[Long Post] Group behavior affecting solo players' experience

I'm tired of trying to earn chests for definitely not meta champs.

To all you people out there that have strong opinions about the balance of various champions...don't let your perceptions warp your judgement when it comes to playing in a team game. All the time I see people standing around doing nothing while the 'low tier' champion is doing all the work. Guess what? My team fed me into the enemy team lots of times last game, and I still managed A+... yeah that's right, they fed me into the enemy times enough to make sure I don't get S grade, but not enough times to lose.

I know groups of players can help make a solid community, but sometimes they just are really effective at bullying other players and I feel like it would be so much less of an heartache if some changes were made.

Now, I'm not saying that you can't match up groups of 3-4 players with solo players, but you need to make their group representation clear to the players. The club tags help with this a little bit, but you really only get a small fraction of the knowledge you need as a player to know which players are in which groups. We shouldn't be forced to notice that when we ignore a rude question from one of our allies for example that suddenly more than half the team have started treating us like the enemy. We should know from the beginning of the game if they might start behaving like that. We should be armed with the knowledge that they have friends willing to bully us if we somehow whether through our own fault or not manage to upset someone.

It's not even about earning a chest, the chest-earning aggravation is just a symptom of the problem. The problem is that solo players' game experience is ruined when toxic groups of players abuse them. Many groups of players are not toxic, and many solo players are not toxic unless they are in groups. It would be nice to have some clarity on which groups are toxic and which aren't. And we can't know that if we aren't aware of all the groups of players that are in our games.

Yeah, you can argue add someone to your friend list and talk to them afterwards, but that still falls short of knowing for sure. Some group of players could easily consider you not worth their notice, whether true or not, and not talk to you after the game. We need the client itself to tell us the groups. That way, we can tell how many of these teammates are just toxic when they play alone, and how many of them are toxic when they play in a group.

The reason I think this is important is I think a lot of people just assume that they or someone like them are just being ganged up on by random people and I suspect that it is happening less often than they think. If someone thinks they are getting bullied by completely random people, they may wrongly conclude that their experience with the game is far too low and that they don't have the talent for this kind of game. But if someone realizes that there is a group of players that are picking on them just because they're not part of their group, then they can realize that their expressions of belittlement/hatred/whatever are not personal and that these players do not know how to handle their emotions properly, taking it out on a random person to preserve a friendship.

I'm generally smart enough to tell if I'm actually making mistakes or if my allies are just blaming me for their own friends' mistakes. But I have a lot of experience in these kinds of games. A lot of newer players may not have the sufficient experience to distinguish between being bullied by low self-esteem players and being harshly reprimanded for playing badly.

Granted, a lot of it might boil down to language usage, and sure, people can just bully someone even for their own sake and not for their friend, thus being outside of a group. Yet I am pretty sure that it happens on a much grander scale with groups rather than without. It would just be nice to have some confirmation on that. Without the confirmation, people just lose their faith in the reasonableness of humanity.

Think about it, everyone's not as bad as they appear. The reason people appear so rude is they are sacrificing face of the random player in favor of face of their friend. That's showing in their mind at least, a lack of betrayal. Just because being honest with your friend is the superior way of handling things doesn't mean that every player is going to have the courage to follow through on what is right, or even know well enough. I'm not saying whether players should be condemned or not for such actions, but it's clear they have some pleasant emotions, even if they are twisted and not functioning as well as we'd like. None of us express all our good emotions well. That's just evidence that we're imperfect.