Why League of Legends' Design Encourages Toxicity | Design Delve 

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It usually boils down to this "1 person alone hardly wins a game but 1 person alone easily loses a game"

I'd like to see something deeper than a surface level look at league toxicity. I think there are many factors that aggravate the problem. Having 3.5 resource streams in a 5 player team, designating "carry" as a role, having a report system that invites misuse, and very little individual mitigation for abusive behavior.

Can't wait to send this to my friend. When I asked him this very question, he basically said "Losing isn't necessarily your fault, so people are way quicker to blame the four other dumbasses you have to share a team with."

I think the feeling of being powerless also plays a big role. The main way to stop being angry at the game is to focus on having a fun time. But being in a lane and having your ass handed to you by an enemy who's obviously stronger is not fun. Anything you do is a risk, and after falling behind enough even hugging the tower won't save you. You'll need your team to help you, but like you said, if it goes wrong then the game is basically over. And there's nothing you can do about it anymore except play another match and hope the enemy is not as good as the one you were playing against. And if they are, then soon enough you're not enjoying the game anymore and playing something else. But there's another option: you get better. You read, practice, train yourself, and suddenly you're winning games. But then your teammates start feeding, and your jungler doesn't gank, and you're not winning anymore, so you get angry. But being angry isn't fun so you try to focus on having fun again, slowly crawling back to the part where you figure out the game isn't fun if you're not good. That's the loop that'll burn you out. You either quit a casual player, or you play long enough to become toxic.

This is actually pretty similar to bad workplace structures and incentives where you judge a team based on individual effort but every person works on something completely different and you’re not able (or allowed) to help because you’re swamped with your own work. If one team member drags your team down, you feel like they weren’t pulling their weight because you did everything perfect. Terrible.

The Litmus test I try to hold all competitive multiplayer games to is "Any game can be fun while you're winning. How many games that you *lose* do you walk away from saying 'That was fun, I like this game.' " This is already why I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering and other cardgames, because I find that while fun games you lose *exist* the *vast* majority of the time, if you're having fun is mostly determined by if you're winning or not, and Mobas are that, but an order of magnitude worse.

Spot on. Snowballing mechanics crossed with "you're on your own but your performance will affect the whole team" leads to massive toxicity.

The best advice I got from a stranger when I started playing was "quit until you get better." I did and my quality of life jumped immediately.

I've only played HotS, while it still has toxicity I think it tries to mitigate a lot of these elements. 1. Most games are 20 minutes to 25 minutes in length, with the game almost forcing the game to end with objectives. 2. Team XP makes it so that if someone struggles, they aren't a weak link permanently. 3. If you're behind on XP, not only do you have shorter respawns, you also gain significant bonus XP from kills, so one good gank or teamfight lets you turn the game around.

I think another reason is because MOBAs(especially League)hits an uncomfortable middle in gaming interaction, where in shooters or fighting games where you are self-sufficient enough to not be able to honestly blame other than yourself, while in more team based games like Deep rock galactica, competitive TF2 and Payday 2 where each member has a role that no other player can cover, you are obligated to communicate and connect with the other players enough to have a decent dialogue and make a strategy from there while also figuratively watching each others back(+ they have a less serious tone to put even more focus on the players). While in League one is independant enough so one doesn't have to connect with your teammates to do things aside of big objectives but also not enough to not be affected by teammates performance, creating this situation where you have to trust people that you really don't care about.

A few of these can be addressed in the design stage. Heroes of the Storm proved you can have a MOBA with short match time and less individualized laning phases, reducing the pressure on an individual player. Meanwhile Dawngate, which tied a player's power to their behavior through a plethora of means, managed to stem the tide of toxic players into their higher tier matchmaking queues, while also providing a non-PVP experience with their Living Lore community vote system, and ended up cultivating a much calmer experience. I say this as someone who played both and experienced it firsthand. League and Dota 2 only won the MOBA wars of the early 2010s because toxic jerks, because of their need to win, are DEDICATED. Anger makes you stay around. Social media knows this and leverages it to great effect. I'm sure it's part of the reason that League and Dota are here to this day.

I think a huge part of it is that you can't leave. I mean you can, but you'll be punished for doing so. Other games might also have similar punishments, but as you mentioned, they have much shorter round limits than MOBAs. Being locked into a 30+ minute match you know (or "know") you're going to lose is ripe for bad feelings, as you feel like you're forced to waste so much time just because the jungler decided to camp yours or someone else's lane and you couldn't recover. And you can't even do like many shooters can where you let someone drop in for someone that disconnected with how the level and gold gain and stuff works. It's not like TF2 (either one) or something where you spawn with the same stuff each time so someone else replacing a disconnect isn't a problem.

This could be me personally, but I also think the constant pushing of these games as competitive outlets also plays a part in it. It's not enough to play and enjoy the game, you have to win and improve because the games are competitive. The highly competitive nature leads to a lot of "Correct" answers, like what the optimal build is for a specific character or the best choices for the current meta. If someone is playing for fun, they're more likely to build items that lead to a playstyle they enjoy or pick a character they enjoy instead of pushing for the Optimal Strategy, which can cause friction with people who are wanting to play the game competitively. Yes there are Ranked Modes for people who enjoy Try Harding and normals for those who don't. Tragically the world is nuanced; What's Competitive to one person could be Casual to another. So while one person thinks they're being competitive because they're playing their best character, someone in the same match could think they're being casual for picking an off meta champion. Someone could think they're playing Casually because they're just pressing buttons on their favorite character while someone else thinks they're being a try hard because said character is the strongest one in the meta.

