For the 4th time in a month, I have just finished a League of Legends match and wondered why I keep playing it. It's not because the game's gotten boring after 3 years; they've just released the new season's changes and shaken things up enough to keep my interest. The players have finally gotten under my skin.

None of them have reached the depths of that one player who decided that a bad match on my part justified telling me to get cancer and die, but the constant childish behavior of the gold- and platinum-rank players I get paired with. Dealing with it in a majority of the matches I play has just ground me down to the point I play EVE to unwind from LoL. I can accept poor play- everyone has their off-game- but players insulting each other, pausing to insult each other, constantly whining about how bad a lane's going, or just ragequitting entirely have turned even the victories into a grueling test of endurance.

And then there's the players who refuse to Surrender and end the game early no matter what, which is simultaneously understandable and frustrating. If all that's happening is we're losing badly, I can tolerate it, but when it's combined with a team of players volleying insults back & forth and laughing when their teammates die, I think it's less about refusing to give up and more about making everyone else suffer as long as possible.

In short, the game has quit being fun, not because of the game itself but because of its players. And I'm not some newbie; I started playing before half the current champions were released. The community didn't drive me off, it wore me down. No wonder Riot and Valve are eager to improve their players' behavior: it's either that or lose customers, even long-time veterans.

Yet it reminds me of a larger issue with gaming. I occasionally visit one of my old teachers to chat, and a common topic is the effect of games on kids. While he worries about the violence in them, I've argued the real threat is the other people playing them, the toxic trashtalk of Xbox Live and harassment in voice chat. Multiplayer games have evolved into a society where sportsmanship is nearly nonexistant, and it's spilled over to the gaming community to the point it is actively driving out not just players, but developers and journalists as well. We have become our own worst enemies, and unless we actively try to encourage sportsmanship and courtesy, it'll only get worse.

I just play pick up games, it feels like its better then it was 2-3+ years ago by far. Having position and lane pick before hand in itself has been a godsend! The community in MoBAs are insanely bad, there is just no getting around it. They say and do some awful, awful shit.

I'd say it's just the game design coupled with the age demographic playing it, kids have no patience. The best game communities for me were Natural Selection 2 and Red Orchestra 2 and most of the people playing those games were older and really tried to teach new players, and get them into it to stay around and not give up the game, even the stray 12 year old or whatever wasn't chastised for existing. Anyway, Get cancer and die nub lrn 2 play unistall th3 gaem bitch yo momz a ho. nub.

LoL is probably my favourite MOBA, but I too was driven away by the toxic community a couple years ago. I'd like to think I'm pretty good at ignoring trash talk but there's just too much of it in LoL.

I also agree with you about how video games can be seriously bad for children when it's this type of behaviour they learn from them. This is the real issue with the effects of gaming. I really doubt the violence in games is anything to worry about.

Anonymity encourages a lot of actions we wouldn't do face to face.

That said, finding a group of regulars to LoL with increases the enjoyment of that game IMMENSELY. Fill out your team, get on voice chat and you can just mute your opponents.

Lose without excuses, win without boasting is something all of us could take to heart, I think.

@konig_kei said:

I don't know. I'm not sure it has anything to do with being a kid. Noone/nothing is correcting these people. There are apparently no consequences. And the general attitude is 'deal with it, because it can't be helped.' These forums have regulations about being civilized, but I guess such regulations are harder to implement and uphold in videogames.

I'm almost at the same turning point as you, but in Dota 2. People keep telling me to not care so much about it and just do my best in the match. But that implies that I should get cold and jaded enough to not see other players as people. And I don't want to be that person. I'm playing multiplayer, I WANT to talk to other people. Just not that kind of people.

Guess the only solution is to find a group of people to play with (that are playing at the same hours at the same skill level)

I started playing League back in high school (BETA OG, UFO Corki skin what up), and I can say that league will either drive you away, or morph you into the pure evil which the rest of the community seems to be. For me my turning point was last summer, when I got into ranked pretty heavily and embraced the climb. Sure you get a few games where your team is friendly, and you pull it together to get that W, but a majority of the times you have a Riven who says "even if we lose lane, we can't lose", feeds Irelia, and then proceeds to bash the rest of the team- losing the game.

I would say that the group I play are probably the people who drove you away from league, mocking teammates, typing in the lyrics for Kanye Wests Power whenever someone dies or other cases of Tom Foolery. So I apologize, but you could probably spend your time more constructively someone else, so thats a plus!

