Boards›Player Behavior

One last question.

Nightsky Pirate·3/2/2020, 6:15:03 AM·1 votes·3,216 views

Do we have to play to win? Or do we have to not play to lose?

As far as I can tell, the rules say no inting, feeding, things like that. But you can play whatever you want in any role, you can (relatively) go wild with your build, spells, etc. Which is to say, you don't have to be optimal. Wouldn't that include effort? You don't have to play in an effort to make some amazing from-behind comeback, but at least you can't roll over and lose- no making the game end faster by letting the enemy win or whatnot. According to rules.

At least, that's what I think.

Also... I'm glad I got to discuss differing points of views these last bunch of months- at some point, I defended/backed up just about everyone here including rujitra (several times actually). We certainly have different views on the best way to behave, but in some way all you regulars have helped here.

Moderators: Thank you for being the role models of civility. I gave you guys more guff than you deserved.

11 Comments

rujitra3/2/2020, 6:45:59 AM4 votes

I’m glad we were able to have constructive discussions on many subjects. Feel free to reach out on discord if you want to stay in touch. I’m in the mod discord but almost always marked offline, just shoot me a friend request or at me.

TrueDamage Ninja3/2/2020, 8:46:17 AM3 votes

Reminds me of the guy who played Teemo support mid, got reported by Nightblue and banned by Riot for trolling.

JustA kleo3/2/2020, 12:18:23 PM3 votes

i mean you can bend the rules.

you can literally go sion and int and then call it the "inting sion takes tower" strategy. its a strat, the users plays to win...

the build and the plays are questionable. but its "a strat to win".

Kei1433/2/2020, 2:36:09 PM3 votes

This is such a conflicting topic for me. I personally like to play alot of off-meta and experiement alot of stuff, I theory craft with the intent to win but many times it doesn't work out and I have no problem with losing those games.

I also judge my teammates alot. If we are in a losing game and I see that they get out macroed and microed by the enemy team alot or they can't play a role (like the tank, the zoner, or even just bad positioning as the carry) then I typically will agree to surrenders or even start the surrender myself.

There's only comeback if there are certain skills (macro is a skill) to back up the come back.

BobTheNoodles3/3/2020, 1:27:26 AM2 votes

Think practically. You can collect evidence and reason from there whats more true. Ranked culture is obviously trying your best to win. Normal is more about having fun. ARAM is even more about having fun the feeding and trolling barely matter there. How often have you seen people rage at feeders and dumb builds for howling abyss? I know I don't care about winning in normal games. Riot doesn't know everything. We don't know everything. There is no clear line between trolling and trying to win. However there are good arguments for whats trolling. And its hard to know when you aren't in that culture. There are some things you should know when you are at a certain rank. Like gold and maybe even silver players understand the concept of cooldowns. If a mid dumped all the burst into the tank and your adc doesn't go in the for the kill its likely to be trolling at higher level elos but in low elo it might just be a bad player. In high elo whether you are trolling or a bad player you will piss off your teammates. In high elo is just the collective culture to care about winning more. I don't know whats the culture in diamonds through challengers though.

On another note I think this logic is sound but dunno how true. The more you care about winning the more likely you are to be frustrated thus the more likely you are to express it and get banned.

Nightsky Pirate3/3/2020, 12:10:59 AM1 votes

Now I have more to add.

I think it's clear that to some degree, silencing is going on. Good, bad, whatever, one of the things that will be silenced is criticism of the system's difficulty in punishing trolling/inting. The last few months made that clear to me. Sites for reviews will be the only significant platforms for criticizing League as far as I can tell in just a few days.

I believe there is no direct rule (not even in the summoner's code) of "play to win" or otherwise because the automated system can't really handle that determination. If it's not really a rule, and they leave it as "inting" (which is even more vague than "don't play to lose") then they don't really have to answer to anyone since isolated cases won't get much traction if the youtubers are allowed to do what they want.

We have seen cases where people were essentially banned for playing to lose, by intentional feeding more often than trolling/griefing/etc. But for not playing to win? No examples of that come to mind. I thought someone might have an example of that, but it seems not.

In the words of one of my ex: "I play to have fun idk about anyone else"

I think that is a common sentiment.

And if Riot heeds that, it's "don't play to lose".