I like to relate it to fighting games due to their differences. In a game like SF it is literally a 1v1 but people despise introspection so much that they still find ways to blame it on anything but themselves, the character is bad, the opp is spamming, etc. This just gets escalated in team based games as you can just as easily blame the other people for all your problems because surely you have not made any mistakes and played perfectly “it’s just my team that sucks.” That mentality is what makes these games so awful to play

I think the time sink is a very important one. It can frustrate some of the most chill and laid back players, of anything, to grind and fight for well over 30 mins to end up loosing, and games with ranked mechanics even more. Talked with a friendo about being leas harsh in the loosing team if they put up a good fight, but they pointed out that it could be exploited, so yeah, quite a issue.

Now I feel even more justified in despising these games... Hated them before, Hated them now. Will never play them again.

A sister video to this one about how games like Deep Rock Galactic discourage toxicity would be pretty cool, i think

I think win/loss economy in games is a contributing factor to toxicity that most people don't discuss. Yes, there's the in-game factors, but games that balance their overall rewards on wins and losses encourage a hypercompetitive mindset just so you can make progression, and because that progression is tied to the performance of your entire team, it means your progress can be slowed or outright halted by players being bad or intentionally griefing your performance.

🎵And this is why I'll never play a MOOOOOOBA🎵 Why would I want to give my time to people who actively ridicule new players when I could be doing anything else? I'll simply get on with enjoying challenges in which I am not mocked by my own team if I make a minor mistake, thanks very much. Anyway, great piece as usual!

I remember a Penny Arcade comic that summed up MOBAs so well. One of them was playing Heroes of the Storm & was asked if he won. He replied, “No, but it took us an hour to lose”. Like you mentioned, I think that’s why people get so toxic in League. When you’re getting squashed in a match, it feels like a major waste of time compared to other multiplayer games where the suffering is at least over in 5 to 10 minutes

JM, I find it to be an absolute sin that I never came across your work or was suggested it via Escapist. Having listened to your series this past month I absolutely love your content and the way your videos are structured. I look forward to seeing more of your future delves

There's 2 other mechanics that feeds into toxicity, and it's a thing that happens in many other games as well. First : Respawn timers. Second : Extrinsic rewards. The first comes in a few varieties. In MOBAs they are quite obvious. You die, you have to wait (sometimes quite a long time) before you are allowed to play the game again. What can you do in this time? Nothing but watch and criticize others. In other games, there's similar effects. Like in soulslikes when the distance between a bonfire and boss is long. Making you slog through the same piece of the level over and over again instead of allowing you to try again right away. Or cutscenes/multiple phases before the boss, that you are forced to replay again on each attempt. It's bad enough that we failed in what we wanted to do, making us wait/slog till we can try again is just rubbing salt in the wound. The second is a bit more nuanced. Extrinsic rewards are used in many games after all and it doesn't make people toxic in all those game. What causes people to be toxic is that in MOBAs they aren't linked to your personal performance or RNG loot tables, but to the performance of your whole team during the whole match. It's not just about losing the game, it also makes it take longer to unlock a new character. There's a build-up of anticipation. "One more match and I have enough currency". Just for it to come crashing down and not necessarily because of you. And just like with the first point, long respawn timers and nothing to do with them gives you all the time to vent that frustration.

I think that any game that puts random people together on a team and expects them to work in a high-stakes environment is always going to invite some toxicity, but I also think that a big factor is how that toxicity is addressed by the developers. If things like banning or systems that promote positive interactions are implemented (and implemented early) into a game, that can change how the gaming community interacts. And, to be fair, sometimes it is up to the community to manage that toxicity

I think another aspect that wasn't brought up that also impacts the toxicity of LoL is how the devs have a rather laissez faire approach to toxicity. Yeah, you can report people if they're being rude or toxic, but they rarely ever get punished. I remember someone was saying in chat that they were going to report them and the other person was like "Go ahead and do it, they won't do anything about it", which further emboldens people to be jerks to one another.

not pvp, but player competition and requirements for group spots can become pretty bad in games when the difficulty or stakes for losing become too high. never got into wow because of how the systems encourage players to only look for people who have already done the content.

I used to be part of the toxicity, but through playing with my friends and getting feedback I started seeing how unproductive and damaging that was for myself and the people I cared about. It wasn't easy, but eventually I learned how to have fun without attaching so much importance to winning that it made me angry. I never really cared about randoms flaming me, and rising above it myself has made it kind of funny to see how riled up people can get about something so trivial. I'm not sure that would have ever been possible before I took up meditation- in a way I kind of appreciate the toxic league community for leading me to a place where I actually wanted to change something about myself- if only so I could be as little like them as possible.

