Why League Has Trolls and Ragers (Real Reason)

Back in Warcraft 3, the predecessor to League of Legends, bad teammates was never an issue because of two things that were different. First of all, you weren't obliged to stay in the game. You could leave the second you thought victory couldn't be achieved anymore. Secondly, there wasn't anything incentivizing you to work together besides winning the game. Friendly fire was possible, and no report system to ban players for doing so.

To understand what this means, imagine you have a troll on your team. He's angry and he's letting his rage out on you for no good reason. How would you respond? You would literally destroy him. Raze his base to the ground, kill his units and then leave the game. Sounds horrible, but in reality it meant you had to earn your spot on your team. You had to make your allies want to play with you. Because if you identified yourself as a troll, there was nothing forcing your allies to play with you.

This is what's different in League of Legends. Someone begins to troll and throw the game, you are bound by the game's policies to stay for the full duration and you aren't even allowed to leave the game unless you succeed a vote that tends to never go through. League has trolls because Riot shackles their players to them.

And in doing so, they take away that important sense of integrity and replaced it with entitlement. Players come into a game and expect their allies to work with them instead of hoping to prove to their team they are worth the effort. Because they know if their allies aren't cooperative no matter how much you ruin their efforts, the system is blind and will treat any violations as a transgression even if you weren't the offender. The system in fact expects you to keep playing by the rules until the end of the game no matter how many of your allies are sitting in the fountain or running into turrets.

Let me take a break here and say I don't look down on Riot's efforts or their report system. A lot of games go really well. Everything has its pros and cons. No system is flawless. League has become a much bigger game than Warcraft ever was, and it's unlikely the same methods would ever work. The point I would like to reach with this topic is the reason for why trolls happen in League, and how the system could be improved to better combat this sort of behavior.

There have been a lot of suggestions over the years on how to stop players from trolling. Some have suggested a vote kick feature, which would only add bullying to the game. Others have suggested harsher penalties, which would only delegate them on to new players through smurfs. You can't stop trolling. If you could, Riot would have done so already.

As long as you have a system that forces players to stay in the game, there will always be trolls. The definition of a troll is someone who is deliberately provocative for the sake of attention. What I believe could be improved on, is the last part. Attention. If you soften up the rules keeping players bound to the troll's game, the act wouldn't have much of an impact. You'd just move on to the next game and forget about that one guy who gave up.

Surrender at 10. 3 out of 5 to surrender. Or even a feature that can identify trolling and allow the teammates to reset or quit the game without penalty. I sincerely believe any changes of this nature would reduce the impact trolling has on the game.

But what I worry is that Riot values the competitive aspect of their game more than their players. The mentality that every game should be played out fully to give players the best possible chance of winning the game. To not let the system be the reason they lost an otherwise won game. The percentage of games surrendered games could have been won is fairly low and would only increase if you made it easier to stop a game in progress. So this begs the question, what is more important---trying to win as hard as you can or letting players skip bad games more easily?

Let me know your opinion below.