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Thoughts on Toxicity

simsinfinity·7/12/2016, 7:59:46 PM·1 votes·551 views

Wanted to get some thoughts from others on what my experience has been with League and its rather, unique, player base toxic nature.

I see toxicity often explained as a natural and justified reaction to people "not taking ranked seriously." The thought process, as I can tell, seems to be that ranked is for serious players only, and that winning is the only thing that matters. If someone has a bad game, feeds, or even worse picks an off-meta champion and doesn't win with it, the most common response is passive aggressive comments, outright rage, or any other host of toxic reactions. Having been a part of competitive sports at a high level, I can certainly appreciate the desire to win, the ambition to always give your all, and a hope that your teammates are equally as committed. What I have never seen, at least until this game, was the outright negativity towards teammates, the inability to control emotions when losing, or the high levels of tilt.

My theory for this is that the development of League, the game play design choices and implementations, are based around the same theory that all free-to-play games use- addiction. The concept of levelling up, grinding for exp and gold, and other staples of MMOs and RPGs are certainly not unique to league, but I do think that Riot was able to take the addictive nature of these games and condense them and enhance them into a 40-50 minute in game experience.

Think about all of the mini objectives/markers that each game is a rush to achieve- the level 2 power spike, getting enough gold for your first item, hitting lvl 6... Each time we hit one of these, the reward is larger. It comes with a more intricate visual and sensory output. Just like in an RPG or MMO, the rewards trigger the release of highly enjoyable brain chemicals. It is the same response that a drug addict receives when they are able to use.

How does this correlate to the toxic nature of the community? I believe it is because when a teammate feeds, or an entire team gets behind, the other individuals are denied the rewards and release that comes with them. It is the emotional instability that also appears when a drug addict is unable to use.

This became apparent to me as I was watching a few youtubers play. During a losing streak or a bad game, they are lethargic, prone to raging, and just have an overall down appearance. Watch these same people when they are having a big game- their entire demeanor changes. They will get overly excited, almost giddy.

Essentially, I think that the addictive nature of the game play creates a withdrawal symptom in players when they cannot achieve the various rewards that generally accompany a winning team. This state leaves people prone to emotional outbursts as the brain craves the usual dopamine surge that comes with those rewards. When combined with the general lack of personal responsibility due to the anonymous nature of summoner names, this creates a perfect storm of toxicity.

tl/dr version- players are jerks in league because we are all addicts.

Thoughts?

3 Comments

Azure Hamster7/12/2016, 8:20:43 PM1 votes

LoL players are not uniquely toxic. Counter-Strike players are the nastiest bunch I have played a game with. And they were even my workmates. Next up, Heroes of Newerth. Woa... those guys were mean! (I played these many years ago, maybe they've improved)

Toxicity exists in LoL, I can't even say it's rare. But it is not the community's defining characteristic, as many seem to think.

Much of LoL's design comes from the DotA W3 mod. They've refined it (in a good way, I really don't like DotA 2's slavish adherence to some of the design mistakes in the mod), but the core addiction cycles you talk about were in the game while it was still genuinely Free To Play, as in, it wasn't even possible to pay the guys making the DotA mod in the early days.

So I'm afraid that due to the game's roots in a game that did not use modern F2P monetization principles, I can't say your argument is very compelling.

Just my 2 cents. Nice to see an actual thoughtful post about this topic for a change.

Caitlyn

Azure Hamster7/12/2016, 9:29:55 PM1 votes

But I'm saying the design was already mostly in place before they ever decided to make an F2P monetization structure on it. But you are right that many of the game structures encourage people to get uptight about what's happening in the game. HotS deliberately eliminated a bunch of those.

I'd guess that in addition to needing psychologists to work on making the game more addictive, their player-behavior department needs those same people to make adjustments to the game to foster better behavior. For example, the new role picking system reduces toxicity. At the very least, they're aware of it, and working on the problem. And so far, I think they've done a good job at addressing this without breaking the core of the game.

Caitlyn