I decided to try getting into Teamfight Tactics recently and found the lack of guides EXTREMELY frustrating. There were plenty of videos and articles that said "here's what the buttons do" and "hoard your gold" but it took me DAYS of searching to find a video that said WHY I should hoard gold. I was fortunate the video even mentioned the unit pool limiting how many of each character could show up and even then, the person mentioned as an "as you already know" kind of thing.

I used to just really binge Escapist for ZP so I dont have a reference, but I'd say I really like these videos for what they are. Gamurs really fumbled with these talents

I very much enjoyed how Heroes of the Storm managed to combat nearly every one of the "inherent toxicity drivers" in the MOBA genre. Games are long? nope, games almost never hit 20 minutes You can see a failing player's stats and blame them? nope - the team has stats as a whole. Fixed Lanes with no way to help each other? Nope - it's very easy to swap players around to other lanes and generate better matchups, the map is fluid Lost resources because you're covering a friend? - you don't have to last hit, you just have to have someone near all the minion deaths, and you get all the xp. Heroes of the Storm very much felt like a second generation MOBA that learned from the core flaws of the genre and iterated.

Its why I enjoyed HotS for a long time. The fun of the genre was still there but with a much more accessible rule set that could be learned by most reasonable human beings. Had a much broader swathe of options for the teams to attempt and more than enough nuance to give skilled players a way to differentiate. Matches were shorter, usually 15-20 so even if you got the AFKer or toxic individual, the time time lost was minimal (and usually considerably less if the other team was given the opportunity to snowball uncontested). A lot of the toxicity I saw in that game was from people coming from other MOBAs that didn't understand that even several deaths early on didn't mean you were doomed; the catch-up mechanics in that game meant one team fight at the 20+ minute mark could swing things right back in your favor. Getting beaten down into the ground on my first try of LoL had me never wanting to play again and I know at least a dozen people of similar sentiment. I feel like if the toxicity issue isnt addressed, the MOBA community is just going to stagnate.

Heroes of the Storm did a lot to help mitigate toxicity. Characters who are designed to, if killed, give barely any experience, last hitting being unneeded and all exp going to the team, etc

Ahh, I really like the topic here, it's something I've believed for a long time but haven't also been able to express well. Nice to see other people exploring the idea. I think most of the reasoning is spot on, too. The difficulty in helping a struggling player, the time commitment of a match, the need for coordination in the midst of anonymity, all contribute to toxicity. There's two things I'd want to add to that: first, in addition to the time commitment, most matches are determined long before their actual endpoint, even with surrender mechanics. It's common to have an experience where the outcome is already determined, but you have to keep playing the game or be hit with a leaver penalty, or even just the shame of giving up when there's still technically a chance. The second is how the meta has evolved so that particular types of characters are conventionally placed in particular lanes, which means that when a lane fails it's easy, even intuitive, to tell which lane it was. In theory that could be used to respond and do damage control, or review and improve for next time, but in practice it makes it easy for people to put blame on a specific person, especially if they're looking for a scapegoat. I think whether you can have a MOBA without the built-in toxicity depends on how strictly you define a MOBA. I would argue that Heroes of the Storm at least proved in theory that it could be done, exp shared across the team and map objectives being more siege options than character improvements reduced individual-character snowballing and specific team arrangements that make it so easy to put blame on people. It didn't fully solve things, but it made them look potentially more solvable. If there's one thing I'd want to try, it would be decoupling mid-match rewards and power from killing things. Give little to no rewards for killing minions, give few if any base rewards for killing enemy players. Instead, introduce supply caravans moving throughout the map, you gain rewards for getting yours to their destinations, or stopping enemy caravans from reaching theirs. Successful caravans keep your outposts defended and your siege engines firing. Probably give rewards for destroying structures, that's still the goal, and would have a meaningful effect on the battle. Finally, give bounties for enemy players having a run of success, either they're contributing to the battle and thus removing them for a time would have material effect, or they're making a nuisance of themselves and removing them helps your side get people to the actual meaningful fights more easily.

An Ai enemy only campaign would teach you what to do which would help. It would also let you learn a new characters a bit faster and easier.

I believe the main reason for toxicity is the same system that enables for millions of people to enjoy MOBAs in the first place, being matched with random players. No matter what role or character you wish to play, you need people to fill the other roles, including the roles of your enemies, and the games wouldn't be nearly as popular and populated if it was only premade teams fighting each other. But the big downside of this approach is (excluding the difficulty of balancing each match) that you play with complete strangers that you will never meet again no matter how many matches you play (the exception being the small number of people in the highest possible brackets that tend to play each other again and again because the bracket is so small in size). Not only is it fairly difficult to feel any sort of empathy towards an anonymous person that you will never have to think about after half an hour, it's also why it is fairly easy to get angry at them and them at you, stoking the fires of anger with each new mistake, insult or intentional provocation. If the other person was someone you know and you know that you will still interact with each other after the match is over, most people (with the exception of really toxic people) will not get angry at a friend... even if you don't know someone in person, just knowing that they will still keep in touch with you or even play with you again on the same team makes is a lot less likely to behave in a toxic manner

I’ve been getting back into Among Us recently and I’ve said something similar to your first point about the competitive scene in that game. The thing about games like among us is that for either side to win, someone on the other team usually has to make a mistake that can be exploited, and their teammates often can’t do much about it, even if they’re alive. A lot of games end up being decided by a single player making an incorrect judgment call. And in casual games like the ones I like this is fine, but if you try to get into competitive, this can lead to a lot of flaming when someone feels that they were right but nobody listened to them.

