Ranked Leagues, Champ-select reporting Idea and justifiable and unjustifiable dodging concerns

Dear League of Legends,

Let me start off by saying I personally love playing league and the amount of toxic hatred you, Riot, specifically receive in the form of unconstructive, unfair, and sometimes purely ignorant criticism is simply overwhelming and stupefying. So many haters, but where would they be without you? They love your game, they live to play it, and it seems they live to unfairly demonize you over it. But I’m writing today to address a commonly known problem with what I hope are some constructive ideas towards remedying it. I’m speaking of the undeniably frustrating experience ranked leagues frequently offers.

To begin, I’m a fairly new player. I began at the end of season 5, not even hitting level 30 before the end of the season. I placed for the first time in pre-season 6, as Silver II. I was pretty pleased with myself over that result considering my newness and the fact that I surpassed the highest ranks my brothers, veteran players, had ever managed to achieve. Maybe this is because I’m not a 14 year old kid, but a 27 year old kid, yes still a kid somehow, but I have some world experience. I graduated college with honors and did a bid in the Navy. Now with my freedom back, I had taken time to dive into some video games for the first time in four years and came across League of Legends, which, embarrassingly, I thought for so long was that game on the cell phones, Clash of Clans.

Now we are season 6. I’m wary of the first new patches because new patches, like the first preseason patches, seem and feel buggy, unsmooth. Further on into season and preseason the game seems to smooth out. For this reason I hadn’t decided to try my first real season of ranked yet. That is, until today. Now I had made a few leagues friends who were impressed with my Yasuo and Taric play over the past few months. One in particular wanted to rank with me because we duo-botted so hard with me at Taric and him at really any ADC. I was in for a rude surprise when we I did a premade 3-man with him and his friend and they begin by doing I don’t know exactly the words to describe. Troll? Terrorize? Just be little shits. My acquaintance, Naladevonjaxx, as he goes by, and his friend, unknown to me, squidward or something, begin by telling one another to dodge and then demanding someone else dodges so that they can get out of the game without penalty. Then they proceed to threaten feeding or afking or otherwise blowing the game for myself and these two other randoms. I don’t say anything or react in any way; I don’t get mad, bitch, complain, fight back, think about dodging myself. I don’t usually become an asshole because other people are being assholes. I typically try to win still or play it out, but generally don’t quit or become toxic on other people even if they’re provoking me which seems pointless in most situations and especially online. I was going to pick Taric and squidward, knowing this, bans Taric. Fine, I pick Alistar. They continue to threaten the lobby and at the very last moment before the game loads Nala dodges. Then they both go offline. Nala comes back online, sends me a “?” which I ignore and proceed to win a couple ranks on my own.

I usually don’t play ranks because I mostly play for fun. But I would like to get placed. I do think I’m a good player and sometimes I wish to play with other good players and I find it much more satisfying to play challenging opponents and barely win, or even lose, but play close games, which not only are more satisfying but more instructive as well. I almost never play alone. I play with my brothers and we play for fun. They’re kinda younger and possess maybe some of the worst traits bronze players are considered or assumed to have. They fight with each other, blame each other, say “why didn’t you gank,” say the other is a newb for only playing Garen or Darius and etc. I personally don’t want to rank with my brothers because… They are bronze. I don’t say that with any ill will or judgement just the truth of observation. Like I said, I play with them all the time and enjoy it. I just don’t want them to reflect on my ranked games. That aside, when I do decide to rank it up, **the nature of ranked leagues is so frustrating that I lose the interest, will, motivation, the lust, or what-have-you, to play anymore and I simply stop playing. ** Honestly, this could be a good thing because we all play video games a little too much, do we not? But I don’t want to be forced out of the game by the toxic nature of a small or even a sizable contingent of players for a game I love like an addict loves his brown sugar. I rather choose to quit playing for my own reasons, like maybe eight hours straight and my bleeding eyes is too much, but I’m addicted, so what the hell? Or maybe I need to put away the dishes or go to work or something like that; but never do I want to quit because some rotten apples soured the cider for the rest of us.

