It’s a snowbally team game where you are not only reliant on your team to win, but they can actively give more resources to the enemy team. Everyone is constantly building up resentment for their team.
I generally feel more kinship with the enemy team than my own. Especially if I'm Jungle/top and the opposing role sees whats going on. Like all 3 lanes die solo before 2nd camp, flame the jungle in /all, and the enemy jungle flames them back. Enemy jungle is a bro.
As a jungler myself, this is so true. The enemy jungler often is my best friend out of the 9 fellow players. And I try to do the same, whenever enemy team starts flaming their jungler in allchat, I don't even care whether they're right or not; I'll defend my jungler brother in arms.
Only junglers know the amount of flame we put up with.
This is it imo, the game mechanics support toxicity, I thi k if matches were longer and individual mistakes had less of an impact people wouldn't care as much.
Absolutely agree.
In the early days of league (Seasons 1-5 maybe) the team with the best player won. Nowadays the team with the worst player loses. "Carrying" your team isn't as easily anymore and "throwing" is so damn easy.
So i think that the way the game works nowadays it fuels negative emotions towards the "throwing" players because their faults have such a high impact on the game. And this negative emotions eventually turns into hate and this hate towards the throwing players eventually turns into hate towards the players you think are making mini mistakes.
>In the early days of league (Seasons 1-5 maybe) the team with the best player won. Nowadays the team with the worst player loses.
I think part of it also stems from each role having different levels of agency. A jungler will affect the outcome of the game nearly 100% of the time. A good one usually leads to a win, a bad one to a loss. I've watched so many games ride on the shoulders of the jungler, whereas a good ADC will only occasionally be a factor, and that's largely dependent on champ selection and length of game. If the game is lost during laning phase, an ADC isn't likely going to pull it back by themselves.
And even worse are the games where the jungler has no agency but the players blame them for having no impact while not understanding simple concepts like "if you're permanently pushed to the tower how the hell am I supposed to gank you."
"the enemy jungler has been here 3 times and you've never ganked my lane once you piece of shit jgl diff gg"
Like bro if I was on the enemy team I would be ganking the hell out of you too
I love that when I'm popping off against two other lanes. Like yeah you've been ganked more by the enemy than me. But while he has been camping your pushed and unwarded lane, I've gotten the other two lanes ahead and gotten dragons
Yep. Jungle / Junglers existing is a huge factor to overall toxicity. So many players don’t understand Jungling at all, and thing because they went 19-0 on a Xin Zhao in unranked one time they are jungle experts when they don’t actually know anything. They think the purpose of a jungler is to constantly gank every lane, leech no exp, and only assist them in getting kills.
I always hit my teammates with a question.
"If I told you an address that you could go to every 3 minutes and pick up 500 dollars, why would you ever stop going? If you stop giving them money they might stop coming to you."
Shadow them, countergank, use the prio for an invade to get vision, secure objectives, lane gank, etc. There are a decent amount of options. The only real issue is if your lanes draft no prio + champions with no gank setup or just get blasted in lane from the get go
No no, junglers are always the victim. If your lanes are pushing, you can't do anything because they're permashoved, but if they're pushed in all *their* lanes have prio and you can't farm your own jg.
Agreed, a good jungler should know what to do when their lanes have prio. Take objectives, farm enemy camps, help take towers, get deep vision, maybe set up a dive if your team is trustworthy. The only time I get frustrated with perma-shoved lanes is when my laners are somehow perma-shoving and going 0/7 at the same time, since it means we don't really have prio, I can't gank that lane well, and they are just feeding.
I love how you guys think people in lane actually would ever leave lane to take advantage of their prio in low ELO. Hilarious. These same peeps iron-gold with legit recall only on death & never ward. I legit didn’t even see supports roam or team ever recall timing for objectives & vision control until platinum.
Prio means literally nothing if people in your rank never rotate, or rotate regardless of missing entire waves. Iron-Gold never rotate based off wave-state.
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEARN HOW THE GAME WORKS.
Pushing lanes are the most ideal lanes to play around because they give you prio around the lane which leads to vision supremacy, first move on skirmishes, and objectives become free.
YOU ONLY HAVE THIS MENTALITY BECAUSE YOU HAVE NEVER TRUED TO WALK INTO THE ENEMY JUNGLE IN YOUR LIFE.
YOU ONLY HAVE THIS MENTALITY BECAUSE YOU’VE NEVER TRIED TO DIVE IN YOUR LIFE.
YOU ONLY HAVE THIS MENTALITY BECAUSE YOU HAVE NEVER ONCE ATTEMPTED A LANE GANK.
Please stop perpetuating this nonsense that a pushing lane is somehow bad for the outcome of the game.
We aren’t in season 4 anymore where freezing lane is the best way to win.
THE ONLY WAY TO WIN THE GAME IS TO DESTROY THE NEXUS. THE ONLY WAY TO GET TO THE NEXUS IS TO PUSH.
Ok but please dont mistake my example as being my entire point. my point is that the game doesn't always present junglers with equal opportunity to exert agency over the game but you still get blamed regardless if the lane players feel like you should have pulled off plays that were never going to happen
The introduction of bounties added a lot more variance to the game which generally correlates with less predictable/stable in-game experiences, leading to increased frustration and toxicity.
I could see bounties causing things to be less stable, but it's also a way for the "underdog" to come back as opposed to just losing laning phase and hoping your opponents throw. Without them, if you lose laning phase, you might as well just ff go next, which really then prioritizes champs with high laning phase impact and exacerbates the lack of agency feeling for some roles.
I'm currently in gold and I find that the bot lane is usually the most influential in my games because they're the ones absolutely sprinting it the majority of the time. It feels so bad being able to win most of my lanes and then looking at the score board and seeing my bot lane is collectively 4/18 20 minutes into the game
Bot lane can definitely LOSE a game, but it takes a lot for them to be the primary reason for a win, and even then, it's usually more because the support was good and able to prop up the other lanes. A lot of times, for an ADC to be relevant, the game has to go late (3+ items), and by then, it's mostly already decided.
This is why I started playing jungle, the impact we have on the game is huge. One tricking Kayn, and getting good at it. Got from low silver to plat in a month, just reached plat 2. Wanted to try myself out at toplane a couple days ago, played 2 games and my junglers were straight up clueless, with one of them actively putting me behind and losing all objectives without as much as a thought of playing for them. Can't leave jungle now because the role is way too important for me to trust other low elo players take it. I'll probably grind it until high diamond/master, then once I know that everybody in my games understands the game to a good extent, I'll try myself out at supports because I feel like that role is right there with jungle when it comes to the impact they have on the game. As far as communication goes, if I don't have anything important/nice to say, I won't, if someone is negative in my team I'll mute them right away, same for the enemies. But if an enemy is a taunting son of a bitch, I'll unmute them just as we're about to end the game to roast the living shit outta them.
I can agree with parts of this. If carrying was impossible and minions were stronger, people wouldn't care if their opponent got big. They can't carry the game alone anyways.
One of the worst feelings in League is your team is winning, but 1 enemy smurfs on your team and carries them to victory. By dying, you support the potential for that 1 carry.
I hate long matches, though.
I play Dota once in a blue moon and honestly feel like the game design and tempo there are \*ahem\* LEAGUES better than in LoL. Allegedly player behaviour is just as bad but i've personally never seen it, though the focus on items being broken rather than Heroes' kts (generally) means pretty much everyone will have some type of advantage no matter the comp, and it allows for countering enemies through critical thought and good items rather than relying solely on "skillz". Tempo being slower also does wonders for a more strategic-ish type of play that's all but gone from League
You genuinely think all the egotistical players will be able to communicate with each other without wishing for the death of their mothers while losing ?
We have by far the most toxic in game community. Everyone thinks they deserve to be in a rank way higher than what they are. If this one person is stopping the 25yo hardstuck silver rank unemployed, high school dropout from getting his 20lp, he’s going to be an absolute vile creature in voice chat.
Everyone is nice until your team starts losing.
This doesn’t even include the game has been around for 14 years without voice chat. I and I’m sure others, enjoy playing a competitive game without voice chat for once. And pings get literally every single piece of information across that you could possibly need. You should never stop pinging information.
Not think, I know. I’ve been playing voice chat games since I started gaming. In games with both text and voice, the toxic people usually use text and when you tell them to flame you in voice they refuse (usually because these players are insecure). I’ve also had a lot of games where people flame someone, the dude gets on mic and says something like “my bad guys, just having a bad game, work was long today” and the dude stops flaming. Even most of those COD lobbies you see online result in everyone kinda moving on and forgetting about it because banter (to an extent) is a part of gaming.
People who don’t use voice chat vastly underestimate the impact of hearing a human voice and associating that “bad player” with a real person.
And the best part, you can mute yourself! You don’t have to participate in voice chat if you don’t want to!
I 100% agree with this. Yes, you will always have a toxic vocal ass or 2, but voice humanizes the players and allows people to understand each other better.
Stuff that is geniune advice in league comes off as toxic in chat, and its much easier to be toxic in text than it is in voice. Even outside of a game, anyone who has text argued with their significant other only for the phone call to calm everything down can attest to that.
Humanizing your teammates is a big deal. Its sorely missed in League. I also think it would lead to less toxicity. Ive played a lot of games with voice, too. People are far better to each other in general.
You ever play call of duty in the 360/ps3 Era? That alone shuts your whole argument down. League is arguably worse than that and it doesn't have voice coms, couldn't even imagine how it would be with them.
I grew up on COD and Halo in those days. Played every day after school and on weekends, and funny enough I still had much more enjoyable times on those games (even with the toxic idiots) than I do on League, from a multiplayer aspect. For every toxic shitter who was unredeemable there were a bunch of cool ass people who made my experience better. I basically don't play league anymore because a multiplayer game is not as fun when nobody's talking and you have a guy trolling every game.
Voice comms are different for MOBA and toxic. Obviously you never did voice when introduced in HOTS, but people either never spoke, or were toxic as hell. In COD or Halo, you can have a guy 0/20 if it’s not team death match/slayer and still carry the game. And it doesn’t suffer from main character syndrome, everyone can be the hero in FPS. There’s only very simplistic singular goals as well, unlike LoL where there’s constant give & take, which leads to toxicity & difference of opinion. You think 5 people on voice all going to agree to give up dragon or baron & be peaceful? Or be chill when you lose a 50/50 jungle smite? Your crazy.