It definitely gets tiring, but that's why I don't play games that require voice chat unless I'm playing with friends.

I don't personally engage in that kind of activity but I always find that it makes it more fun when people trash talk. I mean its like real life(maybe its where I grew up?). Its just people messing with each other, who cares. Isn't it possible to turn off text/voice in these games?

Though admittedly when people won't leave games that are sunk its very annoying, that and the fact that I hate how much I individually control the outcome in Moba's have made me pretty much quit them all together. (by individually control I mean that even if you are playing flawlessly, you can still lose because your teammates aren't. I feel bad that I had stopped playing SC2, LOL and Dota 2 made me appreciate it on a whole new level.

I've played both LoL and DoTA and I can safely say you absolutely need a party of friends to play those games. Going at it solo just ends up being frustrating, at least for me, and because the game is such a time sink and leaving means ruining a game, players get really toxic when they lose because they feel like they've wasted 30+ minutes. Also, everyone thinks is right which more often leads to a lot of arguing that just drags the team down, and ends with frustration for each of the parties involved.

I think it depends on the age group. Then there is the factor that LoL and Dota are highly competitive, where you invest on average half an hour to win. Its not fun to lose and people get angry when someone isn't doing their part for the team. Dota already has a system for filtering out dickheads in the matchmaking, right?

Yesterday i went to twitch to check out what is going on. Naturally the top games were filled with teens doing "lol so random" things. I scrolled all the way down to see the least popular games and i noticed Microsoft Flight Sim X. Started a stream, and there it was a middle aged guy flying a passenger plane towards an airfield calmly explaining how the planes systems work, while the chat asked more on topic questions. Its was so chill and cool.

Can you still not talk to the opposite team?

No trashtalk between the teams and only inteam whining was the final nail in the coffin for me. Its a social game and if you restrict the social aspects of it you are just failing.

How fun would it be if Hockeyplayers wasnt allowed to talk to each other?

You could always talk to the enemy team, it's an option in the options. It's disabled for those who don't like it, but you can change it anytime.

@rolkien: You could always ignore and/or report people who where just trolling but making it default for everyone to have the other team muted is just effectivly ending all cross team talk.

I've been playing League since March of 2010, and when I first started I wasn't really sure what I was getting myself into. The players always seemed to be such a factor in how I really felt about the game. People are competitive and when people are competitive bad shit happens. I've met more nasty and cynical people than I've met good in the game, and it's a game who's popularity has sky rocketed over the last couple of years.

There are so many people playing games like League and Dota, which are two very competitive games where a lot of the players are just teenage kids who really just lack a sense of how to be mature and admit their mistakes.

I started playing league when I was about 14 years old, and man I was totally different back then. I was too a little annoying kid who never really admit his mistakes until 2 years or so.

That being said, when people are competitive and behind the anonymous thing called internet, people are just scumbags. Video games.

Yeah you're right. I sort of wish it wasn't default but I feel like Riot knows what really turns off the competitive nature of the game. While at times it's great, a new player might not really enjoy listening to the enemy team's dumb comments about how they the person they're fighting is getting rekt or whatever.

I've been playing Smite quite recently, and while I don't think the players are any less toxic on a fundamental level, they are way quieter than the people I ran into in my brief time with League of legends. Hardly anyone talks in that game, which is a blessing as much as a curse, as people are way less organized and coordinated. Give it a shot if you want to play MOBAs but don't want to deal with people.

I've recently started playing smite, and man so far the community has probably been the nicest. Sure there are still scumbags, but between Dota 2, and League it's like a nice fest. Everyone uses the voice commands they can use (EX: VER: "YOU ROCK"), a simple button command of pressing v, e, and r can go a long way. I think it's a nicer addition to the formula, along side a different point of view in a moba. It's been a ton of fun, and I think it's the one I'd recommend to most beginners.

Part of the fun with MOBAs is playing with the crazies and trying to fuel their rage.

That difference in audience I think speaks to how differently people view Twitch streams and Youtube videos. Some people come to streams and videos looking for a time wasting clown to make them laugh and that's all they care about. They are looking for a clown that happens to be playing a game they care about. It would be like if Bozo could personalize his set for each individual member of his audience. The people in those audiences have little personal investment or sense of decorum and they just want a performance to entertain them.

A normal person trying to really play a game skillfully and intelligently just draws a different audience. There might be some jerks in the audience, but most people watching are there to learn something and to be informed. It is like a Charlie Rose audience as opposed to a Jerry Springer audience. Both are austensible interview shows, but they couldn't be more different in tone and audience.