I remember seeing a graphic (on 4chan of all places but that's beside the point) about the death of the dedicated lobby/server system in favor of skill-based matchmaking, and how SBMM fosters toxicity by squeezing players with disparate gameplay goals (people who want to win, people who want to screw around, people who want to troll, etc.) into the same match and forcing them all to engage with the game in the same way.

What an excellent breakdown of the genre. I found this one fascinating. I usually steer away from this style multiplayer, but I get why it’s so fun for people

I used to play alot of league and was mostly playing ADC or Top, but towards the end i started playing more Support and leading. I called out when objectives would spawn, ping where i thought enemy jungler was, and most importantly WARD EVERYTHING. I didnt blame others, and when i saw someone was tilting i tried to calm them down and say its not over until its over. I enjoyed it more because i felt like i had an actual impact in the game where psychology and team cohesion was the true goal. I also did the opposite, if the enemy got caught out or was making a mistake, i went into AllChat and tried to get the enemy team to start blaming each other. If theyre busy arguing, theyre not noticing the top laner split pushing into their base

I think rock paper scissors style balancing can lead to it. Specifically in games like Overwatch. If someone wants to play Doomfist, but the enemy team chooses Sombra and Orisa, suddenly Doomfist is drastically less effective. But if you just love the character and want to enjoy a game, people will get mad at you for not switching out of an unfavorable match up. Then you end up with “Tank Diff” and similar stuff😊

I tried to get into League. It's deep, and interesting. My problem wasn't so much that other people got salty, but that I was consistently failing my team because I didn't know wtf I was doing yet. That's the really brutal part. Worst learning curve in a PVP game I've ever experienced.

Something that always reinforces even more toxicity is teamplay. Obviously you cannot remove that from a Moba, but someone will always be more toxic at their teammates for losing than at the opponent for winning. The latter does happen, but also the latter is just way funnier? Like I don't feel bad if someone accuses me of spamming the same move over and over again in a fighting game. It's not my job to change that if I am winning. They need to force me to mix it up.

I've had neckbeards on my team who start being toxic before the game even starts, trolling in champ select because someone picked an off meta or bad matchup, or just because they're on a losing streak and wanna take it out on someone. The way the ranked ladder is structured rewards playing a ton of games so you could easily end up with some dude who shits in a bucket because he plays 10 games a day and doesn't care if he loses this game because he'd prefer to exert some control in his pitiful life by holding his team hostage for 20 excruciating minutes.

My blood pressure was thankful that i moved to Arams, summoners rift is like a prison you voluntarily go into.

There are deeper reasons why not just League of Legends, but all multiplayer games are toxic. It's the environment created by greedy, rich corporate executives that make sterilized multiplayer games designed to encourage toxicity through systems like engagement-based matchmaking while earning money through their monetization schemes. Those toxic players are victims of a corrupt economic system that deprived them of their basic material and social needs, growing up in a poor environment with bad parents or lack thereof, so their only source of enjoyment is playing popular video games like League of Legends, not just for fun, but as a coping mechanism to their bleak livelihoods.

This is why I switched to ARAMs exclusively, it addresses nearly every point you brought up. Very little laning and it isnt solo, shorter matches, much less map complexity, people being forced to use different champs (the champ rng is both a blessing and a curse for both sides, so sometimes it sucks and other times it's awesome). People are still toxic at times but it's much less acceptable and expected

Design delve episode about fear and hunger would be really cool, as this, at first glance, simple rpg has a lot of interesting mechanics

Heroes of the Storm does have a few elements in place that seem to quell toxicity. Gold and Exp are shared, so no one gets left behind. Also, personal contribution isn't really visible at a glance, which means people will usually wait before going at each other's throats. That said, I also firmly believe the community in general has a more relaxed culture. The difference in toxicity between LoL and HotS is staggering, which makes me think it's not just a matter of mechanics but also of playerbase culture.

This is why I love Heroes of the Storm and hope Blizzard comes back to it someday (with the microsoft thing, we can get more franchises...) Getting rid of gold and denying, and making xp shared across the whole team, seems to quell some of the inherent toxic stuff.

Smash bros Ultimate and Splatoon are specific instances where recently I feel like the multi-player encourages someone getting toxic. Simply by having a score that goes up and down depending on whether you win and lose, respectively it creates an aggression when you have a decent streak of wins which comes to a stop with specific player(s). It feeds the winners and makes you feel angry when you inevitably hit that brick wall.

NGL I found it kind of funny that the video ran Overwatch footage under (paraphrased) "other games don't have this kind of toxicity". As both a former League player and an openly queer tank main many years ago in Overwatch 1 I encountered even more toxicity in OW than I ever did in League. Losing a body in a teamfight was such a massive disadvantage in that game it often led to cascade failure and a never-ending blame game.

I want to say I appreciate you and this series. Someday I hope to make video games, so I try and study this sort of thing. Used to watch Extra Credits until they put both feet in their mouth. So thank you for doing this.