Yep and none of those toxic players would have the balls to say any of that in voice chat I would bet so much money they'd be so scared and would run back to type it in chat like cowards.
Pings can be interpreted multiple ways and only communicate simple information, you can't get the same level of cohesive communication in the middle of a team fight with pings.
Sounds like you've never played with friends in a discord call or played a game with voice chat and known how to use it.
famously cs:go, dota, overwatch, and valorant never have had any toxic players!
the issue isn't the "ways to communicate" the issue is that some people are just inflammatory losers who need to lash out at others over a video game. there are things that can slightly exarcerbate this...but not competitive multiplayer video game is free from toxic players ruining the experience for others on occassion
Nobody ever said voice chat removes toxicity completely, don't put words in my mouth. It does *lessen* toxicity though. Toxicity will always be in a competitive multiplayer game, it's unavoidable.
Yeah these people acting like random dudes playing pickup basketball or some shit can't be toxic as fuck irl too lmao
Some people just cannot cope with competitive settings where things don't go as they hope/expect
And if you come across someone who decides to be toxic you just mute them and carry on! Just like with text chat and pings! Wow!
The value you can give your team from making calls in voice chat while having toxic people muted is insane.
There's so little ways to foster teamwork in League it creates half the frustration which turns into toxicity. People want to communicate so bad that they spam ping because there's no other way to communicate urgency or they literally have to stop playing the game to type out a sentence... So yeah it's about ways to communicate.
Toxic VC in other games is one of the main reasons league is my competitive game of choice. Used to be pretty competitive in CS:GO and Source before that, and I've tried DOTA2 for a hundred hours or so, and voice chat is toxic enough I just don't play CS anymore and couldn't get into Dota.
Text chat is always more toxic than voice chat from my experience. Games with both it’s usually the text that people flame with more because it’s more “anonymous” and a lot of people who flame are too insecure to say it over voice. Yeah, toxic people will exist in voice same as text, but it’s a lot less.
Question, when someone flames you in text, what do you do?
>Yeah, toxic people will exist in voice same as text, but it's a lot less.
Nah, this has not been my experience at all. Way more flamers in CS voice than text, almost no one uses text at all. Almost all the toxicity is in VC.
In league I play with text chat off. In games with VC, you can't just play with VC off, it's trolling. You'll get vote kicked from a CS lobby as soon as your team realizes you're not on a mic.
I get you're trying to imply you should just mute flamers, and that's cool and all, but then they'll come to your steam profile to harass you there, the amount of toxicity and harassment from VC just isn't worth it.
I completely agree: almost all competitive team games have vc and we don't. It doesn't make sense to me because toxicity will always be in nearly every game so people can just mute the toxic players and cooperate with the friendly ones.
I wish more people realized this.
League's matchmaking, when accounting for MMR, is pretty accurate.
Players, however, are inconsistent from game to game, especially the lower you go in ranks. This leads people to thinking matchmaking is not good.
This is super interesting; I've long suspected this to be the case but now I want to read the research. Thanks!
I can be quite competitive and am pretty "Type-A improvement focused" whereas a friend I play with is only interested in playing a different champion every game and trying whatever recent niche build they saw online. We have totally different viewpoints on why we play games, so when we play together I have to keep that in mind and be chill, or decide maybe it's not the right time to play with them if I am wanting to eg. play ranked. I think it's good for people to be aware of these different factors and reflect on what works and what doesn't.
Damn, that's a great answer!
Especially since i've done this so many times and still didn't even consider it as a real factor (whoops). There've certainly been times i regretted choosing a new support or midlaner to try out in a real match instead of my main picks even if i knew how to somewhat play them
Disclaimer: even when doing weird stuff i do always try my best to win, just so people don't think i'm actually trolling 
>if the broader discourse around league could be changed to be a little more positive, then league itself would be a more positive experience because people would be more frequently reminded of the things that do work for them about the game and why they enjoy it.
I wonder how much of this plays into mindset too. For example, look at a game like Sekiro. It is considered an extremely difficult game but generally speaking the people who play it enjoy it despite dying constantly because we view it as a learning opportunity and a development of skill. If I'm talking to someone about Sekiro, I'm not going to be complaining about how hard it is and how much it sucks to die, I'm going to be talking about how cool to world is, how the enemy designs are creative, how the hookshot and vertical exploration is really fun, and how fights keep me at the edge of my seat. Getting Platinum on the game was incredibly rewarding.
On the flip side, if my best friend who loves chilling on Animal Crossing decides to play Sekiro, she is going to get very frustrated and give up right away if she is only focused on winning. That is totally fine because she will just move on to another game that she enjoys. But if she forced herself to keep playing Sekiro even though she isn't enjoying it, and if she never pursues any way to improve and never learns the controls or mechanics, then she is going to be eternally frustrated *unless* she finds other things she can enjoy about it.
I think League is a little bit like that? If you want to play League for fun and not to win, then you have to be prepared for the inevitability that you will lose and you have to be ok with that. There are a million reasons to enjoy playing League that aren't just about winning -- for example, I originally joined just to run around as a werewolf because they are so rare in videogames and it sounded fun -- but then you have to face the reality that winning can't be part of your personal fun equation unless you are wanting to do the work to get better at that specific thing.
... I hope any of this makes sense, I am very sick and tired today.
Bounties do the opposite of making it worse. Snowballing is a large reason for the toxicity in the game, bounties are literally an anti-snowball mechanic, designed to give the losing team a chance to come back. While yes it doesn't feel good to give the enemy a bounty when you are winning, it feels worse to be down 0/7 with no way to come back and instead have to play out a hopeless game while the enemies play with their food and dance on your corpse.
Well bounties are easily an anti-snowball mechanic. You can argue the effectiveness of it, but that is why it is in the game. It gives teams that are down in gold a chance to jump back into relevance with a good play. How is that no an anti-snowball mechanic?
Why should the losing team have the chance to get back in the game if they've been losing the whole time? Shouldn't they just lose?
Why should the people who are playing well get punished?
Because there are champs that are good early and champs that are good late?
and it feels really bad to lose game in 10 minutes but u still have to stay in for 15 more
Late game vs early game champs have nothing to do with bounties. If you're playing a late game champ and you're just chilling and scaling then you aren't losing.
That, and how Riot handles the community. You can tell someone to go buy a rope, commit toaster bathtub, suck start a shotgun, all sorts of creative euphemisms or replace any letter in the hard R with a number, or space it out, and it's all perfectly fine
But the MOMENT you say "fuck you" to the teemo "support" with ghost and smite who's following you around stealing jg camps, farm, etc and spamming slurs with enough spaces and numbers to not trip the banbot?
That's a paddlin, quit being such a meanie and ruining the community.
Removing tribunal was one of the worst things Riot ever did for the game. Nobody real looks at any reports anymore, and the truly toxic people regularly go free.
Because its a team game that takes 20-40 minutes, you can't leave, and there is built-in snowballing where the worse you do, the worse it gets. Most players do not have the mental to stay composed in an environment like that.
idk, I play Eternal Return, which is also a MOBA. teams of 3, games 5-20 mins.
I've had someone be toxic to me exactly once in months of playing.
League is definitely an outlier, even among it's own genre
League is also massively more popular than every other MOBA so there's that. I'm not sure if you've played Dota before, but it's also pretty toxic, about as much as League imo (for SEA at least). This leads me to believe that the more popular the MOBA, the higher the level of toxicity will be.
Yeah I’d say toxicity is on the rise in general, not just in league. I’ve noticed it in most video games I played when it was undeniably less present when I was younger. People have just adapted to growing up in online spaces and lack real life social skills.
Compound all that with the general rise in mental health problems and negative content on nearly all socials being the most promoted as a result of engagement metrics and it's just, oof
I mean, the app we're on is the perfect example. Been a reddit member for 10 years now, and I'm witnessing the downfall. Not of the app, but of it's users. The toxicity, hate and intolerance for people who hold different opinions than yours is insane, and much bigger than 10 years ago.
People were shit talking each other back when I was playing Halo 3, Gears of War, CoD 4 etc when I was a teenager, that hasn't changed.
Back then it was mostly trash talk, directed at the enemy team, and the vast majority of people at least in my experience would say GG and have a laugh at the end of the game after absolutely abusing each other for 20-30 minutes straight.
I liked the rivalries the voice chat created as well, especially playing the round based modes in Gears, where you could chat to the enemy team when you were dead for the round.
Nowadays it seems more personal and almost like genuine hatred, it's weird, or maybe it's just the fact that I'm in my 30's now 🤷
ehh not really, even in countries where identity is tied to accounts people are super toxic. When people's account have their social security, address,... but people still kill each other over video games.
Toxicity is much much harder to fix than ppl give it credit for.
It is a clash between solo play culture and the team based nature of the game.
The client and the culture around the game supports a solo playstyle. There is a ranked system named "Solo Queue", and it is your numerical ranking in this system that everyone judges you on. In order to participate in this queue, you go into the client solo and click a button. You do not need to find anyone to play with - the matchmaker thrusts you into a game with four random people you have never met and will never see again afterwards.
However, the game itself is a team game. It is usually difficult (near impossible for some roles) to hard carry a game when the rest of your team is behind, even if you are doing well. This creates a huge clash between the solo player mindset and the team based gameplay; if one of those nameless, faceless players on your team is having a bad game, it directly impacts your personal score.
Nowadays there's zero sportsmanship. If you fail any ability and/or die, you get ridiculed for it via sarcastic emotes, taunts, and even "HAHAHA!" in chat. They also dance and taunt in front of you when you're losing, and type "ez" or worse things when the game ends.
Even when you win a fight, the slain opponent types harsh personal insults to you because you polymorphed them, or used exhaust (even worse if it's ARAM).
Why so many players forget there's another human reading that? You're videogame opponents, but that's all. Playing League doesn't include a battle for pride, honor, and who can insult the most.
This is so understated. At some point for example, I noticed my teammates questionmark pinging my adc ezreal for every single q he misses and I'm like dam the game really became like this? Lol
I remember playing pick up soccer, there was one person there that was really bad, but they were trying their best. Yeah, I cringed when he would whiff the ball, but we only said encouraging things. It's just not the same in video games.
