So I'm writing a research paper and decided to research toxicity. Seeing how there are a lot of toxic people in LoL, from personal experience and stories, I figured I would gauge the community for a response on said issue.
What do you think is the cause for toxicity? Any ideas on how to drastically reduce toxicity? And lastly, if anyone has any links to potential sources for citing, could you kindly include a link for follow up. Thank you for your help.
No law and order. There is no limitations to how toxic a player can be it will be. And you or the team says there reporting after game,they love the idea and escalate more. There is no reason for them not to be toxic. Can't stop them in game, u leave because if it your quickly in trouble not them. Does riot care, do they have something in place, is it a concern at all? We as gamers are in the bttm of riots list. We are there pay check. Asking the community is a great form for feedback but I would really go ask riot. Everyone would like there feedback.
What do you think is the cause for toxicity?
Lack of parents beating children at an early age so they don't act like jack asses.
Any ideas on how to drastically reduce toxicity?
Stop calling CPS on people who are smacking their kids.
And lastly, if anyone has any links to potential sources for citing, could you kindly include a link for follow up.
Maybe Dr. Phil or something.
I would say the toxicity comes from this game being a team game and not being able to solo carry the game, since 1 mistake from your teammate can lead to defeat later in the game, and you having no impact of how good your lanes will be doing early game. People will naturally look for someone to blame rather than focus on improving their gameplay. People want to "win" the game, no matter how good or bad they played.
But you could probably look for causes why this game may be more toxic than others (compare games, back when i played starcraft, played said Have fun, and GG wp at the start and end of game). Does it have something to do with that there used to be report options for unskilled players, causing people to say "report X" every game.
Compare toxicity in team games vs solo games
compare toxicity in games where you have to pay, vs free games (will risk averse people be afraid to be toxic to lose their account?)
Maybe compare games where everybody gets the same playing field (people cannot blame their loss on OP champions if they are playing chess)
are toxic people on the internet equally toxic IRL, or are they shy people who vent their frustrations of not being good enough?
I tend to get a little toxic when teammates refuse to help when I'm having a hard time laning, especially when the blame me for losing the game and it's really just a lack of communication coupled with the selfishness of teammates
Frustration with things beyond their control whether it be recent balance changes, lesser skilled teammates or more skilled opponents, afks, trolls etc.
When there is so much which you can't directly have an impact on but can cause you to lose a 20min+ game then its natural for some people to get angry/fed up and become toxic.
lets take a game i played earlier as elise jungle we had a miss fortune adc who rather take ignite over heal and our support didnt agree so our support decided to play fizz and while the game still ended in a win it was a ton rougher to win than it needed to be i had to camp bot cause lee camped bot and i had to keep our adc in the game its just how people view a situation at the time. in Solo Queue you have people with different thoughts and approaches to the game and while some are more effective than others some people go as far as saying it never works cause it didnt in that game, bad games happen. in mid i will put a rod of ages on ahri cause it keeps me from being bursted down when im going in to charm an adc for example but i love the item cause its even made me survive fights and win fights that i would otherwise lost playing as an assassin like ahri is. also being an aggresive player i farm with my q as well as ahri so for me the hp/mana i get back every level helps me greatly in lane and still provides a solid amount of ap later in the game but ive also gotten a ton of flaming for it till their jungler is cussing me out in all chat cause he cant dive me under tower i have a mentality of a tank so even on squishier champs i play more of a sustain fight when i can. its those differing approaches to champs in such that can also create an element of distrust within the team. thus leading to toxicity.
Root cause of toxicity? There are three.
Root 1. Trolls intentionally ruining games. Root 2. It is quicker/"easier" to punish people frustrated by and harassing the trolls than it is to punish trolls themselves. Root 3. rito's refusal to address Root 1 and instead doubling down on the systems in Root 2.
People feel like there are no repercussions on the internet. Especially when you can be anonomous, there is no social pressure to be polite or conform to social norms. While most people have a strong enough moral compass to still do the right thing in these situations, there is a small minority of the population where the only thing keeping them from doing something wrong is the fear of being punished.
A great example of this is Ashley madison, the anonomous website where married people could meet up and cheat on their spouses. A hacker (probably someone who was cheated on) hacked the Ashley madison website and threatened to post a list of all the users if the owners of the website didn't take it down. Of course the owners refused so the list was released and it caused more than a few divorces and I think even one person who was outed was so embarrassed that they committed suicide.
That kind of shows you how powerful of a temptation being anonomous can be. People know what they are doing is wrong but they get a thrill out of "being bad" and getting away with it. We've all had those horrible thoughts or instances where you had to bite your tongue or clench your fists to avoid hitting someone. The Internet doesn't require you to have that self control so you see a lot more people going to the "dark side."
You can see this all over the internet. I'll frequently read news articles and then read the comments people leave and it's amazing how racist and bigoted people are. Same can be said for any other website or community that isn't strictly monitored. If there isn't a threat of a ban or some other forms of punishment some people will run wild because they have no self control of their own.