The worse thing is that players are punished for leaving when they don't want to continue playing a lost game with team mates throwing the game by refusing to work as a team trying to solo three other people.

I think a major problem is how powerless the reporting system makes people feel. It's always incredibly obscured with little-to-no feedback on if your report has done a damn thing. Bullies thrive when they think their victim has nowhere to turn to and victims become bitter when they feel like nobody is going to help, making it very likely that they will become bullies themselves just so they don't feel powerless. Almost like a circle or something...

A lot of games are like this nowadays sadly. They've basically removed most or all features that provide or assist with making positive teamwork and encounters. It's safer to have no proximity/main chat at all entirely than to try and mess with filters and such, for example. Doesn't make a better game, but the people physically programming/designing the game aren't the ones making the final call either, which is how you get talented studios who seem to make extremely poor/weird decisions, not always but frequently enough.

I think it shows us what we are like when we think we aren’t being watched. There is a report system with the potential for getting banned but nothing to stop someone who like to be toxic for kicks to start a new account and ruin bot and low elo matches for new players. There is no permanence of punishment because you can get a new account after a ban.

I'd say Heroes of the Storm actually made strides in addressing a lot of these core elements. The party-wide level means that any one well-performing player can pull their team forward from any point on the map. Regular map-specific objectives encourage coming together for team fights. Creep recruitment makes jungling a lot more accessible for newcomers. The lack of last-hitting and item shops streamlines the experience of building any given character. But a lot of these elements are treated by the more hardcore MOBA fans as simplifications that dilute the experience, and Blizzard's mismanaged the game badly on the business side.

One of the things I liked about _PlanetSide 2_ was that its scale was small enough to where one individual good play could make a difference, but large enough to where one individual _bad_ play didn't necessarily mean defeat. It was unlikely that you alone would be jumped on for a loss when you were one of thirty or more players on your side of a battle. I would never play a MOBA or other small-squad PVP game, even minus the abuse, because that sort of performance stress hanging over me is not enjoyable.

The difference between RDO's and GTAO's community highlighted exactly how game mechanics influence wider community. RDO's mechanics didn't incentivise griefing at all and it was easy to just disappear from aggressive players. Whereas GTAO actively encouraged this game wise and there was little to do if someone far more powerful kept doing it.

This was a great watch for me. I've been part of the LoL community for ten years now and the toxicity only seems to get worse year on year. When I first made an account all the time ago (back when you bought those lil rune tokens and the tutorial was still on Howling Abyss) and tried to learn, even before elemental drakes and alcoves and a butt load more champions were introduced, not only did the client teach me very little but there was so much to take in from champion abilities to item buffs to objective management etc etc that I just gave up trying. I also wasn't about to waste an hour of my life per game being flamed and inted by people with 'main character syndrome' who are on smurf accounts, and with patches rolling out more regularly and Riot experimenting more everything you only just learned becomes a scrambled mess. Riot is at least trying to curb some of the in game toxicity with changes to ping systems, voting on objectives and chat options like 'deafen', but I feel like it's always going to be a beast that can't really be controlled. Which is disappointing to say, but it's the reality. For a team game, not a lot of teamwork happens.

This video shows the experience in game design. I always wondered why. Amazing

League also has no replacement for leavers and you’re trapped in a 30min + game where the enemy team has access to more resources soo you just lose slowly. Also small advantages lead to big snowballs, soo a mistake from a teammate can make the game much harder.

"Your mum Fat bum Wide tum" More beautiful than any Haiku could ever be😂

There's also the respawn time. FPS games typically have a respawn time of a couple seconds, whereas even the fastest respawn in mobas is about 10 seconds (some being more than 30), and that's before you factor in that the walk back is ALSO slower. That makes it worse as a catch-up mechanic, but more important is the phycological effect of that. Giving a bit of time is good to give the player a breather and recognize where they went wrong, but too much time leads to rumination; also if you decide the fault is another player's that gives time for a full salvo of insults and slurs rather than time for the single message you have time for in games with shorter timers.

would recommend making a Design Delve on Dawngate(unfortunately cancelled), especially how they dealt with toxicity in their beta period

I remember a younger chap trying to get me into playing League back in 2012... ? I hadn't heard of it at the time so I went looking for reviews and let's plays. I have to say, it was clear the game was not aimed like a guy like me. So, I simply told the other player that I wasn't interested. About two years later he threw in the towel because of how increasingly competitive every group had gotten and he felt like he had others things he'd rather do to unwind. He still loves the game and speaks well of it. But, he now actively screens for more chuckle-focused groups than competitive ones.

This series has become one of my new favorites. The pacing, insights, and topics are all great.

I fully agree with this vid, i talk about these points as part of the reason why i quit back in 2016. you make an excellent point about recourse management, and how you cant do much to make up for a teammate's mistake/misplay. I lost a ranked game once because during a huge comeback, out ahri didnt get a pentakill, so they DCed and we did not have the fire power to take down their turrets... it was an ace at 70 min in...