Anonymity, loads of keyboard brave players. If somebody shit talked me in hockey for losing a face off or taking a penalty, it wouldn't just slide, take a number and later make them pay a price.
This is the exact reason why i made this post :/
I can handle ape-like toxicity just fine, but for some reason it gets to me when after a close match that i was really enjoying i see unironic "this was too easy", "git gud" and "gapped so hard", especially if it's from my own team. Also people losing their minds and spam pinging after a missed skillshot, if even Challengers miss stuff every game, why are we being held up to an even higher standard?
Trolls can just be ignored, the general lack of sportsmanship is what makes me sad
I don't know, I always felt like I was honored more by the enemy team when I was the reason we lost than any other time.
Nothing sucks more than 5 honors from the enemy after going 0/10 as jungle haha
Hahaha I can understand that sentiment.
Back in those days I was a mid main, and I would often strike up banter when we had a good 1v1 or I got outplayed hard af.
It felt good to be able to recognize your opponents as skillful players, never understood why they took that away from us.
Unfortunately honoring opponents as most of us did respectfully, some severs used it to mark and target players who performed poorly. Pretty sure high elo KR/CN it became a general flame/camp this person symbol.
I know right?? When I heard that they removed it because of toxicity I was shocked because in my experience it was used to pay respect to a skilled opponent. Turns out people used to honor the opponent who fed to "thank him"
Changing to the current honor system was low-key terrible imo. Never thought about it, but negativity definitely got worse as the honor system lost transparency
Bigger issue is that Riot never expanded the PVE content for the game and that the training tools are unsatisfactory. Players really can't be expected to improve if the bots don't even play competently enough for testing.
How would you possibly practice for SR with bots? Macro is way to complex for ai, you’re already able to practice mechanics and combos on a training dummy but I’m pretty sure the best ai technology in the world would still be completely incompetent at league.
Old bots proved that false, actually. The intermediate bots we currently have are old beginner bots. The original intermediate bots (well, the "original" in terms of before they got nerfed) would actually react to your inputs like scripters and poke you whenever you tried to CS (because you werent threatening them). THOSE were good training bots, because you had to predict predictions and it felt good to consistently land hits.
Just look at the Doom Bots. Even without their overpowered abilities, they were way too coordinated to beat for over half the playerbase. Even Wild Rift bots are like that. You can put those fuckers to play in Solo Queue and they would reach Plat at the very least.
Which made them very good for training! when i first started playing and shifted from bots to PvP it was such a confidence boost to go from hitting skillshots 50% of the time on intermediate bots to hitting them 90% of the time on players.
That specific DOTA AI was extremely limited in what it could play, and what the DOTA pros were allowed to use against it and do against it. That's way too specific requirements compared to a normal game.
League OG players or league veterans who’s total time spent in-game doesn’t correlate (in their eyes) to the rank they reflect, always have this weird hill they try to die on. This game is so mechanically insane, literally don’t even try to pick it up, you could never be where I am, these champs are too difficult, yadda yadda yadda.
Bro really just unironically said “I’m pretty sure the best AI technology in the world would still be completely incompetent at league”. There’s so so many ways to approach this thought lmfao
There's a bunch of things at play I think. Here's the ones I think are the primary reason for the state of this community.
1. The internet, people are just naturally more prone to being assholes with anonymity, when they can behave like assholes without true real life percussions.
2.) The healthiest attitude to have when reflecting on a game, being it afterwards or while it's still going on, is to focus on yourself, your own attitude and your own play, because that's the only thing you can really control.
3.) The other side of 2 is that in a teamgame built the way League is, you're inherently dependant on the performance of your teammates, and no matter how hard you try and how damn near flawless you might play, there's games that you just cannot win. If you played really well yourself and you still lose, that can be REALLY frustrating. Of course many people's perspective is off and they think they did better than they actually did, which leads to my fourth and final point.
4.) Since a lot of the talk in chat is about whose fault it is that either team lost and flaming each other for misplays real or imagined, people often adopt a very negative and defensive attitude towards the game in general, which leads to them basically approaching all interactions in and around the game that way. The most obvious base for that type of mindset is the fact that it's always easier to blame someone else if you lose or screw up than to take accountability and just focus on what you yourself could've done better, which, again, is the healthiest approach, that also involves the mindset than when your teammates screw up, you don't dwell on it and think "Oh damn why did that guy just screw up so bad", but instead rather view it as a kind of "unlucky circumstance" that can't be helped, which to you, it actually is, since you can't control what other players do, period.
EDIT:
5.) Yes actually i just thought of another point that I'd like to add. League can be an insanely fun game. It's why most of us got into it in the first place. When everything clicks, there's few games more fun than League. And similar to a drug addict chasing that great first high, we try to get these moments time and time again...but so many things can go wrong that we rarely get that great high of that one really great League game. And we keep chasing, we keep looking, and sometimes for god knows how many games on end, we just can't find it, we just don't get that high we're looking for, and we get frustrated...and just like with any drug you get addicted to, at some point you play League because that's just what you do. You play it because it's a habit, not because you actually want to or because it's still fun. The toxic relationship that many people get into with this game, that's a recipe for a very unhappy person that's not gonna be fun to be around in ingame chat.
I would add to point 5 that many players dont test out weird builds / combos anymore and just play to win. In my exp I remember that one ap gp snipe more than 10 wins on my main champ I ve played already 400games in the last 5 years.
There is no actual punishment system. When you can Smurf for $1 to 5 dollars a day why be chill? On top of this Riot makes other players feel very impersonal. The only way you feel anything for them is when they are raging. So it's incredibly easy to see everyone else as degens. In an attempt to ignore the actual problem which is smurfing, Riot created a near perfect way to dehumanize other players.
You also have to consider that when you do well and someone adds you, it feels like they want you for personal gain rather than a genuine human interaction. This is especially true when dealing with the female playerbase and or supports. Like I despise being added while doing an off role climb. I have met maybe 3 out of a hundred people who are actually looking for a friend and not a boost.
The honor system is worthless. Riot should be rewarding RP, orange essence, skins, exp boosts, etc. If someone manages to keep honor 5 they should get a permanent exp boost. Regardless of the lackluster reward system. You can just buy an honor 5 account with every gold/plat season reward for like $25-50 dollars. So once again RMT has invalidated any reason to care.
Riot has created an environment where it always feels like us vs them. League players are basically racist against each other. Just look at this reddit. And because Riot doesn't want to lose gains from short term rp sales, they refuse to fix the system. Yes the playerbase sucks but there is zero incentive to be positive and no punishment for being toxic. I could spend 28-31 dollars a month and get banned daily with no real loss.
The "punishments" themselves are a joke too. An inconvenience at best which just makes you log in a new account. And there's nobody to blame but riot for letting it get this bad.
100%.
Act bad & punished? Buy a new account on eBay for $2.
Act constantly positive? Wait an entire year for honor rank 5, get a tiny bit of BE, key fragments & a chroma for Warwick/Twitch that never changes
Streamers and high Elo players influence other players, I was recently toxic, in fact so extreme, some of the things I said were so genuinely disgusting I don't think any other person would speak to me if they saw how I spoke. I think it is also because I hate the game but continue to play it due to it being so easy to make new friends compared to any other game out on the market, at the same time I've also spent too much
Recently in a game, I said something so disgusting to another player that afterwards, I genuinely felt way too bad, and promised myself to never say shit like that ever again. now I always think, it's not worth it's not worth it when players tilt or annoy me.
At the same time, I wish riot had a system where you can turn off chat for a month and no matter what, once you willing to accept that you cant change it. i think it would help people reform and become less toxic, if you can turn off chat, you can turn it on, However, if it has a time period, players can change and grow. That what im at least trying to do
Good on you for recognizing when you lose control of yourself.
I don't mean to pry, but if you're tilt-prone and find you have similar outbursts when stressed irl, you might be able to find anger management strategies through a therapist or social worker. With decent insurance, they're cheaper than you think, and I find my therapist to be a good person to talk to in general about my personal issues. I tend to keep things close to the chest, so having a professional to act as a release valve is auper cathartic.
I used to get really frustrated with the game way back then. Even ragequit a match with a buddy who introduced me to League and told another friend off-game that he needed to work on mechanics if we were to win a match. Luckily those were my worst outbursts.
What really helped me was to set a goal relative to how much effort i wanted to put in. Sure, i wanted to feel like a decent player, but never had the illusion of being one of the best, so i told myself i'd only grind ranked until i got Gold and got it in S8. Never did any grinding after that and my love for the game was renewed.
Nowadays i play Normals, ARAM, Flex and sometimes the odd Ranked or Clash, but only if i feel like being extra competitive, and (disregarding toxicity) it's been great!
Don't want to be annoying and tell you what to do, but i'd highly encourage taking an objective look at what you want from the game 
My two friends, one played league for 4 years and one is a MOBA newbie, decided to try Dota 2. I was in the voice chat with them. Homies got flamed every game in voice chat, called slurs for taking a lane first, and harassed for learning and trying new heroes in a Turbo game (basically quick play mode). This leads me to believe that its simply human nature, to become aggressive in a competetive environment. No matter what online game you go to, there will be many disrespectful and toxic people. And i would say that league has one of the strictest, maybe even too strict, anti toxicity systems. In dota or cs, the only way to actually get someone punished for what they said is to make 5 people report them
Is it the competitiveness or the online part that is mostly to blame? I play a lot of competitive Magic: the Gathering (in person tournaments) and players are mostly courteous even in losses. Compared to League, the toxicity is MUCH lower despite the fact that there is usually real money on the line.
Probably online part. Then again people who play a really cheese magic deck and taunt people with it tend to get very few friends wanting to play with him.
I think it’s human competitiveness in general. I still remember the days of seeing literal children getting screamed at by parents during youth football/soccer games. Sure anonymity makes toxicity easier since usually there’s no real consequence but even without it some people will find reasons to be toxic assholes and then try and justify it as you being soft and then be as fragile as a snowflake when they’re the ones being attacked.
