Every online game will say the same about their community: it’s toxic. But League of Legends? Now that’s a whole other story.
Riot be like: we’ll disable /all chat, and then we’ll win the fight against toxicity. But guess what? It’s not the enemy team that flames you the most. It’s the 0/8/2 jungler that thinks you’re the reason he just died the 8th time in the top jungle… while you’re farming bot. It’s the 15/0/5 top laner with the level 30 smurf account that complains about you playing badly in Silver IV, or it’s the support that goes AFK after you die the first time to an actual good play from the enemy bot duo.
I bet all of you have stories like this that you could tell, and the fact that almost all of us report at least one player by the end of a match says it all…
…but what makes League so toxic?
Why Does League of Legends Have the Most Toxic Community?
As already mentioned, League of Legends just has an extremely toxic community, but what could be some of the reasons as to why this is? Let's investigate some of the core reasons why League of Legends is such a bad 'team game'.
The Team
If you play with 4 others, and you lose, you won’t be as tilted as when you play Solo Rank. Even if you die 8 times to the enemy Aphelios, your friend, the support/ADC, will still make you laugh and make it fun. But if you play with someone that you don’t know, they will ping you, they will go AFK, or they will go to other parts of the map to leave you to die because it's what you deserve for dying yourself.
Easy To Become Toxic
It’s easy to become toxic yourself, isn’t it? When you’re playing so well against an enemy mid laner, and they’re dying over and over again to you, it’s easy to emote on his body and type /all ez. It makes you feel good to be good and to let others know that you’re good and that they suck. This is the kind of toxic behavior that we hate from the enemy team, but if you’re being honest with yourself… you’re kinda toxic too.
Toxic Match-Ups
You play against a Thresh/Miss Fortune, you know how to handle it. But then there are others who like to experiment and then all of a sudden, you’re playing against a Lux/Seraphine bot, and you’re beginning to question whether or not you should finally delete that stupid game because you’ve now been stunned for 10 seconds and Lux’s ultimate has a cooldown of 20 seconds… there’s nothing you can do. You just keep on dying.
It’s not fun to be the one dying… but it sure as hell is fun to be the one killing.
Toxic Masculinity
You might have noticed from my name and profile picture that I am a woman. However, I do not say that. Ever. Why? Because the moment I mention my gender, it’s “so that’s why you’re so bad” or, “go make me a sandwich”. It’s men, no matter whether they know your gender or not, telling you to suck them or that they screwed your mom. Actually, let me rephrase that: it’s boys. Boys living in their WoW and LoL worlds with half naked Ahri wallpapers on their desktop. If you feel offended by this, you're one of these men. Deal with it.
Insecurities
If you’re bad, you need to make somebody else feel bad to feel better about yourself. That’s just human nature and no different in League. If you die because the enemy jungler ganked you, and your own jungle came to help, you’ll ping your jungler if you die… though you were always the one that was too far ahead, and it was never your junglers fault. But you need to make them feel bad about themselves so that you feel better about your own mistake.
Owning up to ones own mistakes is hard, and we all gotta learn it at some point.
Riot Isn’t Doing Anything Against Toxicity
You would think that the report option is broken because it never feels like the players that you report actually get punished for their behavior. But no, that’s just Riot being Riot and not prioritizing this. That’s them removing /all chat and thinking that it would solve the problem.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Take reports seriously, please.
Riot Wants to Reward Good Behaviour
Riot has decided at the start of 2022 that they would try to take a new approach to player behaviour, but will an Honor Level 5 border and recall really solve the problem of toxicity in the game?
Like I said, we all have our stories of toxic moments and toxic stories to share. If you want to share yours, go on our Facebook and find this post… share your stories, and let’s all roll our eyes at some 12-year-old boy calling us a fat pig because he died in bot lane while you were farming top.