I'm not sure if I would characterize optional objectives like Roshan or Baron as catch-up mechanics? Usually that would imply something struggling players have either an easier time to obtain or can gain more advantage from than the players in the lead. While it is true that a losing team could take those objectives to turn the game around, the winning team can as well to push their advantage. In fact they will often have an easier time doing so, since they can win the fights faster and will have an easier time getting to safety if their opponent tries an ambush. Especially in Dota, while I do not play anymore, I do still sometimes watch tournaments. And while I would be happy to be corrected by someone who can cite actual statistics, I have seen the Aegis of the Immortal used far more often by the winning team to protect a risky winning push than by the losing team to turn the tide. Similarly, a winning team will often flat out cut the opponent off from valuable creep camps or the secret shop. So tldr: since being ahead makes it even easier to take advantage of bonus objectives, I am not sure how accurate it would be to call them catch up mechanics.

Totally tracks. My first time playing League, I easily made my way through the short tutorial and went into an unranked match. Not only did I not have any idea what I was doing in regards to things like the Shop, I was kicked after the game ended for "purposely feeding" the other team. Uninstalled it right away and haven't looked back.

I don't know why but the Dawngate community was always friendly and helpful. My friends and I briefly tried LoL and DOTA2 but quickly quit due to bad player behaviour despite having a friend willing to show us the ropes. In contrast when we tried the Dawngate beta not only were our team kind and supportive but so we're the enemy team. My friend tried jungling with a new character for the first time, stumbled across an enemy player with the same character doing the exact same thing. Instead of ganking the massively under leveled player he spent the entire match teaching my friend how to jungle. The rest of us happily played the rest of the match with each team 1 player down.

I think laning is a big issue. A feature to share success across lanes would help. Say I could send my minions to your lane if you're struggling. Or if I defeat a tower and you're behind the game auto adjusts them. I think the best way to do this is to create a "bet". If I send you help because you're struggling it feels like me wasting resources on you and I get mad. But if I feel more in control if I can place a "bet". By limiting my own resources for a period I give the team a boost. If I survive that period I win the bet and get a bonus reward. Then I feel like a hero. I took a risk, helped the team out and got rewarded. In competitive play this would be hard to balance. There, instead of helping lesser skilled team mates, it's a deliberate sharing of risk and reward across the team.

When you are forced to play with other players of varying skill levels and even wants out of a game you are going to run into problems. The higher the skill level needed to play, the more toxic the game will be when people don't know the basics of how to play but play anyway.

I call this the "group project effect". It reminds of group projects we do on school, where everyone says "each one does their part and we put it together to present". Everyone can make something correct and it might not be cohesive at the end and the result is not as good as if everyone did it together from the beginning. For League is a little worse than for DotA, since DotA allows you to teleport to another lane and help them out on a gank or counter-dive easier. When the top and mid answer quickly to a gank on the bot lane, it quickly changes it from a 3x2 into a 3v4 or 3v5. There is also the Teleport Gate that connects top and bottom, and two outposts for each team that allows the team controlling it to teleport there, since TP scrolls allow you to teleport only to your towers or the outposts. So while everyone is playing their own lane, maybe the dual lanes top and bottom, or the solo lane mid, you have the possibility of quickly relocating to another area of the map and making some impact there. It adds more Team responsibility to each player. Also, voice chat makes a big difference because it allows for quick communication and strategizing. Although in League, allowing voice chat without any other support to teamplay will only pile on the toxicity

There is a massive difference between playing with a friend group on a full team, and playing with randoms within each MOBA. With friends, you can mess around, learn more, and get better at a relatively decent pace. With randoms, you will learn new and colorful swears which puts Tenma to shame. Plus, the addiction aspect of MOBAs doesn't help. I know many end up playing the game over being productive, eating, sleeping, or any other meaningful action. I ended up like that too, and had to quit cold turkey. I am never going back to that hard drug of a game.

This is spot on. I tried to get back into Dota last year but hadn't kept up with all the changes. I was playing with a friend and he was helping. The match feel apart because there was no coordination. I didn't help because I hadn't gotten the mechanics of the character down. I heard a never ending stream of hate because I wasn't playing top tier with my character.

Most of these points can be expanded to all games with a competitive scene. Nothing breeds contempt more than giving people an individual rank that other players can easily affect.

League's reputation speaks volumes about the intractability of this problem. I'm an indie tabletop designer, and while brainstorming with a friend I mentioned League as an influence for a kind of gameplay I wanted to lean into. I was thinking about the way League uses its mechanics to reward teamwork as a function of their usage, not with an extrinsic reward - the way that it just makes sense for champions with crowd control abilities to use them to lay up targets for their allies with high damage abilities as an emergent property of those abilities. This admittedly kind of theoretical point was lost on my friend who, before I had time to explain myself, had pictured all the things League is better known for - competitiveness and complexity (and the characteristics that emerge from those, eg toxicity) - and was actually upset that I wanted to do this for like, the rest of the day.

There was one game i heard of called dawn gate that fought toxicity by incentivizing being nice to people. Essentially the experience you gain from each match would double if another player voted you positively, and it stacked up to like 32x. So if you were rude, it would take you way longer to rank up, and everyone was nice to each other

I think online anonymous co-op in general leads to a lot of toxicity, some of it counter intuitive. In Team Fortress 2's Mann up PVE mode, the Pyro has a ridiculously broken weapon called the Gas Passer that for a single upgrade can firebomb crowds of robots but there's a divide in the community between people who condone it's use for easy wins and those who ban those using it on sight.

