Psychology of the Toxic Community and how Riot can use it more effectively
Hi there, college student, heading to grad school soon, Bio major, Psych minor. I'm not a Psychology major, so I'm not fully immersed in it, but I do have my feet wet.
Long post, so, if you want to read the tl;dr, there is no tl;dr. This is from an educational POV for what I would consider one of my more favorite games, with a caveat: I only like League when I DON'T communicate with anyone that I do not know in the game. This isn't a scientific study, but more of a "fun" study I did with a friend to help them out with their report, since we both share a fondness of this game, if the caveat I mentioned is involved.
What we performed was in no way scientific: We just surveyed the local population, our friends who did play League, and the community of reddit, specifically, the subreddit, so don't expect me to immediately say "this is why 'x' is bad, and this factually proves..." because our "fun" experiment was for that: fun, as well as helping him with his grade. It was mainly a survey-based, so there are some factors affecting it such as self-reports and not taking into account geographical location, which do affect the results, hence why I considered it a "fun" experiment and not one for research (That, and I don't physically own that much money to do actual research on community interaction because of the stereotypical poor part-time working college student status).
Overall, we got about 200 responses (213 to be exact, we were only to get 60-80, so we overshot our goal by a lot). The questions we did were a mix of free-response, multiple choice, a 1 to 5 Likert Scale, and demographic questions asking age, gender, and educational attainment status. For demographics, a majority identified as male (Around 83%, 17% female), ages were varied, but the majority followed a bell curve with 16 being the peak of the curve; the youngest age was 11, and the oldest was 32. The average educational attainment was also varied, with "currently in high school" being the most chosen response, and "Bachelor's or higher" being the lowest response. The second lowest response was "Below 8th grade" (This survey uses American educational settings, since we're both currently living in America).
When survey takers were asked if they played with friends or played alone, or not played the game at all, the majority response was that they played with friends, with that choice taking about 65%, playing alone scored around 33%, and the remaining went to not playing at all. When asked on a Likert Scale how much they enjoyed playing League, 1 being "I hate it", and 5 being "I love it", it also followed a bell curve, with the responses leaning much more towards the 5 end. When asked about why they chose their response on the Likert Scale, a brief explanation was given (free response). Varied responses ranged from it being a time to relax, to unwind, and to play video games. Other responses that were included went along the lines with the respondent using it to hang out with friends, or to meet new friends.
So, it's safe to say that League is popular and well-liked.
However, when asked about the community interactions that they had, we had a couple of alarming findings that may seem to contradict all the "good-feelings" that were previously posted. When asked about playing alone and to give their experience with the community, a slight majority (54%) indicated that they did not enjoy playing alone. The remaining 46% was divided up between the person enjoying their time alone to play League, or saying that they didn't play League at all. 2% said that they didn't play League, while the remaining said they enjoyed playing alone. When asked why they chose their response, there seemed to be a good amount of respondents saying that the community is why they did not enjoy playing League. One particular quote that popped up and summarized the general sentiment was:
>"I do not like playing alone because I very rarely have a good time communicating with the community. They're either silent, berating me, or we generally have a good time. Unfortunately, my experiences seem to be a mix of the first two mentioned, with the second one being slightly more frequent than the first."
One last Likert Scale question was asked to put on a scale of 1 to 5 of how they viewed the community of League, with 1 being unfavorable, and 5 being favorable. The choices also followed a bell curve, with the scale leaning left more. The majority of responses were hovering around 2 to 3.
Again, this was not a scientific study. We did this for "fun", and to also help out my friend's grade, since it was his project for the class. We both did it because we have had unpleasant interactions with the League community, even though we both enjoy League of Legends. This is in no way to say "this entire community is bad", but to address the issue that is affecting League and its community. We're not asking to take the numbers and responses too seriously as we did this with a limited budget, as well as doing it for a Psych class project on the effect of interactions among others. He ended up getting an A for the project, so we celebrated together.
What I do appreciate is that Riot made tips that did relate to the point of the survey created. These in particular were the ones that related the most: >Players who cooperate with their team win 31% more games. Players who follow the Summoner's Code win 27% more games. Players who break the Summoner's Code lose 23% more games. Players who verbally abuse their teammates lose 16% more games. Players who curse at their teammates lose 13% more games. Players perform better if you give them constructive feedback after a mistake.
What I notice from my personal experiences from last season as well as this season, is that when I did not interact with the community, I performed better. When I did interact with the community, I performed much worse. My last two games of Ranked for this season, I decided to try and interact with the community, so I did not do what I did last season, and I left my chatbox unmuted. In both games, I noticeably performed much worse than I normally did, even during my last season placements and previous placements beforehand. What I remembered in my last season's placements was that I muted my entire game and got a 7/3 W/L ratio. As of right now, I'm 1/2, and the reason for the first win was because I muted my entire game, so I didn't see the chatbox.
The reason for my losses were a mix of those above, as well as my own personal skill. I play League for fun, and to relax, so I am not a Plat+ or a pro. I am far from that, and I will own up to that, because I do not have time to hone my skills to play League very often, even during vacation times. I only seem to relax and enjoy my games when I mute the entire game, or I play with friends that I know in real life, or friends that I met online and I can talk to through Discord. In my last two games, I had the majority of my team breaking the "verbal abuse" tip, and the "cursing at their teammates" tip. The first loss, I tried to shrug it off, kind of what many people in this community tell others to do, and went into my second game. Same thing, but this time, halfway through my game, I ended up just doing what I did last season and muting my entire game. After I did that, I performed much better.
Riot is already utilizing tips to make their community a better place, which can be seen a bit in the forums, but not so much in the actual game itself. Either the games for me are silent due to no one talking, and everyone just pinging, a giant insultfest, or I mute my entire game. I do the third most often, so it's biased for me. Unfortunately, those mutes do not go past into the postgame chat. Riot does also take classified information very seriously, which I appreciate, but I personally think that Riot should release general percentages on how the data that they have collected over time about community interactions. Keeping the community in the dark about itself and its interactions seems to be a negative reinforcement, so shedding some numerical light on this subject would definitely be positive reinforcement. I remember that Riot released an infograph about this before (back when the Tribunal was still functional), and from what I saw, the community got immensely more likable after that graph was released. That was a while back though, so an update would definitely help out a lot.
The overall idea to take away from this is that community interactions definitely play a factor in enjoyment for League of Legends. People play League to play with friends, or to interact with each other. What seems to be more common in the Player Behavior and Moderation forum is that others have negative interactions with the community, with maybe 1 or 2 posts out of 100+ praising a random unnamed community member for giving out a random act of kindness.
This post is food for thought, and open for discussion. I'd like to see how the community itself thinks of the community as a whole. I have a biased view of it, so I would like to hear the opinions of others and their view of the community. The experiment was a "fun" experiment and in no way meant to be taken as factual information. To give credit to the community, I have met some pleasant community members and have added them online, but the majority of my friend's list are friends who play League, or used to play League, but rarely do now, or never play League nowadays.