As to the topic of MOBAs, I dropped off of Dota2 because it was too great of a time sink and because the players are the freaking worst. Even in low level play you would get people dropping, actively feeding, and just generally being jerks. Not to mention all of the smurf accounts and fountain farmers. I have never had a real life team sport experience like the average multiplayer game experience. I've never played with someone who was intentionally messing things up for everyone else nor have I seen someone act like an boastful jerk without someone actively stopping them. The average online multiplayer player would start a fight if they tried the shit they do online in a physical sport or a face to face game. So that's why I don't play online multiplayer of any kind anymore. The jerk-o-sphere that exists there holds nothing for me anymore.

I would encourage you to think about whether you would try that if the other players were physically next to you. If you wouldn't, then why do you think that your behavior is acceptable online. Pissing people off on purpose is still a shitty thing to do and the people you're playing with are still people.

The majority of League players are also between the ages of 18-35. Maybe a greater proportion of trolls are younger but just know that the whiny "child" bitching at you might actually be a grown-ass adult.

Honestly this is why I mainly play league with friends, never soloq, duoq at a minimum. Use the mute button liberally. Someone says anything that might piss you off, mute them straight away. Chances are if they're flaming they're not using the chat function to discuss tactics anyway. Once you can't hear them I find the game becomes much more enjoyable. If you still find yourself pissed off after that, well, consider taking a break? I have a friend who got seriously annoyed by flamers all the time, to the point where he'd spend the entire game bitching about them on skype to me. I finally told him to just walk away from the game until he actually had fun playing it again.

I think for the twitch example it's less about the game they were playing and more the number of viewers. If you tune into a league or dota or SC2 stream with <200 viewers you get the same kind of chill discussion. "Twitch chat" as a phenomenon only really starts to occur once you get 1000+ people in chat and no amount of moderators can control all that shit.

Like i can go into certain popular league streams that focus on teaching the game, and with 5+ mods on and subs only you get twitch chat down to a manageable level where it's not cancerous to read. It's not the game (although that may play a factor), it's totally just the number of people you get in the stream. Like GB chat gets pretty bad too when there's little to no cooldown and thousands of people screaming shit into chat because the chances of having a meaningful conversation either with the dudes on stream or everyone else in the chat is really low. If no one's going to be able to read your thoughtful comment the people that post them don't speak and the people that spam messages or emojis are the only ones left.

Side note: It has never shown video games make people violent. Although "the public" believes it there has never been a solid connection where someone has played a violent game then has then thought "this is okay to do" and subsequently gone out in the real world and acted that way.

It has been shown that video games make people aggressive. The antagonizing environment and the competitive drive can make someone who was passive before playing agitated with both winning and losing. So in the real world the player may win or lose but either way many are more forceful and aggressive and emotional immediately after playing these games.

So that is really what the issue is with these games: A (seemingly) high stakes game that is an aggressively adversarial environment leaves people in the real world feeling pissed off or extremely elated where anyone who doesn't know how to handle their emotions acts out. I'm not sure "changing the game" helps as much as getting people to learn sportsmen like behavior like how to control their emotions when they win and lose.

I haven't really played LoL, so I can't speak to the community. I will say that I think this is a serious issue. I have definitely played enough Halo 3 to know how vitriolic a community can be, and it can literally cause someone to not want to play anymore. Instead of wanting to improve, it just drives people away. I wish there was a way to improve player-to-player relations but it seems, as our medium is often used as a form of escapism, that it is almost hopeless.

I remember, though, that Bungie had a really cool feature in Halo Reach where you could choose to get matched up with players based on play style. The options ranged from serious play, working as a team, and just playing for fun. I thought that it was a really neat idea, but the Halo player base was simply dying too quickly after 3 to really show if it worked or not. I hope someone brings that idea back around, but it seemed that Bungie did a lot of that kind of work when they were under Microsoft.

I don't play League at all, but I do play Dota 2 once in a while. I'm very trigger happy with the mute button. I just don't have the patience for jerks. Some people may say that "oh but you need to communicate with your team so muting some of them ruins teamwork" but that just seems blatantly wrong. Watch streams of the top pros, they mute people all the time. Wagamama said on his stream one day after someone asked about why he was muting people that nearly all needed communication can be done with pings or with the quick chat wheel.

And yeah, find people to play with. It makes things so much better. I found one person who invited me to play with them and now as a result I've found a whole bunch of others (basically friends of friends) that I can play with if I want.