This is why I'm thankful that Valve are now stepping up their efforts to reduce cheating, toxicity and smurfing in DOTA. Not even pros or famous streamers are safe. It's definitely improved the game tremendously over the last few months

League suffers big time from what I like to call "Monopoly syndrome". Monopoly syndrome is this: the game is pretty much decided in the first ten minutes, but it doesn't actually end for another three hours. Once someone starts buying houses and hotels you know they've won, but it isn't official until they've bankrupted every opponent, which takes absolutely forever. In League you can guess with 90% certainty which team is going to win by the end of the laning phase, or sometimes even in the middle of the laning phase. But you have to keep playing for another half hour or else Riot punishes you for quitting. This is why I only ever play ARAM, which doesn't have this issue because your typical ARAM match is ten minutes tops.

A lot of the stuff in this video is stuff I'd kind of figured out on my own, though framing the source of laning phase's toxicity as "I can't afford to help because it'll hurt my own lane's performance" instead of "my idiot teammate is losing us the game" is an angle I hadn't considered. Objectives, on the other hand--well, I have a specific problem with objectives, and it's that you naturally have to fight the enemy team at them. This hampers your ability to turn that objective into a comeback, because...well, if you're already behind, you're not magically gonna have extra damage just because you're fighting over Baron or Roshan. Fundamentally, taking a comeback objective in League of Legends requires you to be able to fight the enemy team effectively, and that's something you _CAN'T_ do if you're already on the back foot. They don't function as comeback mechanics, because in the very situation that you _NEED_ a comeback mechanic...it becomes much, much harder to actually trigger the mechanic.

sounds like it also suffers from shard punishment personal reward. Players on your team that end up dying punish the whole team as that progression now make the other team hard via a stronger player, but any teammate that dose well doesn't disseminate that progression to other players. A lowing tide drops all boats but a rising tide only raises your boat, players are expected to work together for the benefit of other players rather then benefit of the whole team.

The term I like to use a lot if "Death Spiral". This effect was very common in lots of old D&D, however the effect of "feeding" the other teams leads to them having a massive lead/advantage feels very much in line with the idea/concept of a death spiral.

I keep track of a lot of statistics about my ranked games in an attempt to climb better. This includes things like cs tracking at several different intervals, how many of what kinds of fight I take (1v1s, 2v3s, etc), my personal objective damage, and how many times I died for nothing. My favorite stat to get blindly mad at is what i call 'helping', which is like ganks, but covers the entire game. Anytime another play takes the initiative to move over and help in any way, that counts. In platinum elo, as top especially, i can go 25 minutes or more- sometimes entire games- without a teammate helping me a single time. Meanwhile, the average amount of help my enemy gets by 15 minutes, when i consider the lane to be over, is just under eleven. Eleven, to my personal average of 0.09. It has been 29 games since i was last helped in top before 15 minutes.

Looking back on my time in League, I would say these same toxic traits caused an increase in my anxiety levels because I felt like i was letting down all of those people on my team, and the lengthy match lengths compounded that.

Dragons and Barons aren't catch-up mechanics unless you can steal them. They're "win-more" objectives or "the enemy has a strong turtle comp and this game needs to end this century."

I love the representation of the salt mines in the background while talking about this

I believe that these envoronments are toxic, because the entire premise of the game is centralised around winning, gaining "LP" and climbing the ladder (Ranked). The thing is this: Your expectation as a "good player" is to be able to win. However, frustrations occur when outcomes do not meet expectations, this is basic psychology. When conflicts to those expectations occur, we become frustrated and look for someone or something to blame due to factors that are seemingly beyond our control. And the longer one plays this game,the more and more that gaining of LP starts to matter, and the more you care about climbing, the more aggrovating other players or game design become(s), and thus you have developed a pre-conceptualised notion that other people in the game should be working towards your acquisition of "LP", because your mentality now believes that this score determines YOUR worth as an individual (it doesn't) and you have become so obsessed with that portrayal, that you're willing to stamp on other players because you are FAR superior to anyone else in this lobby/game (you are not, you play League of Legends). I quit this game over a year ago and picked-up/dived into XIV; Never felt better!!!! ^_^ =D Also league doesn't really reward you for playing casually When an entire game is centralised around a number determining your worth in the game, when you're addicted or passionate, your mood begins to centralise around that number. Until you realise it's all a big waste of time anyway, if you're not having fun, why bother? One night, I eventually just asked myself: "What the f**k am I actually doing here? I'm just miserable and depressed." And I just uninstalled it there and then and never looked back. League is extremely linear and extremely repetitive in its core playstyle/design, so after a while, the only stimulation you recieve, is gaining "LP", and when you don't "gain LP", it's highly frustrating and puts you in a worse state of mind, because you spent the last 30-60 minutes JUST trying to gain "LP". Which is why League of Legends is a mental illness, and can be bad for your mental health when played excessively, especially when losing a lot (ranked ladder, at least). But above this, I believe there is no excuse to abuse or harass other players, or people at all, if you are toxic, YOU are the problem. My personal advice? Pro-tip: Uninstall league of Legends =p Remember, they are people, like you. Ironically though, DOTA is fun as f**k, I love DOTA; It's whacky, it's crazy, and there's so much funny s**t you can do, it's full of memes and I love it X;'D DOTA allows you to be creative, League does not.

