Boards›Player Behavior

Problem with toxicity that I too rarely see being mentionned

Lachainone·3/22/2018, 2:22:49 PM·1 votes·409 views

As a lot of us, I play soloQ. I played SoloQ during the S7 season, during the preseason and play it right now in S8. ** Skip to "What can be done" if you don't want to read everything**

I guess that a lot of us noticed how super toxic soloQ is during the beginning of a season. Here's why with a fictional character called Tim:

  • Tim is a competitive player trying to reach diamond.

  • Tim ended last season at division plat 2. He was close to his goal and felt like with more time, he could have reached his goal.

  • Tim didn't play soloQ during the preseason and started playing soloQ few weeks after the beginning of the new season.

  • Tim did his placement. He was matched with a large variety of skill level (idk why this happen during placement, but it always happen). That made him think that he needs to carry games instead of playing patiently. He starts playing a high risk high reward playstyle as a race against the enemy carries to get fed on the bad players.

  • Tim finished 5-5 after his promo (the usual score) and placed gold 4.

  • Tim now has the feeling that he doesn't deserve to be at this rank even though he understand that most people lose ranks with the new season and will try his hardest to carry.

  • In champion select, he's last pick. The current team comp is GP top, Syndra mid, vayne and nami bot. He knows that a frontliner would be great, but he knows that he can't take a tank otherwise he won't be able to carry. He picks Nidalee and lose the game (not specially his fault). Has he had taken a frontline, he would have had a higher chance to win, but the risk of being frustrated not being able to carry was too big.

  • Next game, Tim picks Nidalee again. This time, he has a good teamcomp. Unfortunately, his Caitlyn is really bad and tilts. She single-handedly lose the game finishing 0/10/2.

  • Tim is now a bit frustrated but plays again. He gets a good comp and his favourite pick Nidalee again. He knows he needs to carry hard and thus play a high risk high reward playstyle. His risks don't pay off and he feeds. One of his ally flames and he tilts. "Why does this player says I am bad, I am Plat 2 player stuck in low gold, this guys doesn't know shit!" Fact his: he's curretnly 0/10/2, the same score as Caitlyn from last game.

My point of this story his: most of us were in one point of our "league carrier" at the same spot as Tim. Feeling like we don't deserve to be at the rank we are (since we were higher last season), but are unable to climb. Most of us are victim of the high variance of player skill and most of us then try to take carry champions to win. We then play high risk high reward, adding even more variance and in the end: everyone is frustrated and tends to become toxic.

What can be done? SoloQ is more toxic at the beginning of seasons. I fully understand why ranked reset happen. Riot wants to keep their playerbase and one big way of doing this is resetting their rank so they can have new goals and new reasons to play. However, I feel like Riot is really aware of the positive effects of ranking resets, but also unaware of the negative ones, which are:

  • Lots of people don't play soloQ at all because they don't want to spend time and effort in something that will get reset soon after. Most of my friends are like this. They just do their placement for fun and end up silver even though they are gold-plat level. When they sometime play soloQ, they are so far from their right skill level that they stomp their games creating the "high variance games". When they lose, you can' be sure they won't bother playing another one since everyone is playing shit.

  • SoloQ is really toxic at the beginning of the season and at the end which causes a lot of people to stop liking the game and quit.

  • People don't want to play non-carry roles like support because they hate being matched with ADC that are 5 division lower than their real level and seing them fail while being unable to do anything.

I don't know exactly what can be done, but I feel like most of toxicity (I'm talking about angry words, not running it down mid) doesn't come from twisted people, but just from normal people who are frustrated about the game.

I think that if Riot's goal is really to reduce toxicity, they need to reduce the in game frustration rather than taking award and punishment measures. The thing is, competitiveness and toxicity are closely linked. Riot wants the players to be competitive so they care about the game and continue playing, but at the same time wants to reduce toxicity. I think it's hypocritical since the two goals can't be obtained with rank reset.

tl;dr: toxicity is for sure higher in the beginning of seasons and if Riot really cares about reducing toxicity, they should stop with decreasing the ranks of every players after their placements.

3 Comments

Kei1433/22/2018, 2:43:21 PM4 votes

The rank itself is just a visual number. The MMR of the account doesn't change during season changes.

Tim may be in gold4, but at the start of the season, he is matched against people in plat2.

Thinking that he needs to carry is a standard mindset, but is he adhering to the META? If it is shield META and he's trying to play a bursty carry but can't do his job sufficiently as all his damage is getting blocked by shields, then his original gameplan of have to carry through dealing damage maybe an incorrect outlook of how the game should be played optimally.

What Tim needs to realize is where his MMR is at is different than what he sees. Maybe due to the shift in META, his MMR is no longer plat2, but he belongs in gold1 instead. Maybe he doesn't understand the lower MMR METAs and the tenancies of the players (like how bronzes don't watch the mini map, thus won't get in position or set up for ganks as often as the plats do) and is failing to adapt.

Bottomline, the rank resetting is probably not the root cause of Tim's problem.

SanKakU3/22/2018, 8:48:15 PM2 votes

The thing is, most players don't even know what real toxicity is. Real toxicity is playing a chat game instead of League of Legends, while you're supposed to be playing League of Legends. Well, that's one kind, anyway. Being frustrated at your allies and expressing it might jump into that territory, but I agree that frustrated players shouldn't be picked on. Fixing matchmaking would do a lot to make players less frustrated. It's possible to be competitive without causing a large amount of frustration for everyone involved.

Terozu3/24/2018, 5:16:38 PM1 votes

*career

And yeah you dont need to carry you need to strengthen your team. I've learned that nunu is so strong because he specializes in making his team stronger. Once they have more raw power the game is easier. And noone does that better on a teamwide scale than nunu.