On the topic of the twitch chat thing from above, yeah, unless you have a bunch of strict mods, once you surpass around 1000 things become unusable. In lower viewer channels the chat is actually useful and kinda nice. I used to watch an SC2 streamer who usually got around 3-500 people watching. In the chat there was always the same people and we actually got to know each other a bit. We would talk about school or work and how things were going. It was a sad day when he announced he was no longer streaming.

I only really play competitive games with other people I know. Online with random people is too much of a crap shoot. Even in games that I find relatively chill, I have found people being absolute jerks with no real reason. Add to that that I am a female and the possibilities for dickishness multiply, and I base this conclusion on personal experience. The thing is, I think the best way to tackle this stuff is to use the tools that the developers give you to report them. I made this mistake before where I did not and just deleted gross PMs, but I realized afterwards that I should have been more proactive. At the same time, I was really confused and didn't want people to come after me for being too sensitive about trash talking or taking a "joke" too far. All of this stuff went on in my head within a few seconds before I deleted the stuff. Even if I was being sensitive, and I don't think I was, I still should have reported it. It would have made me feel like I did something about it and maybe it would have prevented them from treating other people poorly.

I have never played a MOBA and the talk concerning the toxicity makes me never want to try. I know this seems like a huge leap, but I would rather play cooperative games where I have had good experiences, such as when I played GoW horde mode or ME3 multiplayer, instead of trying to join a community that seems to enjoy being awful to one another. I also don't know a whole lot of people who play, so trying to learn in Pub games seems like an invitation to insanity.

It's unfortunate that a game that you enjoyed playing seems to be pushing you away. I hope that they find a way to balance allowing good-natured ribbing, which exists and which I think people wouldn't mind hearing in games, with punishing those that take that type of stuff too far. it would be bad news for them if older players decide to leave because the community is too poisonous.

Why wouldn't I do it if someone was next to me? I don't say anything hurtful or combatative. It's actually normally the opposite. Being super nice to the raging crazies usually incites them even more.

Most of the time I just ignore them but messing with them can be fun.

It is a wide problem. I hardly ever play games outside of my friend group because it bugs the crap out of me. I bough Gears of War 2 years after its release. Went into my first MP match and was just getting the feel for it. Then a player thought it would be a good idea to audio message me and tell me how much I suck and I should never play again and kill myself. WTF? I sent him a friend request :) He replied back with "I'll never be your friend" this wasn't some 10 year old punk kid either. I took some of his "advice" and never played GoW MP again. Just didn't care enough deal with that crap.

That being the case; Destinys MP system works better for me with less BS on the social end.

Saying stuff to deliberately make other people mad is a crappy thing to do regardless of whether you are using insults or false kindness. It isn't a cool thing to do regardless of your tool of choice. Would you intentionally shit talk/ talk down to a person to their face solely for the purpose of pissing them off if you were looking them in the eye? What you are describing isn't competitive trash talk, it is instigating shit for no good reason other than to laugh at other people. I think that it is behavior like that which makes online games and the internet in general pretty infuriating. So maybe think about not doing that anymore?

I've occasionally tried grouping with friends, but (and this may be a problem unique to LoL's matchmaking) we seem to often get matched against premade groups that beat the tar out of our "casual" group. I used to find that annoying, but lately I've been debating whether I'd rather play solely with friends instead, losses be damned.

I've been playing Dead Island: Epidemic for a while now ... and while that game only shares elements with moba's and gets a bad rep on GB (for some reason I can't really understand) it's quite fun and not that toxic.

LOL has a fantastic reporting feature at the end of every match. You should use it. It works.

@thatpinguino: I never trash talk or talk down to anyone. If you have such an issue with it, stop being a jerk to other people and we can all have an enjoyable game.

@cornbredx: I do constantly. I wish I could report people before the match started, too; listening to 3 people demand to play mid and refuse to change roles gets eye-twitching, and I'd like to do more than just mash Force Quit.

(I could play solely via the Team Builder, but unless I'm support or jungle it takes a long time to form up. And that only takes care of the issues before the game.)

Sure it would help if other people were not short tempered jerks in the first place, but further inciting the anger that already exists doesn't help anyone. It just makes the experience worse for everyone in the game.

When I did play Dota 2 I tried to treat the game like I would any game of pick-up basketball and I found that my tone on voice chat helped a lot. It was when my mic didn't work and I could not actively try to steer things in the right direction that things went into crappy name calling town.