"Just mute the twats and enjoy yourself" is not only good MOBA advice, but an ethos to live by.

As someone who has played LoL for over 10 years, and never accepts the surrender vote, I don't do it to "hold players hostage", I do it because I've seen many miraculous victories and because I understand that I can't win every game. I'd rather lose repeatedly than give up at 15 min every time.

I remember some 2-3 years ago there was a student thesis regarding how modern online games encourage toxicity. Brings up alot of the points that were brought up here and even uses League as its prime example.

World of Warcraft and M+. The introduction of party locked, timed dungeons with loss of progression on failure in a PUG sphere, exponentially increased PvE toxicity within the game.

Virgin league of legends design vs chad deep rock galactic design

I thought I'd give my perspective as someone who tried MOBAs briefly and then transitioned to Fighting Games (another genre famous for poor new player experience). My experience is 1 game of League, and a few dozen hours of Pokemon Unite in the first month after launch. In League I knew LITERALLY nothing about the game or the genre, I turned on the game, picked a random free character. And ran face first into death for 20 minutes. I mostly went... left?.. but after dying a lot wandered the jungle for a few minutes pointlessly. I realized there was a shop halfway through but didn't know what to pick so I clicked one that said damage go ^. After realizing I had been dying so much I was under leveled and that I had no hope, I gave up. I quit the game mid-match and uninstalled it. I have vague memories that my teamates yelled at me but I could be misremembering. Unite I was more devoted to, I like Pokemon and the game length was much more reasonable to me. I tried a few mains but settled on Snorlax since no one ever picked Defender and it was easy to fill that slot. I mostly went top lane and over all I think I was pretty good in low rank. I had wanted to get competitive with Unite and really climb the ladder but after a while I got REALLY disillusioned, Dreadnaw and Zapdos were such huge swings that when I saw my team handling them wrong I started getting angry. I started developing strategies taking my teamates playing poorly into account and even worse it started working. I was making REALLY bad plays as Snorlax like going into the jungle just to cover my teamates weaknesses and I knew I wasn't improving I was just carrying my team against players who had a similarly low understanding of the game flow. I realized I wasn't going to be able to improve until I got to the higher ranks so I focused on climbing, and this is where I hit a wall. It took SO LONG to climb. Every game was a coin flip. As a Tank main I couldn't swing games in my favor by playing out of my mind, which left me reliant on my teamates. So every game I would hold my ground top for 70% of the game and then an enemy bot laner would show up several levels higher than me becausd my entire team had been feeding him all game and we would lose on the spot. Nearly every game I actually played I had the least deaths but as many kills as anyone else. I felt worthless, like I had no control over whether I won or lost and could only keep flipping the coin every 10 minutes and watch my rank slowly creap up. I felt like my time was being wasted and it was making me angry. I don't like being angry so I just, stopped playing. I know I wasn't as good as I make myself sound, I play a lot of games and have a good understanding of macro-level strategy but I only did a few hours of research into ways to improve. But sometimes I think if I had a way to skip to the next rank, would I still be playing? Would I have reached the point I was the problem and found joy in improving myself? I found Fighting Games enjoyable because at every level there was something obvious I could improve on. Motion Inputs, Buffering, Neutral, Anti-Airs, Combos, Setups, Whiff-Punishes, Safe Jumps, Option Selects. There is always something to optimize. I'm sure it's the same in MOBAs, but to me it felt like I was better off waiting until I had good teamates, or just not playing at all.

This is why I prefer Heroes of the Storm for my MOBA fix and I hope that with the actiblizz aquisition they start working on it again

I realized pretty early in my League career that the feedback loops really didn't react well with my personality- I either get anxious to drop the lead or incredibly frustrated if I'm getting stomped. So I ended up almost exclusively playing Co-Op vs AI, which obviously got extremely monotonous, so I eventually played less and less until you get to now... I don't have League on my new PC because I haven't felt compelled to reinstall. Some genres just aren't for everyone, I guess.

There's also the base element of any competitive game where your allies and enemies are humans, not AI. We all have an incredible capability of riling up the emotions of others; whether it's the enemy taunting you, or your team mates casting blame, you know that there's a real person behind it and therefore it hits harder. If you're having a bad day in a solo game then you may get worked up or upset, but it doesn't have the same depth of feeling that anything involving people does. It's a personal experience though, some find it easier to shrug off negativity than others.

I think one element that could help lower toxcity is a two lane system with one roamer/jungler. Perhaps the lanes are slightly branched or more players are encouraged to make brief pitstops in the jungle but I feel like making sure you have a teammate there to help and also giving them the ability to wander off briefly to catch up and being able to have someone there quickly move to where they're needed and possibly trade places with a player could be beneficial. Killing two bird in one stone there could be a buff for killing certain smaller or mediumish enemies that gives a variable xp gain boost if they're on your side of the jungle depending on how far behind you are. Encouraging brief pitstops in the jungle for some risk or swapping a struggling player to jungle to get stronger.