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LoL created an environment where bullies thrive

Territian·5/3/2017, 5:47:24 AM·4 votes·1,837 views

Today I reached a conclusion. Some games encourage bullying by their very design. And League of Legends is King.

At one time I was an active player, spending money on skins, recruiting my friends to join who also spent money on the game. But I wasn't very good at the game, or at least that's what I was told by the other players. Between LoL games I played World of Warcraft, a game who's social structure creates an environment where bad behavior is punished by social constructs of the game. If you want to raid, you have to be nice, or nobody will want to play with you. If you were booted from a Guild, your real ID could be tracked, and people could find out who you were. People were nice.

LoL was completely different! When a player makes a mistake, it is announced in chat to every player that you died. The players are strangers, and only spend 15-45 minutes with you, then never see you again. Hiding behind the mask of anonymity, they are encouraged to be competitive by the ladder ranking system, and players who are poor at the game, are advertised via messages, and the mini map. You can even criticize a persons personal build.

My brother became a moderator. We watched several games where players had been reported, and made judgements as to if the player should be banned. We punished bullies!

But a 3 day suspension didn't solve the problem. Permabans didn't keep bullies from creating new accounts and continuing their malicious behavior. So the bullying continued until one day I realized, this game was toxic to my life. It was affecting my mood, my self esteem. So I quit.

I recently got nostalgic for the game because minus the constant social bullying from other players, the game is VERY FUN! So I reinstalled the game only to find out that I myself had been PERMANANTLY BANNED! Why? I never cheated. I wasn't a good enough player use exploits, or even know what those were. But players frequently said, "He's bad at the game, report him for hacking!"

I didn't think any moderator would take that kind of thing seriously, as I had personal experience moderating. But someone must have let the bullies win, because without explaination, the virtual goods I paid REAL MONEY FOR were deleted. Because of Bullying. The creators of LoL should be ashamed they have made such a toxic footprint on the history of humanity.

Here was their response. All lies, and clearly a robot.

"Greetings,

I can understand that this account means a lot to you so I looked again into this case. Upon my investigation I have observed that it was involved with the usage of an exploit that gave it an unfair advantage over others with the game. We view the usage of exploits that offer an unfair advantage over others to be a violation of the Terms of Use as it destroys the game experience for those other players. Due to the severity of this action we must remain firm in its decision taken against this account.

Templar Iytsuna Player Behavior and Game Support

Hey again,

I am sorry but I won't be able to go into specifics as this could compromise our investigation methods. Often times when players write in they are looking for how they got caught so they can avoid it in the future. I am not saying that this is your intent, as I don't believe it is, but this is why we do not give specifics for these sort of suspensions.

Templar Iytsuna Player Behavior and Game Support"

I will never play this game again, and will be telling all my friends about the toxicity of the LoL community. For me, it's a life lesson learned. Perhaps other Moba's will learn to create environments where advertised player errors will not enrage bullies, and where bullies cannot speak, or are held socially accountable in a way that doesn't empower them to permaban the people they are preying upon.

Poppy RIP Poppy :(

27 Comments

Deep Terror Nami5/3/2017, 5:57:16 AM6 votes

They don't take people's word for it, they investigate actions taken on your account. You will never be banned just because someone said you did something. If you truly did not ever cheat, it's more likely you got your account compromised or were sharing it with someone that did use cheats, or you played on a public computer that had them.

If you feel something like that may have happened you should let player support know.

Skins Project5/3/2017, 6:56:01 AM3 votes

May I ask when you quit?

Because looking at your match history there were matches recent as about a month ago.

Also reading your sob story I highly doubt it was you if that was true.

http://imgur.com/a/63l7B

That is YOUR account.

Assuming your brother truly was a mod, and you helped, I wouldn't say it was the Lol's problem as much as it was yours.

If not, it is likely you were hacked.

If that was you.

Good riddance.

If it was not.

Shame, for you are laying shame upon another without cause.