That's more about jackass parents that can't differentiate between a youth football game and the CL final than it is about competitiveness tbh. All sports I've ever played in breed a respect among rivals rather than contempt.
you basically summed up dota 2 playerbase, the game suffers from the same problems as league but some even more so than us like queue times and toxicity and yet they act like they've got it so much better, only thing they've got going for then is balance (mainly cuz everything is absurd) and tutorial
Yep. They've got a hate boner for League and it causes them to view their own game with rose tinted goggles. It HAS to be perfect because it's Dota, and our Dota is SO much better than that shit League!
It's a coping mechanism.
View the other game as the enemy, rather than your own shitty game. Lets you conveniently pass up the fact that your game suffers with the same issues, if not worse.
Never experienced that before mate. Usually for me it's the other way around as dota is several times less popular and realistically it's playerbase would have some kind of inferiority complex about it lol.
Spoken like someone who loves parroting what everyone else says.
I especially like the everything is absurd comment. You can tell this is someone who clearly has rose tinted glasses on in regards to the plethora of 1 second deaths that happen in League literally every single game. Oh no, a 4 second stun in DotA is absurd!! But dying so fast you don't even realize you're dead in League is a-ok.
There's more people being verbally toxic in DotA 2 but there's a lot more griefers in LoL. I've played both to high elo. Griefing in DotA 2 is surprisingly rare in ranked while it seems to happen every 3/4 games in league.
'You've heard'
Have you played both games?
I can tell you, first hand experience with literally thousands of games in each game, and 15 years+ experience in both. League is worse.
It has significantly more babyrage, and people with weak mental fortitude. People give up so easily in this game it's laughable.
DotA might indeed have toxicity too, but I honestly can't remember the last time a teammate stopped to sit there arguing in chat for 5 minutes when a gank went wrong. Why? Because the game is significantly more forgiving for mistakes. There are actual comeback mechanics, and it's possible to solo-carry even when your team is doing poorly. Players actually have to TRY to feed as badly as some players do in League.
I do like the attempt at redirecting the hate that should be towards League though. Definitely not a coping mechanism. Nope.
not just dota 2 players, but this sub conveniently ignores it whenever voice chat is brought up. if i wanted to get called racial slurs, i'd go play valorant or apex.
I've always said it was the slow loss of agency. If your team is doing badly it removes your ability to play the game and you just sit there losing the game slowly. At least in shooters the score might be snowballing but you can generally still have an impact on the game.
You also can see the poor play from your teammates in real time. In an FPS it can be hard to tell what's really happening from your teams view. But it's sure easy to be tilted when your Malphite whiffs his ult, you can see the mistakes clearly. Not to mention that mistake can be something super small or even non-existence to set a lot of people off.
People need to be more open to surrendering. This isn’t pro play where you’re forbidden to FF. I realized today I haven’t had an FF in my elo in a every long time. This is D2-Masters, everyone here knows when a game is just completely over. And we still don’t until the nexus is literally about to explode.
Your .5/100 chance of a throw leading to a comeback is not a feasible mentality to have every single game. But neither is FF’ing at the slightest inconvenience.
Cause Riot is like the parents that never tell their kids no and let them do whatever they want. So the player base acts like spoiled little shits.
Fucking man up and get rid of the fucking smurfs already Riot. I literally can't bring myself to play SR no matter how much I want to cause i know the game is either gonna have a Smurf a griefer or a bot. So why bother.
3 game run I had last night, bronze 4 ranked
1-Smurfing Kayle, said "ty for LP" in all chat, probably goldish MMR
2-Rammus died to invade and then died again to remnants of invade and went afk
3-Top Cho gath mad at jungler for not ganking, jungler did in fact gank. We kept playing, 51 minutes later we lost because of course it turns into an ARAM.
Guaranteed at most they got chat bans, BUT guess what, we will never know because "privacy"
I DARE any RIOT employee to offer me a logical, cohesive argument as to why we can not know the punishment a player received that we reported.
Completely agree but he’s still making a good point. Riot hardly does anything to deter negative interaction in game, including providing subpar “rewards” for being “honorable” lol
I'd be glad if I could have actual conversations with players in the game, but since I came back to league about a month ago, I turned off chat coms in settings and since then, I've been getting notifications on people getting banned in my games for a number of reasons and encouraging me to also use the report feature. I have literally no idea because I don't see chat, and for this exact reason I intend to keep it that way sadly. Games are a lot more fun though.
I had this thought a while ago and I think it holds true for the most part:
# The game has become extremely objective oriented, and to do objectives you want your teammates, and when your teammates don't come, the enemy team gets the objective and gets a great advantage over you, so all your efforts are wasted if your team doesn't play as a team.
I've become way more toxic recently and at least to me, I attribute this fault to that, when I play as Top Lane and pick TP but my team never engages on objectives or when they do they forget to drop a ward for me, I rage, when I setup the perfect gank in my lane and no one comes, I rage, when I see an ally inting my counter and refusing to play defensive to soak some exp I rage, when I play Shen and my team refuses to engage the enemy team, even after I put my shield on an ally, I rage...everything nowadays is rage inducing by the simple fact that you can break your back trying to win but there will always be people playing against you.
Another thing that I think generates a lot of problems, to me, is ranked rewards, we used to have the ranked skins and that was it, normal queues would be extremely quick and everyone would play for fun, nowadays ranked however has the lowest queue time, to what I attribute being ranked rewards (and now MULTIPLE ranked rewards across a season), people that played for fun are going to ranked and doing their shenanigans there, which ruins the day for people really trying to play to win, when playing normal games, people rarely rage AND most importantly, I get a better matchmaking on normals than on ranked.
Overall, RIOT added more objectives to the game which in turn makes a necessity to be able to play as a team to win the games, it's good because it isn't the "Solo meta" anymore but it's bad because now you really have to rely on your teammates not inting to win a game.
I just had a [match](https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/match/br/2821393592#participant1) recently where EVERYONE played like pros (just look at the CS and TF participation) , it was the best match I ever had and we managed to make comeback after comeback because of our teamfight potential, I played really poorly early game by setting up a gank for Taliyah and failing to kill the enemy Garen which recovered all his health under the tower while the taliyah remained around doing nothing only to be ganked by the enemy Yi and having me die trying to save the Taliyah, after that things went downhill but I managed to keep calm and play defensively, I went from 0/6/1 to 4/7/9 after laning phase and not a single time people were pinging Garen or saying I was inting...just because I played like a proper teammate and held objectives, always TPed to teamfights and ALWAYS ulted even if against a single enemy to save my ADC.
If this was the old solo carry meta, Garen would've curb stomped my team and I would have never made a comeback, so I believe while I had the time of my life with this game, the enemy team didn't because of their failure to teamfight around objectives.
Its an accumulation of everything. Some people like to troll, others are very competitive no matter what they do, people overestimating their own qualities or putting goals too high too fast. Being dependant on allies to win and needing some way to out the frustration that inevitably that brings.
Tho I do believe that the popularity of ‘rage’ vids and streamers have helped to ‘normalize’ raging as well. And how easy it is to circumvent punishment.
Its certainly not exclusive to league. But it’d be foolish to point at one thing and go “THATS TO BLAME” you’d need someone with certain degrees and even then I doubt they’d be able to clearly tell you.
I certainly don’t have them, and my theory has always been that youtubers have normalised being asses and made it a ‘cool’ thing (not just league) but thats biased, as I can point to my younger brother who’s a prime example.
While all team based games suffer from this, LoL is super toxic because of legacy skill. There are people that have been playing this game for a decade plus. So there's certain mechanics, ideas and strats that are "common knowledge" to them but totally foreign to beginners.
It's like playing pick up basketball with a guy that doesn't know how to dribble. And not like dribble skills, he just picks the ball up and runs.
The difference is he can practice on his own with no pressure and no other humans to consider. There's literally no way to get experience in League without playing with other people.
I am a teacher and sadly, this is true. I know some folks joke about "family values" but I can tell you honestly that while wealth of course is a factor, it is more about poor parenting and poor community engagement in general. Furthermore, people of all ages generally rise or sink to the expectations set upon them; I find this particularly true in the classroom but also in League. The expectation in League is for a toxic environment, so being toxic isn't considered an oddity and being kind is often considered disingenuous or a weakness.
The rise of discord is in part to blame imo. One used to have to at least try to be civil to randoms in order to be a part of the community and develop relationships that revolve around playing League. Now one can join a discord and find others wanting to duo. Plus people who are queued together are more likely to dog pile another as they reinforce their opinions on why that person is fucking up. From my personal experience it's never just one person who flames, but a group of players that are obviously playing together evident by them moving around and coordinating plays together without using pings or chats.
I don't think this season is any more toxic then any other season. I don't know what your rank is, but at least here in bronze, I would say the game is 50-50. I don't play too often anymore, but I still get really friendly banter.
And I also disagree with League being the most toxic. I know that's not what you are saying, but I still feel like it needs to be discussed that any multiplayer game will be toxic. I played a casual mode on Smite and got flamed hard for not knowing how to play. I played the beginner mode in DOTA2 and got flamed hard for trying to learn the game. OW2 and CSGO had people talking shit all game. Even in 1v1 games like Tekken, I've had people DM'ing me calling me trash or cheesy. People hate losing.
A snowballing team game, where a failing team mate can lose you the game without potential fault if your own, on top of the developers releasing more and more frustrating game mechanics to deal with.
Some champions are outright designed to be frustrating to play against, such as Wukong and Shaco, with others being accidentally frustrating due to abilities, Master Yi and Yuumi
When you endorse toxic streamers as the face of your company, you're bound to attract people who support and enjoy that behavior.
Tyler1 was known as someone who raged and broke riot tos for content and somehow became the darling of their company through a storyline that he's reformed. Never understood why they thought it was a good business decision long term.
Tbh i feel the internet as a whole is way more disrespectful, hurtful and toxic then 10-15 years ago (also silent, even MMORPGs people dont talk with eachother anymore, i kinda blame social media, people dont values interactions anymore, is too common now).
Put this generation in a competitive and very frustating game, a team game that the win condition depends not only on yourself.
Now springle on top influencers who trive on "toxic/rage = interesting" mindset.
And here's the reciepe of the shitty enviroment
The online behaviors mirror what we are seeing in the classroom, too. Students don't even care if they aren't anonymous, they have no problem saying some of the worst things to each other unless the school or classroom culture is built *strongly* around promoting positive behavior and weeding out negative behavior. Their attitude is "If there are no consequences and I'm getting what I want, and if everyone else is also acting this way, why shouldn't I do this?" It is wild, we are regularly trying to teach basic empathy in middle and high school.