Yeah, the macros go a long way. I also, because the game is much breezier and requires less of an investment, people get less heated about it. I wouldn't even necessarily recommend Smite for beginners, but for people who have in interest in those types of games, but were scared off by Brad's descent into DotA maddness.

I feel like there's an underlying sense of entitlement MOBA players to having a "good game", probably fostered by years of single player games basically going out of their way to tailor the experience to give players whatever they want. Most modern AAA single player games are very patient explicit teachers that teach you self reliance and that frankly winning is just a matter of effort(not skill).

That completely does not prepare you for MOBA performance which is more similar to sports, which is all about self sacrifice,co-operation, coordination, communication and skill. A single player/lone wolf mindset is lethal to performance in these games.

Single Player games hand you nearly everything, MOBAs you only eat what the team kills.

So when you drop 30-60 minutes into a bad match where one of your team is doing so poorly that it costs you the game, you can feel furious about what was "taken from you" and that it was deliberate. Eventhough your score may have looked great, it might not reflect that you didn't go bail your teammates out when they were getting pounded early in lane or that you bullied your way into a role/hero that you enjoy but may not have been the best one for the matchup or for your team composition and thus are just as responsible for the loss. Couple that with not having any physical interaction with your teammates, the knowledge you'll likely never play with these randos again, a lack of visible immediate consequence for bad actors, a mic right next your mouth but also right in their ear and you have a situation ripe for toxicity.

No one likes getting their but whipped, but I think youth sports do a better a much better job of fostering the right attitude for team success. And of course in sports when you grumble about how the game is going, you are not grumbling about it right in your teammates ear either.

Unless my teammates are super communicative, I usually just put something on my second monitor while I'm playing Dota. At least that way if the match is trash I don't feel like I'm wasting my time completely.

@jadegl: I think being able to find that balance with randoms is almost impossible. Too many people, too many variables, and Riot even has their own dedicated group that pretty much tackles the psychological and behavioral aspect yet this kind of behavior persists. Like you said, the best solution and is still the only viable solution has always been to team up with people you know. That in itself is a bit of hassle to set up but it beats being matched up with really toxic players more often than not.

Most of my personal experience with a team-based, competitive game like League or Dota has been in a LAN environment in net cafes back when I went to college overseas (this was before Dota 2 even existed). I'd be matching up with friends and sometimes we would match up with strangers looking for an available game and if they happen to be regular customers, you get to play a lot of games with them and eventually they also become friends. Not saying that this kind of behavior can't be replicated online since this can still happen but its different when you are playing that kind of game in the same physical space with other people where everyone is more or less expected to not act like a dick.

I guess that kind of experience pretty much helped and trained me not to be a jerk when playing with other people online even though there is no risk of physical harm or confrontation if I wanted to piss people off.

You bring up valid points, and nothing you've said is untrue. But I would say that, having been dragged UPWARD by my group of regular teammates, a few of whom are Diamond, there are ebbs and flows to the levels of vile talk. Perhaps placing in Ranked would put you in an environment that is less toxic and more supportive. There are heavy correlations between treating your teammates poorly and the team DOING poorly, and I feel as though that's something that professional players, and many people in at least Silver 1 tier, understand.

@jadegl I certainly understand that hesitation based on your points, and the same thing that the OP talks about occasionally still strikes me, but I would say that if you have friends who already play MOBAs - at least four of them - then it's worth at least giving League of Legends a shot. I don't know if DOTA2 or SMITE allow you to turn off all-chat, but in LoL it's off by default, and if you have a full team, all there with you in a skype call, you won't even need to worry about some of the legitimately awful people who play the game. They're very interesting games, and I find myself drawn to them without really knowing why, but there's nothing else quite like them.

I've played everything from Bronze players to Diamond 1s and everything in between. The game is just as varied a community than any other, its just that games have actual meaning and that makes people upset. I just finished a game going 20-5 and we because someone dc'd. Ya get salty but then you move on. Learn to laugh at peoples anger and shake it off. Focus on yourself and your play and dont worry about what other people are saying/doing. I've done DOTA and SMITE but nothing fits like League does, and the numbers back the game up

Well, I grew up with Unreal Tournament. While we did trash talk a lot, it was only to having a stronger motivation to win the game. "That guy called me a noob, I'm going to cap his ass...I mean flag..." The sworn enemies of last match were now your allies in another match. It was all in jest and no one really cared once you quit the game what was said to you. I never said anything horrible or deragotory. I can kinda understand why someone would curse but at some point you need to grow up. Xbox Live and MOBA-kiddies never did I guess...