HítlerDidNtWrong5/3/2017, 10:29:46 AM2 votes

The only way Riot can solve this is to ignore all of the things people say and focus their resources on banning legitimate exploits. Who cares that people are arguing over the internet, let them. Stepping in to moderate the behavior of human beings is pathetic and goes against human nature. The only exception is if someone is spamming chat incessantly. Seriously do your mods a favor and stop caring about behaviours, we can't all be Bob Ross after leaving the military, if we were then how would anyone be unique? Even that calm hearted man used to yell at people as a drill sergeant. So fucking what? Act like adults. [zombie-brand-facepalm] Moderators are failing to be human by not letting others express themselves the way they want. It's just censorship at the end of the day, you can't sweep human nature under the rug.** Imagine what they could accomplish if they didn't have to moderate this? They could instead move all the moderators into game testing roles and patches and fixes and rebalances would have exponentially more eyes/ears/brains helping out. It's not rocket surgery!**

Narvuntien5/3/2017, 6:36:04 AM2 votes

Oooh Deep terror Nami has mod powers again.. yay.

I digress. I agree the game is VERY FUN... and the people that play it are TRULY TERRIBLE.

Riot has tried all sorts of things to try and fix the community but you can't fix human nature. They couldn't solve it, they tried and they failed. banning doesn't work they just make a new account and troll the low levels. Trolls trolling people turn those people in trolls and it breeds like a virus.

In the end Riot had to look at a different strategy for solving the issue. This game is about 1000X better when you play with friends... Introducing..... Dynamic Queue!... ooooh boy did that backfire horrifyingly. They thought they could instead "solve" the issue by just giving people a shared league experience... but that just resulted in people gaming their system to get boosted :(.

I just don't know what else Riot can do about this issue they have tried over and over again and everytime they have failed to fix it. Perhaps all gamers are terrible people, perhaps the more competitively minded you are the worse a human being you become.

higura5/5/2017, 3:33:36 PM2 votes

But players frequently said, "He's bad at the game, report him for hacking!"

I can understand that this account means a lot to you so I looked again into this case. Upon my investigation I have observed that it was involved with the usage of an exploit that gave it an unfair advantage over others with the game.

seems to me this is less about "bullies" and more about you exploiting the game to get a unfair advantange in game.

this is futher backed up by your upper story not makeing any sense at all...

My brother became a moderator. We watched several games where players had been reported, and made judgements as to if the player should be banned. We punished bullies!

But a 3 day suspension didn't solve the problem. Permabans didn't keep bullies from creating new accounts and continuing their malicious behavior. So the bullying continued until one day I realized, this game was toxic to my life. It was affecting my mood, my self esteem. So I quit.

there is 2 things that don't make sense in this:

1: riot don't handle reports manually unless there is a very good reason to.

2: if your bother is a mod for the team that handles reports, then why did you contact the support?, you could just have asked him to take a quick look at your case.

YerroFever5/4/2017, 12:40:02 AM1 votes

Any competitive game creates an environment where bullying can thrive. It's not Riot that encourages it.

Because there are so many aspects to the game, there are so many ways to be negatively affected by people.

Pre game - champ select and team chat In Game - chat, pings, feeding, afk/leaving, etc... Post Game - post game chat, friending you just to be able to send you harassing messages, using a bot that continuously sends friends requests to harass you, etc...

It's difficult to fix all of the problems and they've done a lot to fix the symptoms of toxicity but curing toxicity at its core is actually hard and mostly out of Riot's hands because it's how that person deals with the situation. Riot can't fix people. They have to want to fix themselves. However, Riot can try to fix how someone negatively affects you and try to encourage people to be less toxic.

There's a balance between helicopter parenting and tough skin and Riot is doing their best to find that balance.

Pantheon Forever5/3/2017, 1:05:27 PM1 votes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPt1bckqJmU

I play wow and that game is wild too!

(average pick up group environment for a raid is this)