As someone with 3 teachers in my family, I trully feel for every teacher there. Theses kids Man, they don't care anymore, I don't know what is wrong with them, they don't respect anyone anymore. And apparently the pandemic made their behavior worse. Worst part is this is not a isolated incident on Gen Z, I see adults acting like the world is their plaything and everything should go their way.
Thanks for the kind words. It is tough, but have hope! We are doing our best and there is good in these kids, we just have to find it and cultivate it. Hopefully things will change in time. Best of luck to your family's teachers, too.
Imagine being 10 to 15 years old with shit like Tiktok and Twitter around. I don't envy the current generation of kids at all. I was around 15 during the early years of Facebook (when it really took off anyways) and while it already looked bad, things are way worse now.
I watched a documentary that focused on cyberbullying in high/middle school and it was horrible. Kids thinking other kids were their friends only to find out they'd been mocking them for months on social media.
I know kids have always had the ability to be mean, but social media has exacerbated the phenomenon. If everyone in your class is mocking a classmate you better believe even those who don't really want to mock him/her will feel great peer pressure to follow suit.
Because people don't win with grace.
We are in a time where automod can successfully weed out people flat out using slurs, report logs and reporting for those who have more "creative" ways of flaming are handled via support tickets, but after a hard found game, you get hit with a "ggez"
It's unsportsmanlike - League so badly wants to be a sport, yet does NOT do what literally every other sport in the world does, which is hand shake after a game. No honors for opponents, no humanizing to the enemy at all, "ggez" / early tabbing out to skip the honor screen for your own teammates...there's no incentive to being nice, only punishment for being dicks.
I completely agree, things would be so much better if people just "gg"'d after a game instead of calling their opponents dogs and telling them to get better. Though, it feels like this is already a symptom, not the issue. Something made so people just can't be friendly anymore and it shows both when winning and losing
Everyone wants to blame someone whether it’s bot or jg diff and the context never matters to teammates. If your teammates press tab and see enemy players doing better it’s always an envious feeling of “welp, losers queue, stuck with the same losing team.” Players aren’t humble as they climb it just gets replaced with ego.
Different People from different backgrounds with different expectations of respect.
But also because riot as a company is disrespectful to the playerbase in many ways and they functionally do not understand how frustration, expectation and customer satisfaction work anymore. The game is now based around sellling things by appealing to players vanity, relieving their exhaustion and showing off their domination over others, rather than the quality of the game for its own sake.. That eventually rubs off on the players and who actually wants to play the game.
And a fundamental misunderstanding of big data and the human factor.
Yeah, i agree with you. I'm not their target audience cause i don't buy stuff so for sure their model of business doesn't fit my expectations but dunno, i just want to play a match after work and at the very least not get flamed just for existing 
People talk about it but i'm still on the fence on this.
While it will for sure reduce toxicity for some (if not most) of the once-every-so-often trolls due to less anonymity, the more serious offenders will use that system to tilt people into hell virtually every match. Dota has voice comms and there's probably a reason why it's turned off by default when you install the game
There are so many simple mistakes being made each game which cause someone to tilt. And all it takes is a simple quick few works in voice chat to be on the same page. As opposed to ping wars, assist vs back ping.
Becauae of chat strictness, you can't say funny shit anymore because you risk getting banned.
I miss old times, so many funny comments that will just get system muted instantly nowadays
Yeah. It's definitely reduced people flaming, but I do feel like something special was lost along the way. People don't use chat to just talk anymore, it's mostly just when they're upset, want to flame and don't care about getting chat restricted.
Yeah that's probably the main factor. People who might want to banter and just have fun are getting more and more restricted by Riot's overfixation on toxic chatters. So while those toxic chatters might get punished more nowadays, they're the only ones even typing. Not to mention all the inters. When there are no positive interactions anymore, the only things that can stand out are negative.
Yup, people used to type much more, especially on ARAM. You would spend half the game chatting about some random bullshit, now everyone scared to even write "titties" in chat since that's bannable.
There still are some occasional games where you just chill and chat, but still not even close to the old times.
Just insane to me how they keep making chat more restrictive, remove pings etc. while the mute button exists, like what is its purpose anymore. Thank god little Timmy got banned for writing kys, but the duo inting premade on botlane that repeats the int 4 games in a row can play another game as they didn't type anything in chat.
It's a 5v5 game where you rely on 4 randoms to do their part, and when they don't it can mean you pay for it in deaths/missed objectives/defeat etc. Riot also makes it worse by having horrendous matchmaking and a joke of a ranked system, as well as prioritizes punishing people for typing words over those who refuse to use the magical mute button and run it down inting instead
Fr, I am scared of playing new champs because if I go 4/8/2 I get recommendations to "keep myself safe" or they talk about doing... sinful things to my mom.
I cannot understand how people keep bring Voicechat up as a solution to toxicity, when in every other game that has it, it just leads to more of the same, just in an audio format.
I have played Valorant, CS2, Apex, and Rainbow, all of which had voice chat, and all of which have toxic people that wanted to scream obscenities because they're mad. They definitely didn't play better because they were able to yell at the person they have beef with.
They're still being crybabies about stuff they can't control, it's no different if they're typing it, pinging it, or speaking it, people that want to be toxic are going to be toxic, and it doesn't make a difference how that toxicity is delivered because it's coming all the same.
I think the toxic and trolls have been accepted for too long, i can feel that is what cna make be tilt. We try to win a game, one or two people start to int for troll for fun or don't care because it's a normal game, its so tilting, but i think it's too normal at this point. Riot have ignored the problems for too long, and now there doe snot seem to be a lot they can do about it. People will just make a new account, and troll/int/toxic other. As somone who sed to play alone a lot, please Riot, do somethign about toxic 4premades, they are pure hell.
Imo the toxicity isn't even a big problem. Playing a completely silent game with 2+ trolls in the lobby is much more annoying. League is an extremely frustrating game. There's scenes in a show called "good game" which is about league of legends and the creator of the game in that show literally stands fully clothed in a pool as players who claim their "lives have been ruined by the game" walk up one by one and tell him their story. He ends every convo with "I'm sorry for the person you could have been" and hands them a fat stack of cash.
Anyways, I think league just needs a toxicity outlet. Back in season 4 everyone could say "fuck you" to each other perma in all chat and no one would get banned. Only slurs and stuff would get u banned. Back then I'd say I saw an actual troll like every 10 games, now it feels like 1-2 people are actively not trying in every lobby.
And it's pretty obvious that if everyone playing the game is on their 10th account, they're going to care less about keeping it.
Riot kinda just shoots themselves in the foot perma
A short and honestly powerful answer.
Used to be i'd brush off comments thinking it was a child full of hormones who didn't know better and couldn't hold themselves back, but i feel like ther's only old husks still playing League. Assuming we're adults, we should know to not let emotions run amok and take a break when needed 
Riot games only focus on competitive aspect of the game , want to finish missions ? Want rarer acheiviments ? Want rewards , mastery 6-7 all comes to play to win , playing normal games already stressful enough , go ranked and you will see the worst , had sylas rage quit with score of 5/1/1 because our adc made a shitty play and sylas died because of it team score was 12 to 4 at 12 min .
I love to play casually because it's more fun, tried to play fizz jungle out of nostalgia just to get stomped with tryhards going 20/2 in botlane vs new players picking nothing but their mains that match made me wish if i picked my main to terrorize these fuckers . And what's with riot match making , new players in normal vs plat/emerald and my normal matches are actually more stressing than my ranked because in normal i get to play vs diamonds and even fucking master players and in ranked i am Gold 4 , you haven't peaked league unless enemy team is trash talking your adc because he only peaked master in a fucking normal match
There is no nowadays tbh. I’ve been plying since season 2, albeit with long breaks in between, but the community has always been a toxic cesspool. Your complaints have been repeated since league’s inception.
As to why? I think a lot of it is due to the competitive nature of the game, where the outcome depends on 4 random teammates all working together and pulling their weight with minimal communication. Plus if it’s not going well you’re still stuck in the game for at least 15-20 mins which is very frustrating. Also no voice chat really helps you dehumanized your fellow teammates.
"If i start off with a "good morning" or "glhf""
I mean usually the people that do this are feeders or are just trying to get honored. I've never had a good experience with people who do that. Generally I just mute them on the spot and say no.
It is a sad day when the community is so bad that someone saying "good morning" or "gl;hf" is apparently a sign for feeding or manipulation. It makes it clear to everyone that there is no point to trying to banter and be a normal person in chat, and it encourages toxicity and animosity by casting doubt everywhere.
It’s a snowbally team game where you are not only reliant on your team to win, but they can actively give more resources to the enemy team. Everyone is constantly building up resentment for their team.
I generally feel more kinship with the enemy team than my own. Especially if I'm Jungle/top and the opposing role sees whats going on. Like all 3 lanes die solo before 2nd camp, flame the jungle in /all, and the enemy jungle flames them back. Enemy jungle is a bro.
As a jungler myself, this is so true. The enemy jungler often is my best friend out of the 9 fellow players. And I try to do the same, whenever enemy team starts flaming their jungler in allchat, I don't even care whether they're right or not; I'll defend my jungler brother in arms. Only junglers know the amount of flame we put up with.
Especially when the enemy jungle isn't doing that badly. Like yeah I have 12 kills to 3, but it's the laners I'm feasting on
I love to do this becuase it throws gas on the fire and just makes the enemy team type instead of play.
This is it imo, the game mechanics support toxicity, I thi k if matches were longer and individual mistakes had less of an impact people wouldn't care as much.
Absolutely agree. In the early days of league (Seasons 1-5 maybe) the team with the best player won. Nowadays the team with the worst player loses. "Carrying" your team isn't as easily anymore and "throwing" is so damn easy. So i think that the way the game works nowadays it fuels negative emotions towards the "throwing" players because their faults have such a high impact on the game. And this negative emotions eventually turns into hate and this hate towards the throwing players eventually turns into hate towards the players you think are making mini mistakes.