While there are several causes this season that frustrate players and enhence toxicity (note that I'm only taking players who are actually here to play instead of here to troll into consideration), I'm looking at overall trend over the past years and my conclusion is very close to what venomous frost said.
I believe the reason ppl react drastically and eventually negative to the point of toxic is because of severe consequence from dying.
True, we should be punished for our mistakes and rewarded the other way around, but it's to the point where mistakes are too harshly punished for, and it's the entire team that suffers so the team's more likely to direct their anger at the one who made them suffer.
I've played mmorpg's where I could 1v20 and stomp. I've also played those where I had to function as part of a group in order to find success. I've died often, my team died often, and we lost objectives, but in both settings I've never run into a single negative player, reason being most ppl end up having fun regardless. Team got wiped, we're behind in points or objectives? It's k lets go over what we did wrong as we head back to yolo more. Team gets wiped and we lose in the end? Our healer noob yo (priest: wtfbbq noheals4u). In the end everyone laughs it off as they move on. Main reason why those ppl feel no pressure is because it's no big deal when they're losing. Yes the team's behind, but just like the bounty system we have here, the losing team is rewarded more significantly if they win against the winning team, allowing comebacks. Most importantly, the losing team's strength is not handicapped in any way, making comebacks more than likely. The same doesn't hold true here: yes you're rewarded significantly if you beat a fed opponent, but you completely rely on your opponent to hand that to you through playing like an idiot instead of standing on even ground as you battle it out.
TL;DR if your opponent is awarded 50gold 0exp per kill instead, are your teammates going to rage as hard at you as they would before?
What do you think is the cause for toxicity?
In my opinion, the cause for toxicity starts from a player that has a terrible game. For example, Player A is on tilt, begins flaming someone and eventually Player B will be responding and both players will be arguing with each other. Game over, next game Player A and B will be flaming someone else.
There are options where you're stuck with a premade 4 and they just begin bashing you because you're not in their premade and you can't do anything about it except take it because you're most likely going to get reported by all 4 of them and have a higher chance of getting punished regardless of what you said because a report is a report.
Thirdly, you have players that are intentionally feeding or afk and refuse to cooperate with the team. You can try motivating them to play but then they start bashing you which leads to reason 1 earlier.
Any ideas on how to drastically reduce toxicity?
How you can fix this is you send the entire team chat log and review it instead of just reviewing the player that is reported' chat logs. Like for example if I am responding to someone who is sending me death threats or spamming me pings, I shouldn't really be punished even though the mute button is right there. If you're getting verbal abused, why can't you respond to them? Yes it makes it worse, but my entire day is ruined already just cause I have been bashed on so what's wrong if I respond? If you want to talk shit, expect a reaction or don't even be afraid of one.
Honestly this is just like bullying, if someone is bullying you, you have to step up and tell them off otherwise they are just going to continue. Sure it's wrong because I may be cursing back but what if the rest of my team is on my side and know a troll when they see one? If this guy is intentionally feeding, telling all 4 of us to die, what's wrong with us responding back? He already ruined the game for all 4 of us which is why I believe we should investigate further to find the root by showing the entire chat log.
Lastly, it may be difficult but I'm sure we'll see more results if there was a level bar for our accounts on how close we are to a punishment. This system can gradually increase or decrease as we have good/bad games. Not that it's to encourage toxicity, but if we know where we stand we will try to be a better role model or even encourage everyone to be more positive. Like have a scale 1-5, we can gain like 50-100 ip if we can stay in the 4/5 zone for 2 weeks. If you're at 1 that means you're getting closer to a ban. To get closer to a 5, you have to receive a lot of honors, and to get closer to a 1 you're going to be reported like almost every game.
Just my 2 cents, hope it helps someone.
It comes from the lack of policing. You can feed/DC/flame almost limitlessly with virtually no reprocussions and the people that actually care about playing a match with order feeling helpless to make their community better.
Didn't lyte already publish a paper in gaming toxicity? I remember reading something a while back. or better yet, why not ask lyte directly in his ask.fm
but if I were to guess the root of toxicity
people have no tolerance to lesser skilled players (typically starts the conversation with "why" or "report xxx for troll / feed")
people can't take any form of criticism and will rage when asked "why" or see someone direct something negative at them such as "report xxx for feeeding
I think pride and social group is the main factor.
Many people think that if they're label gold below they are labelled as trash and unskilled. I have been through that once I got out of gold I started to realize that this isn't a solo carry game. It's a team game there is a reason why this is a 5v5 game. You can improve mechanically and game sense to win games.
A majority of people want to win and climb but they can't help to be toxic bc they want to win.
Try to draw ideas from heros of the storm and contrast it to lol. The game is more team game oriented while lol requires laning to last average 10mins where sometimes lanes can be punishing. Whereas hos there are ways to come back by taking objectives.
Watch grossgore stream yesterday incitful evidence of toxicity. He makes a lot but complains is angry about his rank. Another reference you could use is a prime example the legend of Dotot. Try using hos to find a counter argument or something for your research as well.
