Is Riot doing enough?
I'm coming off a game where one player went toxic supernova in the first few minutes, complete with homophobic ranting and deliberate feeding. (I muted, reported and blocked him, as usual, but he still ruined the game for 9 other people.) I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks: my ban list has over 400 people at this point. I've read about Riot's player behavior team and how they've supposedly improved the culture, reduced bad behavior and repeat offenders, but in my experience this still happens all the time.
I watched a video of a talk about the messages in white text vs. red text and how those experiments have helped find ways to improve player behavior. I'm wondering: is that enough? Are text color experiments, or even the Tribunal, the most effective things that can be done to help this playerbase?
Playing armchair psychologist for a minute, I've found a couple of things that might contribute to why people rage so hard in this game compared to others:
- Players are known by their champion name, not their summoner name. "Irelia, I'm coming to help. Ashe, is your ult ready?" This means that every game, each player gets a disposable identity that shields them from the consequences of their actions. I think the problem is compounded by the idea of smurf accounts, which are another layer of disposable identity.
- The UI and control scheme are imperfect. Even after playing games like this for ~10 years, I still find myself accidentally clicking on the minimap and running away from my destination, or struggling with bad pathing issues, or mis-aiming my abilities at a bad time. The zoom level is frustrating. Ultimately, this control scheme was designed for RTS's, not 45 minutes of micromanaging a single unit, and that adds to the baseline frustration of trying to play the game.
- It's inherently a team game, where you have to rely on other people, but there are aspects of the game that only reward individual performance. There are concrete incentives to try to grab glory by kill stealing, for example.
- The rock-paper-scissors philosophy, with this many champions, means that sometimes you end up in a situation where there's nothing you can do to be effective against certain opponents. The only way to die is to stay completely out of range. Being rendered helpless by game design choices can be really infuriating.
I'm curious to hear other people's input about what makes LOL so rage-inducing from a game design perspective, and if there are game design solutions to some of these problems. Because honestly, I don't think changing a message's text from red to white is sufficient.