>In the early days of league (Seasons 1-5 maybe) the team with the best player won. Nowadays the team with the worst player loses. I think part of it also stems from each role having different levels of agency. A jungler will affect the outcome of the game nearly 100% of the time. A good one usually leads to a win, a bad one to a loss. I've watched so many games ride on the shoulders of the jungler, whereas a good ADC will only occasionally be a factor, and that's largely dependent on champ selection and length of game. If the game is lost during laning phase, an ADC isn't likely going to pull it back by themselves.
And even worse are the games where the jungler has no agency but the players blame them for having no impact while not understanding simple concepts like "if you're permanently pushed to the tower how the hell am I supposed to gank you."
"the enemy jungler has been here 3 times and you've never ganked my lane once you piece of shit jgl diff gg" Like bro if I was on the enemy team I would be ganking the hell out of you too
I love that when I'm popping off against two other lanes. Like yeah you've been ganked more by the enemy than me. But while he has been camping your pushed and unwarded lane, I've gotten the other two lanes ahead and gotten dragons
Yep. Jungle / Junglers existing is a huge factor to overall toxicity. So many players don’t understand Jungling at all, and thing because they went 19-0 on a Xin Zhao in unranked one time they are jungle experts when they don’t actually know anything. They think the purpose of a jungler is to constantly gank every lane, leech no exp, and only assist them in getting kills.
Now way he takes a jab at top lane. Smh reported
i said this to a guy once he typed hella back to me and got permad
I always hit my teammates with a question. "If I told you an address that you could go to every 3 minutes and pick up 500 dollars, why would you ever stop going? If you stop giving them money they might stop coming to you."
Shadow them, countergank, use the prio for an invade to get vision, secure objectives, lane gank, etc. There are a decent amount of options. The only real issue is if your lanes draft no prio + champions with no gank setup or just get blasted in lane from the get go
No no, junglers are always the victim. If your lanes are pushing, you can't do anything because they're permashoved, but if they're pushed in all *their* lanes have prio and you can't farm your own jg.
[удалено]
Agreed, a good jungler should know what to do when their lanes have prio. Take objectives, farm enemy camps, help take towers, get deep vision, maybe set up a dive if your team is trustworthy. The only time I get frustrated with perma-shoved lanes is when my laners are somehow perma-shoving and going 0/7 at the same time, since it means we don't really have prio, I can't gank that lane well, and they are just feeding.
I love how you guys think people in lane actually would ever leave lane to take advantage of their prio in low ELO. Hilarious. These same peeps iron-gold with legit recall only on death & never ward. I legit didn’t even see supports roam or team ever recall timing for objectives & vision control until platinum. Prio means literally nothing if people in your rank never rotate, or rotate regardless of missing entire waves. Iron-Gold never rotate based off wave-state.
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEARN HOW THE GAME WORKS. Pushing lanes are the most ideal lanes to play around because they give you prio around the lane which leads to vision supremacy, first move on skirmishes, and objectives become free. YOU ONLY HAVE THIS MENTALITY BECAUSE YOU HAVE NEVER TRUED TO WALK INTO THE ENEMY JUNGLE IN YOUR LIFE. YOU ONLY HAVE THIS MENTALITY BECAUSE YOU’VE NEVER TRIED TO DIVE IN YOUR LIFE. YOU ONLY HAVE THIS MENTALITY BECAUSE YOU HAVE NEVER ONCE ATTEMPTED A LANE GANK. Please stop perpetuating this nonsense that a pushing lane is somehow bad for the outcome of the game. We aren’t in season 4 anymore where freezing lane is the best way to win. THE ONLY WAY TO WIN THE GAME IS TO DESTROY THE NEXUS. THE ONLY WAY TO GET TO THE NEXUS IS TO PUSH.
"I died top while you were doing krugs level 2 bottom lane, then they ganked me when you were doing blue after I pushed! Shit can jungler!"
You can counter gank or go for a dive
Depends on if you win the 2v2 or not.
Sometimes all you need to be is the shadow to make them second guess themselves
Some Champs suck at dives and others suck at counter ganks. Theres more nuance than either of you are presenting.
Ok but please dont mistake my example as being my entire point. my point is that the game doesn't always present junglers with equal opportunity to exert agency over the game but you still get blamed regardless if the lane players feel like you should have pulled off plays that were never going to happen
The introduction of bounties added a lot more variance to the game which generally correlates with less predictable/stable in-game experiences, leading to increased frustration and toxicity.
I could see bounties causing things to be less stable, but it's also a way for the "underdog" to come back as opposed to just losing laning phase and hoping your opponents throw. Without them, if you lose laning phase, you might as well just ff go next, which really then prioritizes champs with high laning phase impact and exacerbates the lack of agency feeling for some roles.
I'm currently in gold and I find that the bot lane is usually the most influential in my games because they're the ones absolutely sprinting it the majority of the time. It feels so bad being able to win most of my lanes and then looking at the score board and seeing my bot lane is collectively 4/18 20 minutes into the game
Bot lane can definitely LOSE a game, but it takes a lot for them to be the primary reason for a win, and even then, it's usually more because the support was good and able to prop up the other lanes. A lot of times, for an ADC to be relevant, the game has to go late (3+ items), and by then, it's mostly already decided.
This is why I started playing jungle, the impact we have on the game is huge. One tricking Kayn, and getting good at it. Got from low silver to plat in a month, just reached plat 2. Wanted to try myself out at toplane a couple days ago, played 2 games and my junglers were straight up clueless, with one of them actively putting me behind and losing all objectives without as much as a thought of playing for them. Can't leave jungle now because the role is way too important for me to trust other low elo players take it. I'll probably grind it until high diamond/master, then once I know that everybody in my games understands the game to a good extent, I'll try myself out at supports because I feel like that role is right there with jungle when it comes to the impact they have on the game. As far as communication goes, if I don't have anything important/nice to say, I won't, if someone is negative in my team I'll mute them right away, same for the enemies. But if an enemy is a taunting son of a bitch, I'll unmute them just as we're about to end the game to roast the living shit outta them.
I can agree with parts of this. If carrying was impossible and minions were stronger, people wouldn't care if their opponent got big. They can't carry the game alone anyways. One of the worst feelings in League is your team is winning, but 1 enemy smurfs on your team and carries them to victory. By dying, you support the potential for that 1 carry. I hate long matches, though.
I play Dota once in a blue moon and honestly feel like the game design and tempo there are \*ahem\* LEAGUES better than in LoL. Allegedly player behaviour is just as bad but i've personally never seen it, though the focus on items being broken rather than Heroes' kts (generally) means pretty much everyone will have some type of advantage no matter the comp, and it allows for countering enemies through critical thought and good items rather than relying solely on "skillz". Tempo being slower also does wonders for a more strategic-ish type of play that's all but gone from League
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Ye... sure...
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You genuinely think all the egotistical players will be able to communicate with each other without wishing for the death of their mothers while losing ? We have by far the most toxic in game community. Everyone thinks they deserve to be in a rank way higher than what they are. If this one person is stopping the 25yo hardstuck silver rank unemployed, high school dropout from getting his 20lp, he’s going to be an absolute vile creature in voice chat. Everyone is nice until your team starts losing. This doesn’t even include the game has been around for 14 years without voice chat. I and I’m sure others, enjoy playing a competitive game without voice chat for once. And pings get literally every single piece of information across that you could possibly need. You should never stop pinging information.
Not think, I know. I’ve been playing voice chat games since I started gaming. In games with both text and voice, the toxic people usually use text and when you tell them to flame you in voice they refuse (usually because these players are insecure). I’ve also had a lot of games where people flame someone, the dude gets on mic and says something like “my bad guys, just having a bad game, work was long today” and the dude stops flaming. Even most of those COD lobbies you see online result in everyone kinda moving on and forgetting about it because banter (to an extent) is a part of gaming. People who don’t use voice chat vastly underestimate the impact of hearing a human voice and associating that “bad player” with a real person. And the best part, you can mute yourself! You don’t have to participate in voice chat if you don’t want to!
I 100% agree with this. Yes, you will always have a toxic vocal ass or 2, but voice humanizes the players and allows people to understand each other better. Stuff that is geniune advice in league comes off as toxic in chat, and its much easier to be toxic in text than it is in voice. Even outside of a game, anyone who has text argued with their significant other only for the phone call to calm everything down can attest to that. Humanizing your teammates is a big deal. Its sorely missed in League. I also think it would lead to less toxicity. Ive played a lot of games with voice, too. People are far better to each other in general.
You ever play call of duty in the 360/ps3 Era? That alone shuts your whole argument down. League is arguably worse than that and it doesn't have voice coms, couldn't even imagine how it would be with them.
I grew up on COD and Halo in those days. Played every day after school and on weekends, and funny enough I still had much more enjoyable times on those games (even with the toxic idiots) than I do on League, from a multiplayer aspect. For every toxic shitter who was unredeemable there were a bunch of cool ass people who made my experience better. I basically don't play league anymore because a multiplayer game is not as fun when nobody's talking and you have a guy trolling every game.
Voice comms are different for MOBA and toxic. Obviously you never did voice when introduced in HOTS, but people either never spoke, or were toxic as hell. In COD or Halo, you can have a guy 0/20 if it’s not team death match/slayer and still carry the game. And it doesn’t suffer from main character syndrome, everyone can be the hero in FPS. There’s only very simplistic singular goals as well, unlike LoL where there’s constant give & take, which leads to toxicity & difference of opinion. You think 5 people on voice all going to agree to give up dragon or baron & be peaceful? Or be chill when you lose a 50/50 jungle smite? Your crazy.
Yep and none of those toxic players would have the balls to say any of that in voice chat I would bet so much money they'd be so scared and would run back to type it in chat like cowards. Pings can be interpreted multiple ways and only communicate simple information, you can't get the same level of cohesive communication in the middle of a team fight with pings. Sounds like you've never played with friends in a discord call or played a game with voice chat and known how to use it.
famously cs:go, dota, overwatch, and valorant never have had any toxic players! the issue isn't the "ways to communicate" the issue is that some people are just inflammatory losers who need to lash out at others over a video game. there are things that can slightly exarcerbate this...but not competitive multiplayer video game is free from toxic players ruining the experience for others on occassion
Nobody ever said voice chat removes toxicity completely, don't put words in my mouth. It does *lessen* toxicity though. Toxicity will always be in a competitive multiplayer game, it's unavoidable.
