Why I Love League but Hate the League Community

Yeah, it’s a League of Legends post. I started playing League first semester freshmen year because Super Monday Night Combat had maybe 50 people online ever. I don’t know why I got so into the game but now I see it as a way to have fun and improve in some way. It’s always exciting knowing you are getting better at something. The only thing that detracts from my enjoyment is the League community.

If any of you have played League for long enough you have probably run into your share of “toxic” players. Toxic is Riot’s word for asshole basically. Assholes seem to pop up more in ranked games because they are the serious games but you see your fair share of assholes in almost any game. Let’s create an analogy for what happens in ranked.

For one of your classes your professor decides to give your class a group exam, your grade will be the group grade, no individual credit. Both sections that he teaches will be taking this exam and your group of 5 is randomly selected between the people in both sections. There are 5 sections on the exam and he recommends that you split up the exam evenly between your group so that you and your group get the best grade. He gives your group 2 minutes at the beginning of the exam to look over the exam and decide how to divide up the work.

This exam should be no problem for you because you studied every section and expect your partners to have done the same. Unfortunately partner 2 only studied the last section your professor taught and only half remembers the other sections. Partner 3 knows the first 2 sections really well, is only OK on section 3 and sucks at section 4 and 5. Partner 4 is half good at all the sections because they studied for about 2 hours before the exam. Partner 5 knows section 2 and 3 pretty well but knows section 5 really well because that was their favorite section.

This is the chaos that happens when first meeting your teammates and trying to select roles for ranked. Everybody should be able to play every position somewhat and everybody has their preferred roles but almost every game it’s a struggle to decided who should play what. Then comes those times where somebody gives up on the team and decides to ignore what the rest of the team says and does whatever. We will however leave the edge cases out of our simulation.

You suggest that partner 2 should do the last section because they would probably be useless on any other section. This however makes partner 5 pretty annoyed that they couldn’t work on their favorite section because “I know that section super well and would ace it”. You and the rest of the group calmly tell partner 5 that the group has the best chance if partner 2 does section 5. Partner 4 decides to do section 4 because they think they remember that section OK. Partner 3 does section 1, partner 5 does section 2, and you do section 3. 15 minutes into working partner 5 starts bothering partner 2 because partner 2 isn’t doing that great on section 5 and partner 5 knows it. Clearly this harassment would make partner 2 do better on his section so partner 2 goes to the bathroom to clear his head and get away from partner 5. Partner 4 tells partner 5 that he should be nicer. Partner 5 tells partner 4 to fuck off. Partner 4 does so and heads to the bathroom.

Now you have 3 people to do 5 sections. Partner 5 switches sections and is happily doing section 5 while partner 3 is clearly annoyed at the situation but continues struggling through the exam. Partner 2 and partner 4 come back after a while but it’s too late to finish everything. Your group runs out of time and your group fails the exam. This kind of situation almost never happens in real life but this happens in League all the time. Somebody is annoyed from the start and this bleeds into the game. Somebody starts swearing at somebody and telling them that they suck and that makes them play even worse. It snowballs from there and usually your team loses. The people that play League though are normal rational people in real life right? Why would they turn into assholes online?

This can be attributed to multiple things that I wont get into here but here is one theory. Somebody may have had a bad day and somebody else in the game may have been playing poorly. The other team may just be better and it’s nobody’s fault for being outmatched. Whatever it is the League community and maybe even Riot needs to find ways of fixing this. I’m still going to play League but every time I go into a game I need to be ready for partner 5 to tell me to fuck off.