude, but I'm thinking, maybe he's autofilled, used to midlane, and its just reflex. So i ping a quick question mark, and ask him to please not last hit, and focus on stacking by poking the enemy laners. No response. He continues to stack using my cs. Now, I'm pretty good at csing, so I manage to effectively deny him most of the cs (this is my teammate. im denying my teammate cs. o___O) but I am growing slightly more bothered the longer this goes on. I ask him again, to please stop taking cs, and focus on poking them. Logically, he can make more stacks doing that than taking my cs, if he lands his abilities. Once again, I am ignored.
Now, like I said, I'm a pretty passionate person, especially coming league, especially ranked. It might be more accurate to say I'm hot-headed. So, eventually, I blow up on this guy. Some mild swearing, "what the frick" (i didnt say frick) "bro back the fudge off" (again, not fudge, you get the point.) He doesn't seem to get the message. It's been 15 minutes of this, and finally, I ask in all chat if after the game, everyone would please report our veigar support for griefing. That's it. Following that, veigar moved to top lane. Started stealing all of my top laners cs. So my top laner goes mid. Admittedly, lane phase has pretty much ended by this point. He's allowed to do whatever the heck he wants now, cs waves, roam, whatever, but I would hope his goal is to still win the game.
Nope.
I guess he got tired of stacking minions, because he starts walking down mid looking for enemies, finds ezreal and manages to kill him. He's stacked up a decent amount of ap at this point, so thats to be expected. He does die, however, trades 1 for 1, not too bad, but kind of stupid, since the enemy team is already pretty far ahead. He respawns, and runs it down mid. Again. And again. And again. He manages to get a kill or two almost every time, but by the time he's done, he's got 7 deaths now, and the enemy lux is up to 12 kills. The game goes downhill from here, he finally stops running it down, but still refuses to group and they end shortly thereafter.
End game screen, I ask everyone to report veigar one more time for griefing, and I report him. Out of curiosity, I decide to take a look at his profile. What I saw shocked me. This guy only plays ranked. He also only plays about one, maybe two games a day. Over the past 5 days, he's lost 7 games in a row. Unlucky, right? WRONG. Five of those seven games, he ragequit. I went through and looked at the timeline of each game. He's a jungle main, and 3 of those games he got invaded and killed in, he ragequit at 3 minutes. The other two, he lasted about 7-9 minutes before he ragequit. FIVE GAMES IN A WEEK, this guy has ragequit. The other two games, he was obviously trolling/inting.
After looking at his profile, I can tell this guy doesn't give a crap about anyone other than himself, and he seems to get a kick out of ruining other people's games. I can understand maybe doing this kind of crap in normals. It's extremely rude and self-centered, but normals is where you go for fun, and if you have fun ruining other people's days, you're a scumbag, but hey, it's a free world. Now, ranked on the other hand, maybe I view ranked differently than other people, but ranked is where people go when they want to have fun, and WIN. That's what the ranking system is for. To validate your wins, so you can see how much you improve, and so you can compare your growth with others.
After seeing his true colors, I felt confused as to why he has not been punished for this kind of behavior yet. Especially after 5 ragequits in his past 7 games, I would have thought at least the LeaverBuster system would have given him some sort of penalty, but it obviously hadn't. So i went to the support page and sent a ticket in, asking them to look into it.
Fast forward to today. I haven't played a game since that upsetting finale last friday, and when I log in, I get an unexpected surprise on my home page. There's a notification telling me that I have been chat-restricted for 10 games due to unsportsmanlike conduct. it listed some of the chat logs from our game. I know I was out of line and using some strong language, but I don't know if I would say it was penalty-deserving. I used a lot of the word "dang" (not dang, you know the one), "dumba**" (don't know any other PG words for that one), and I did use "c*nt" once (that was probably the one I got restricted for). What I thought was funny was, it actually included some of the end-game lobby chat logs in the restriction. I said "Please report our veigar, thanks. gg wp" <-- This was included in their explanation of why I got chat restricted. XD Asking people to report a troll is actually enough to get you restricted, apparently. I'll have to be more careful in the future. I digress.
Here is what confuses me: this game has an actual function to filter vulgar language. So, if you have turned off said filter, I would say it's safe to assume you don't care if other people swear. Because, if you cared, you'd turn on the dang filter. Now, if you don't care about vulgar language, but what someone is saying is still bothering you, there is another function to shut them up: the MUTE function. Now, if you haven't muted someone who is bothering you, then again, you can't really say they're bothering you. It's simple. Click the button. Boom, it's gone. So the fact that you can be restricted for foul language is slightly confusing to me. Of course, racial slurs, homophobic comments, and other inhumane verbal abuse should not be tolerated, and is something that should be prohibited. But I did not do anything of the sort, and was penalized for simply asking someone to stop trolling, and asking other players to report them when they wouldn't listen. That was the extent of my transgression.
On the other hand, players can apparently do anything they want in-game that will ruin the experience for other players, and escape unpunished. THEY CAN RUIN THE ACTUAL GAME, THAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE HERE TO PLAY, AND NOT BE PUNISHED AT ALL. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't play league to socialize. I could do without the whole chat function, period. That's what discord is for. THE GAME is what I care about. I'm here for the game, but that's the one thing that people can screw over and riot won't do a dang thing.
So can someone tell me, why is there not a system to punish players whose abuse is solely gameplay related, and not chat related? So far as I can tell, this seems like it would be a really simple problem to fix. Any player who trolls in ranked, should be restricted to only being able to play normals. "But how would we know if someone is trolling?! They could have just had an unlucky game!" Yes, but stats don't lie. Everyone has bad games. But as I saw in that veigar's profile, it's not that hard to tell if someone is trolling. Multiple offenses such as ragequitting or inting is clearly obvious from just their kda and level differential alone.
What are your thoughts? Should riot develop a way to prioritize finding/punishing toxic players, players whose offenses are more severe than just saying a couple swear words? Any suggestions?