You see, after my new acquaintances disappointed me with their antics I decided I to rank anyway, without them. It took three lobbies before I got into an actual game. Why? People dodge. People don’t like some champ pick, some team composition, or whatever. They didn’t get mid. All this you already know. Finally I get a game, we win, its cool. Next game, again several lobbies. Annoying. Time wasting. It’s not so bad, but it accumulates. Finally another game. We win, its cool, whatever. About to play game 3. Same lobby crap again. Here I lost interest. I just didn’t want to play anymore after this occurred, this essentially non-game related stuff. Kinda like the way people didn’t like team-builder waits. This is a tangent, but I loved team builder. We all got to play precisely what we wanted, even if sometimes we waited for it. Anyway, I turn leagues off. I’m going to do something else. I’m eating, and I decide to write this letter.

My first constructive criticism is that we need to include a way to report player’s misbehavior during champ select. Someone decides to be a terrorist, let me call it out right then rather than losing their name and any ability to report their malfeasance when they dodge or, if we get into a game, forgetting to report at the end. We all know trolling doesn’t only occur once you’re in-game. This idea should also be married to a concept I’d call justifiable dodging. Someone shows signs of trolling, starts terrorizing the lobby, banning a player’s intended pick just to fuck with them, a player should be allowed to report this misbehavior and also be allowed an unpenalized escape, a dodge. I think its clear that in a trolled game or lobby, unoffending parties shouldn’t be required to stick it out or else themselves face the dodge penalties. They deserve a free reset. This is where the report comes in, being able to report another player’s misconduct in lobby can also serve to justify or delegitimize any dodges. The mechanics of it might be difficult. You might not have the manpower to review all the cases or reports. But the option of reporting might be a deterrent as well, resulting in less of this problem. Maybe you could have a mechanic that requires two maybe three players to vote on dodging the game because of one player acting out. That would prevent this system from being abused or misused by things like false reporting. This is the nugget of an idea, it would require further fleshing out, but I wanted you to have it.

TL;DR: A justifiable dodge based on player misconducts in lobby and a reporting mechanic during champ select for lobby trolls and terrorists.

Next, dodging penalties. Given the preceding argument, I think there is already a need for people to dodge sometimes. While that is the case without any actual justifiable dodge policy, dodge penalties can never be appropriately stiff or else we’ll be over punishing those that had legitimate reasons to dodge or who have truly disconnected; but neither will we be ridding the community of those that ruin it because they can get away with it, because they can laugh at the penalties and wait them out. They got time. And some people do legitimately disconnect. And some people legitimately unplug their internet and turn off their computers too, I know. Not sure how to deal with them myself. But people who legitimately disconnect, like my brother, who runs on the shittiest computer you might imagine a league player to use, has legitimately disconnected. Then he suffered 5 x 20 minute bans. Of course he probably unlegitimately dodged a few times to get his dodge count up which surely contributed to that then arguably deserved punishment. Getting convoluted, I know, sorry, but we need a system that doesn’t punish legitimate dodges/disconnects, one that can differentiate between innocent and criminal dodging, and punishes the criminals harder. I'm sure this must be heavily technologically reliant, I understand, but It’s an issue that is probably on your radar anyways. If that could get established and justifiable dodging could get established, we could move on to stiffer penalties for unlegitimate dodging, which we need. Not getting mid, not liking a team comp, not yourself deciding to be a troll, none of these are legitimate reasons to dodge/dc/afk. A person does this kind of toxic shit once, twice, three times. One time should be a hard and fast penalty. A second time should almost be severe enough that they can't come back from. Three should be like a permanent ban. But we need evidence, we need justification. In-game you can get this. You can get the after reports. But in the lobby, where so much goes down, I don’t know if you have any way of monitoring that, or reviewing it, but a reporting system could go a long way.

TL;DR: not the greatest TL;DR but revamping dodging penalties and differentiating between justifiable and unjustifiable dodging with an in-lobby/champ-select reporting system.

It’s almost embarrassing that a game this widely played, the most played game ever, is ruled, or at least affected fairly often, by such chaotic childish and anonymous trolls. I’m not a child anymore but I still want to enjoy video games. Maybe that is my fault, but here is my dissenting opinion. Take from it what you will.

“realvkin” NA

P.S. More of a wishlist item than an expectation, but, us Alaskans don’t love the server move xD.