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Playing to Win, Game Modes, Reports, Dodges, and how it all ties together

The Last Zica·2/20/2017, 4:25:20 AM·1 votes·662 views

Blood Moon, more than most featured modes, has really underscored some issues regarding player intentions and how they affect the game and how that interacts with the Player Behavior systems, so I want to spark a discussion about the interrelations and maybe find some ways to improve the situation - or at least share what I've come to myself so far.

Now, Blood Moon is a mode that is won on points. Champion kills grant points... but they don't grant a whole lot of points. I've seen quite a few people claim you can win on champion kills, ignoring the (reskinned) heralds (demons.) I've also seen every single one of them lose, no matter which team they were on. Whatever wins they're getting ignoring the heralds, they're not getting with me on their team... or on their enemy team. Fact is, 25 points your team gets rather quickly, and denies the enemy team, seems to be decisive, every time. Whoever controls the pits better at the key times, always wins in my experience, no matter whether that's my team or the enemy team.

With that in mind, we come to the question of what constitutes playing to win, and whether it's wrong to explicitly not play to win even when you know you will make yourself much more likely to lose for taking a given course of action. I'm pretty sure playing to lose is explicitly seriously punishable in Ranked, and probably also at least Draft modes, but where do Featured modes and Custom games fall when it comes to this? And just where is the line drawn on what is and isn't playing to win? Can you be punished for not playing to win in a mode like Blood Moon? Or in custom games? Does explicitly saying you don't care about winning affect things? Does ignoring the meta and statistics and say, ignoring the heralds and refusing to group up for them constitute not playing to win in an official sense? Should it? How much suicide bombing on a champion like, say, Sion, Karthus, or Kog'Maw, is acceptable? The Summoner's Code and other resources I've seen aren't very specific about these details, and some of them are fairly grey. When does something stop being just not conforming to the meta and start being letting the enemy team win? Singed Support certainly dirtied that water a lot, for example.

Personally, I prefer to have exclusively players who will play to win in matchmade modes. Don't really care about custom because it's not matchmade, but in a mode like Blood Moon, I have more fun with teammates who actually try instead of playing deathmatch and focusing on KDA to the point of losing because of it. If it isn't already, I'd strongly prefer that whatever isn't "playing to win" be punishable in featured modes, and personally, I'd include outright refusing to pay any attention to the heralds or explicitly saying you don't care about winning without serious extenuating circumstances like a permaAFK or someone else on your team that is really, really extremely toxic to the point it's legitimate to just want to get away from them ASAP (e.g. users of hate speech and intentional feeders, none of us want to be around those, right? Are those considered valid exceptions?)

Also personally, I've taken to prefacing every game of Blood Moon with "This mode is won or lost on Herald kills" in champion select, often followed by "Is everyone ready to play to win?" depending on what, if any, reaction the first sentence gets. If someone is clearly going to be a major liability, I dodge. The rest of the time I often encounter players who are happy to discuss our strategy for the coming game, and, well, my winrate is something like 75%+ in BM now (a nice perk, sort of,) and far more importantly I'm enjoying the average game much more because my teammates actually work together instead of playing solo deathmatch. The cost of 6-15 minutes is well worth it to me, though honestly, I'd prefer some way to just get matched only with serious players - on BOTH teams - in general. Winning because it's effectively 4v5, in either direction, is not (as) fun, and it's very very hard to actually get that with all the players who simply don't care about actually winning the round.

So, Player Behavior pros, where do the actual rules fall in specific cases like these? Everyone, what do you think about the issues raised? Any ideas how to improve the situation so more people can have more fun and not have games ruined by players of severely differing intentions?

5 Comments

Magical Player2/20/2017, 4:37:36 AM1 votes

If im 5 stacked and my team agrees to lose a game :D

ModKnightsKemplar2/20/2017, 4:43:35 AM1 votes

Well, I don't disagree with your attitude or your points.

However, being bad isn't punishable. Being stupid isn't punishable.

I, too, prefer to have teammates that both a) know the best way to win and b) work to employ that strategy to the best of their ability. Unfortunately, that just isn't how the world works. Some people are tough to deal with.

Frankly, that's what separates the good players from the bad ones. You can't punish bronzies for not knowing how to play around the baron pit. If they knew that, they probably wouldn't be in bronze. You can advise them, kindly, and hope that your comments help lead your team to victory. But you can't get mad if they don't have the skills to win the game.

My experience has been that there are two key ideas that help me have fun in League:

  1. Remember that it is just a game. It's fine to tryhard, it's fine to practice, and it's fine to want to win. But at the end of the day, you have to remember that it's just a game, and it doesn't kill you to lose one now and again. Just try to learn something every game and keep improving.

  2. The better you get, the more fun it is. Once you get to a skill level that actually suits you, you have more fun because every game is an engaging challenge. I got promoted to my record high of gold 2 last week, and I've never had more fun with the game. I know I'm getting close to my "true elo," as people call it, because my games are a tug of war. I tend to suck pretty bad in lane, but my late game decision making is really good, and that's starting to bear out very consistently in my games. I win a lot from behind lately, which is fun.

But I'm rambling. The point is, you still have to focus on your own game. It isn't reportable for someone to be bad; you just have to keep your MMR high enough to avoid those people. It's a drawback of social gaming. This isn't unique to LoL, and it won't go away with policy or new ideas. It's just the price of social gaming.

EDIT: Part of the problem is that "trying" looks really different to lots of different people. I'm sure that to diamond players, I look like I'm playing one-handed. I can't help that. This is as good as it gets for me.