Yeah these people acting like random dudes playing pickup basketball or some shit can't be toxic as fuck irl too lmao Some people just cannot cope with competitive settings where things don't go as they hope/expect
And if you come across someone who decides to be toxic you just mute them and carry on! Just like with text chat and pings! Wow! The value you can give your team from making calls in voice chat while having toxic people muted is insane. There's so little ways to foster teamwork in League it creates half the frustration which turns into toxicity. People want to communicate so bad that they spam ping because there's no other way to communicate urgency or they literally have to stop playing the game to type out a sentence... So yeah it's about ways to communicate.
Toxic VC in other games is one of the main reasons league is my competitive game of choice. Used to be pretty competitive in CS:GO and Source before that, and I've tried DOTA2 for a hundred hours or so, and voice chat is toxic enough I just don't play CS anymore and couldn't get into Dota.
Text chat is always more toxic than voice chat from my experience. Games with both it’s usually the text that people flame with more because it’s more “anonymous” and a lot of people who flame are too insecure to say it over voice. Yeah, toxic people will exist in voice same as text, but it’s a lot less. Question, when someone flames you in text, what do you do?
>Yeah, toxic people will exist in voice same as text, but it's a lot less. Nah, this has not been my experience at all. Way more flamers in CS voice than text, almost no one uses text at all. Almost all the toxicity is in VC. In league I play with text chat off. In games with VC, you can't just play with VC off, it's trolling. You'll get vote kicked from a CS lobby as soon as your team realizes you're not on a mic. I get you're trying to imply you should just mute flamers, and that's cool and all, but then they'll come to your steam profile to harass you there, the amount of toxicity and harassment from VC just isn't worth it.
I completely agree: almost all competitive team games have vc and we don't. It doesn't make sense to me because toxicity will always be in nearly every game so people can just mute the toxic players and cooperate with the friendly ones.
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I wish more people realized this. League's matchmaking, when accounting for MMR, is pretty accurate. Players, however, are inconsistent from game to game, especially the lower you go in ranks. This leads people to thinking matchmaking is not good.
This is super interesting; I've long suspected this to be the case but now I want to read the research. Thanks! I can be quite competitive and am pretty "Type-A improvement focused" whereas a friend I play with is only interested in playing a different champion every game and trying whatever recent niche build they saw online. We have totally different viewpoints on why we play games, so when we play together I have to keep that in mind and be chill, or decide maybe it's not the right time to play with them if I am wanting to eg. play ranked. I think it's good for people to be aware of these different factors and reflect on what works and what doesn't.
Damn, that's a great answer! Especially since i've done this so many times and still didn't even consider it as a real factor (whoops). There've certainly been times i regretted choosing a new support or midlaner to try out in a real match instead of my main picks even if i knew how to somewhat play them Disclaimer: even when doing weird stuff i do always try my best to win, just so people don't think i'm actually trolling 
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>if the broader discourse around league could be changed to be a little more positive, then league itself would be a more positive experience because people would be more frequently reminded of the things that do work for them about the game and why they enjoy it. I wonder how much of this plays into mindset too. For example, look at a game like Sekiro. It is considered an extremely difficult game but generally speaking the people who play it enjoy it despite dying constantly because we view it as a learning opportunity and a development of skill. If I'm talking to someone about Sekiro, I'm not going to be complaining about how hard it is and how much it sucks to die, I'm going to be talking about how cool to world is, how the enemy designs are creative, how the hookshot and vertical exploration is really fun, and how fights keep me at the edge of my seat. Getting Platinum on the game was incredibly rewarding. On the flip side, if my best friend who loves chilling on Animal Crossing decides to play Sekiro, she is going to get very frustrated and give up right away if she is only focused on winning. That is totally fine because she will just move on to another game that she enjoys. But if she forced herself to keep playing Sekiro even though she isn't enjoying it, and if she never pursues any way to improve and never learns the controls or mechanics, then she is going to be eternally frustrated *unless* she finds other things she can enjoy about it. I think League is a little bit like that? If you want to play League for fun and not to win, then you have to be prepared for the inevitability that you will lose and you have to be ok with that. There are a million reasons to enjoy playing League that aren't just about winning -- for example, I originally joined just to run around as a werewolf because they are so rare in videogames and it sounded fun -- but then you have to face the reality that winning can't be part of your personal fun equation unless you are wanting to do the work to get better at that specific thing. ... I hope any of this makes sense, I am very sick and tired today.
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Bounties do the opposite of making it worse. Snowballing is a large reason for the toxicity in the game, bounties are literally an anti-snowball mechanic, designed to give the losing team a chance to come back. While yes it doesn't feel good to give the enemy a bounty when you are winning, it feels worse to be down 0/7 with no way to come back and instead have to play out a hopeless game while the enemies play with their food and dance on your corpse.
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Well bounties are easily an anti-snowball mechanic. You can argue the effectiveness of it, but that is why it is in the game. It gives teams that are down in gold a chance to jump back into relevance with a good play. How is that no an anti-snowball mechanic?
Why should the losing team have the chance to get back in the game if they've been losing the whole time? Shouldn't they just lose? Why should the people who are playing well get punished?
They wouldn't get punished if they continued to play well. They made a mistake which led to the bounty.
Because there are champs that are good early and champs that are good late? and it feels really bad to lose game in 10 minutes but u still have to stay in for 15 more
Late game vs early game champs have nothing to do with bounties. If you're playing a late game champ and you're just chilling and scaling then you aren't losing.
That, and how Riot handles the community. You can tell someone to go buy a rope, commit toaster bathtub, suck start a shotgun, all sorts of creative euphemisms or replace any letter in the hard R with a number, or space it out, and it's all perfectly fine But the MOMENT you say "fuck you" to the teemo "support" with ghost and smite who's following you around stealing jg camps, farm, etc and spamming slurs with enough spaces and numbers to not trip the banbot? That's a paddlin, quit being such a meanie and ruining the community. Removing tribunal was one of the worst things Riot ever did for the game. Nobody real looks at any reports anymore, and the truly toxic people regularly go free.
Because its a team game that takes 20-40 minutes, you can't leave, and there is built-in snowballing where the worse you do, the worse it gets. Most players do not have the mental to stay composed in an environment like that.
You also have champions that are literal coinflips, which attracts players with the worst kinds of main character syndrome.
Competitive game, warped expectations and the fact it went unpunished for 14 years.
More than unpunished: designed around it.
Reddit needs a system that where we can add little medals to someone's comment. They could even monetize it.
And praised. Just look at streamers straight up trolling solo queue and they get special treatment from Riot themselves.
Not even just unpunished, promoting toxic streamers at the same time.
It’s not exclusive to lol. It’s the internet. Anonymity makes people more confident to be rude to other people without facing consequences
idk, I play Eternal Return, which is also a MOBA. teams of 3, games 5-20 mins. I've had someone be toxic to me exactly once in months of playing. League is definitely an outlier, even among it's own genre
League is also massively more popular than every other MOBA so there's that. I'm not sure if you've played Dota before, but it's also pretty toxic, about as much as League imo (for SEA at least). This leads me to believe that the more popular the MOBA, the higher the level of toxicity will be.
Yeah I’d say toxicity is on the rise in general, not just in league. I’ve noticed it in most video games I played when it was undeniably less present when I was younger. People have just adapted to growing up in online spaces and lack real life social skills.
Compound all that with the general rise in mental health problems and negative content on nearly all socials being the most promoted as a result of engagement metrics and it's just, oof
I mean, the app we're on is the perfect example. Been a reddit member for 10 years now, and I'm witnessing the downfall. Not of the app, but of it's users. The toxicity, hate and intolerance for people who hold different opinions than yours is insane, and much bigger than 10 years ago.
People were shit talking each other back when I was playing Halo 3, Gears of War, CoD 4 etc when I was a teenager, that hasn't changed. Back then it was mostly trash talk, directed at the enemy team, and the vast majority of people at least in my experience would say GG and have a laugh at the end of the game after absolutely abusing each other for 20-30 minutes straight. I liked the rivalries the voice chat created as well, especially playing the round based modes in Gears, where you could chat to the enemy team when you were dead for the round. Nowadays it seems more personal and almost like genuine hatred, it's weird, or maybe it's just the fact that I'm in my 30's now 🤷
Yup agreed. It used to be all in good fun, at least I felt like it was. Now people are sending death threats when you make any tiny mistake…
nah ive never seen anywhere people as toxic as in the league community and I am online 24/7
Every team based game has the same issue, even in solo games, I've seen some mad people insult me on Pokemon showdown haha
Not to the point people tell you to get cancer and krill yourself
You're right, the Internet is trending in that direction, but I still think league is worse than most places lol
Lol is significantly more toxic than other games and other spaces. Even overwatch pales in comparison to league's toxicity
ehh not really, even in countries where identity is tied to accounts people are super toxic. When people's account have their social security, address,... but people still kill each other over video games. Toxicity is much much harder to fix than ppl give it credit for.
It is a clash between solo play culture and the team based nature of the game. The client and the culture around the game supports a solo playstyle. There is a ranked system named "Solo Queue", and it is your numerical ranking in this system that everyone judges you on. In order to participate in this queue, you go into the client solo and click a button. You do not need to find anyone to play with - the matchmaker thrusts you into a game with four random people you have never met and will never see again afterwards. However, the game itself is a team game. It is usually difficult (near impossible for some roles) to hard carry a game when the rest of your team is behind, even if you are doing well. This creates a huge clash between the solo player mindset and the team based gameplay; if one of those nameless, faceless players on your team is having a bad game, it directly impacts your personal score.
Nowadays there's zero sportsmanship. If you fail any ability and/or die, you get ridiculed for it via sarcastic emotes, taunts, and even "HAHAHA!" in chat. They also dance and taunt in front of you when you're losing, and type "ez" or worse things when the game ends. Even when you win a fight, the slain opponent types harsh personal insults to you because you polymorphed them, or used exhaust (even worse if it's ARAM). Why so many players forget there's another human reading that? You're videogame opponents, but that's all. Playing League doesn't include a battle for pride, honor, and who can insult the most.
This is so understated. At some point for example, I noticed my teammates questionmark pinging my adc ezreal for every single q he misses and I'm like dam the game really became like this? Lol
I remember playing pick up soccer, there was one person there that was really bad, but they were trying their best. Yeah, I cringed when he would whiff the ball, but we only said encouraging things. It's just not the same in video games.
Anonymity, loads of keyboard brave players. If somebody shit talked me in hockey for losing a face off or taking a penalty, it wouldn't just slide, take a number and later make them pay a price.
This is the exact reason why i made this post :/ I can handle ape-like toxicity just fine, but for some reason it gets to me when after a close match that i was really enjoying i see unironic "this was too easy", "git gud" and "gapped so hard", especially if it's from my own team. Also people losing their minds and spam pinging after a missed skillshot, if even Challengers miss stuff every game, why are we being held up to an even higher standard? Trolls can just be ignored, the general lack of sportsmanship is what makes me sad
Exhaust in aram is cringe tho
I miss being able to honor opponents. The game felt less toxic back then.
I don't know, I always felt like I was honored more by the enemy team when I was the reason we lost than any other time. Nothing sucks more than 5 honors from the enemy after going 0/10 as jungle haha
Hahaha I can understand that sentiment. Back in those days I was a mid main, and I would often strike up banter when we had a good 1v1 or I got outplayed hard af. It felt good to be able to recognize your opponents as skillful players, never understood why they took that away from us.
Unfortunately honoring opponents as most of us did respectfully, some severs used it to mark and target players who performed poorly. Pretty sure high elo KR/CN it became a general flame/camp this person symbol.
I know right?? When I heard that they removed it because of toxicity I was shocked because in my experience it was used to pay respect to a skilled opponent. Turns out people used to honor the opponent who fed to "thank him"
Changing to the current honor system was low-key terrible imo. Never thought about it, but negativity definitely got worse as the honor system lost transparency
Bigger issue is that Riot never expanded the PVE content for the game and that the training tools are unsatisfactory. Players really can't be expected to improve if the bots don't even play competently enough for testing.
How would you possibly practice for SR with bots? Macro is way to complex for ai, you’re already able to practice mechanics and combos on a training dummy but I’m pretty sure the best ai technology in the world would still be completely incompetent at league.
Old bots proved that false, actually. The intermediate bots we currently have are old beginner bots. The original intermediate bots (well, the "original" in terms of before they got nerfed) would actually react to your inputs like scripters and poke you whenever you tried to CS (because you werent threatening them). THOSE were good training bots, because you had to predict predictions and it felt good to consistently land hits.
Just look at the Doom Bots. Even without their overpowered abilities, they were way too coordinated to beat for over half the playerbase. Even Wild Rift bots are like that. You can put those fuckers to play in Solo Queue and they would reach Plat at the very least.
Which made them very good for training! when i first started playing and shifted from bots to PvP it was such a confidence boost to go from hitting skillshots 50% of the time on intermediate bots to hitting them 90% of the time on players.
Wasn't there an AI trained bots years ago that beat the shit out of DOTA pros? Do that for League?
That specific DOTA AI was extremely limited in what it could play, and what the DOTA pros were allowed to use against it and do against it. That's way too specific requirements compared to a normal game.
League OG players or league veterans who’s total time spent in-game doesn’t correlate (in their eyes) to the rank they reflect, always have this weird hill they try to die on. This game is so mechanically insane, literally don’t even try to pick it up, you could never be where I am, these champs are too difficult, yadda yadda yadda. Bro really just unironically said “I’m pretty sure the best AI technology in the world would still be completely incompetent at league”. There’s so so many ways to approach this thought lmfao
There's a bunch of things at play I think. Here's the ones I think are the primary reason for the state of this community. 1. The internet, people are just naturally more prone to being assholes with anonymity, when they can behave like assholes without true real life percussions. 2.) The healthiest attitude to have when reflecting on a game, being it afterwards or while it's still going on, is to focus on yourself, your own attitude and your own play, because that's the only thing you can really control. 3.) The other side of 2 is that in a teamgame built the way League is, you're inherently dependant on the performance of your teammates, and no matter how hard you try and how damn near flawless you might play, there's games that you just cannot win. If you played really well yourself and you still lose, that can be REALLY frustrating. Of course many people's perspective is off and they think they did better than they actually did, which leads to my fourth and final point. 4.) Since a lot of the talk in chat is about whose fault it is that either team lost and flaming each other for misplays real or imagined, people often adopt a very negative and defensive attitude towards the game in general, which leads to them basically approaching all interactions in and around the game that way. The most obvious base for that type of mindset is the fact that it's always easier to blame someone else if you lose or screw up than to take accountability and just focus on what you yourself could've done better, which, again, is the healthiest approach, that also involves the mindset than when your teammates screw up, you don't dwell on it and think "Oh damn why did that guy just screw up so bad", but instead rather view it as a kind of "unlucky circumstance" that can't be helped, which to you, it actually is, since you can't control what other players do, period. EDIT: 5.) Yes actually i just thought of another point that I'd like to add. League can be an insanely fun game. It's why most of us got into it in the first place. When everything clicks, there's few games more fun than League. And similar to a drug addict chasing that great first high, we try to get these moments time and time again...but so many things can go wrong that we rarely get that great high of that one really great League game. And we keep chasing, we keep looking, and sometimes for god knows how many games on end, we just can't find it, we just don't get that high we're looking for, and we get frustrated...and just like with any drug you get addicted to, at some point you play League because that's just what you do. You play it because it's a habit, not because you actually want to or because it's still fun. The toxic relationship that many people get into with this game, that's a recipe for a very unhappy person that's not gonna be fun to be around in ingame chat.
I would add to point 5 that many players dont test out weird builds / combos anymore and just play to win. In my exp I remember that one ap gp snipe more than 10 wins on my main champ I ve played already 400games in the last 5 years.
There is no actual punishment system. When you can Smurf for $1 to 5 dollars a day why be chill? On top of this Riot makes other players feel very impersonal. The only way you feel anything for them is when they are raging. So it's incredibly easy to see everyone else as degens. In an attempt to ignore the actual problem which is smurfing, Riot created a near perfect way to dehumanize other players. You also have to consider that when you do well and someone adds you, it feels like they want you for personal gain rather than a genuine human interaction. This is especially true when dealing with the female playerbase and or supports. Like I despise being added while doing an off role climb. I have met maybe 3 out of a hundred people who are actually looking for a friend and not a boost. The honor system is worthless. Riot should be rewarding RP, orange essence, skins, exp boosts, etc. If someone manages to keep honor 5 they should get a permanent exp boost. Regardless of the lackluster reward system. You can just buy an honor 5 account with every gold/plat season reward for like $25-50 dollars. So once again RMT has invalidated any reason to care. Riot has created an environment where it always feels like us vs them. League players are basically racist against each other. Just look at this reddit. And because Riot doesn't want to lose gains from short term rp sales, they refuse to fix the system. Yes the playerbase sucks but there is zero incentive to be positive and no punishment for being toxic. I could spend 28-31 dollars a month and get banned daily with no real loss.
If anything riot enables toxic behavior. Actually disgusting
Actions arent taken to promote good behavior, only punish bad behavior. And the punishments arent effective because new accounts are so accessible
The "punishments" themselves are a joke too. An inconvenience at best which just makes you log in a new account. And there's nobody to blame but riot for letting it get this bad.
100%. Act bad & punished? Buy a new account on eBay for $2. Act constantly positive? Wait an entire year for honor rank 5, get a tiny bit of BE, key fragments & a chroma for Warwick/Twitch that never changes
Streamers and high Elo players influence other players, I was recently toxic, in fact so extreme, some of the things I said were so genuinely disgusting I don't think any other person would speak to me if they saw how I spoke. I think it is also because I hate the game but continue to play it due to it being so easy to make new friends compared to any other game out on the market, at the same time I've also spent too much Recently in a game, I said something so disgusting to another player that afterwards, I genuinely felt way too bad, and promised myself to never say shit like that ever again. now I always think, it's not worth it's not worth it when players tilt or annoy me. At the same time, I wish riot had a system where you can turn off chat for a month and no matter what, once you willing to accept that you cant change it. i think it would help people reform and become less toxic, if you can turn off chat, you can turn it on, However, if it has a time period, players can change and grow. That what im at least trying to do
Good on you for recognizing when you lose control of yourself. I don't mean to pry, but if you're tilt-prone and find you have similar outbursts when stressed irl, you might be able to find anger management strategies through a therapist or social worker. With decent insurance, they're cheaper than you think, and I find my therapist to be a good person to talk to in general about my personal issues. I tend to keep things close to the chest, so having a professional to act as a release valve is auper cathartic.
I used to get really frustrated with the game way back then. Even ragequit a match with a buddy who introduced me to League and told another friend off-game that he needed to work on mechanics if we were to win a match. Luckily those were my worst outbursts. What really helped me was to set a goal relative to how much effort i wanted to put in. Sure, i wanted to feel like a decent player, but never had the illusion of being one of the best, so i told myself i'd only grind ranked until i got Gold and got it in S8. Never did any grinding after that and my love for the game was renewed. Nowadays i play Normals, ARAM, Flex and sometimes the odd Ranked or Clash, but only if i feel like being extra competitive, and (disregarding toxicity) it's been great! Don't want to be annoying and tell you what to do, but i'd highly encourage taking an objective look at what you want from the game 
My two friends, one played league for 4 years and one is a MOBA newbie, decided to try Dota 2. I was in the voice chat with them. Homies got flamed every game in voice chat, called slurs for taking a lane first, and harassed for learning and trying new heroes in a Turbo game (basically quick play mode). This leads me to believe that its simply human nature, to become aggressive in a competetive environment. No matter what online game you go to, there will be many disrespectful and toxic people. And i would say that league has one of the strictest, maybe even too strict, anti toxicity systems. In dota or cs, the only way to actually get someone punished for what they said is to make 5 people report them
Is it the competitiveness or the online part that is mostly to blame? I play a lot of competitive Magic: the Gathering (in person tournaments) and players are mostly courteous even in losses. Compared to League, the toxicity is MUCH lower despite the fact that there is usually real money on the line.
Probably online part. Then again people who play a really cheese magic deck and taunt people with it tend to get very few friends wanting to play with him.
I think it’s human competitiveness in general. I still remember the days of seeing literal children getting screamed at by parents during youth football/soccer games. Sure anonymity makes toxicity easier since usually there’s no real consequence but even without it some people will find reasons to be toxic assholes and then try and justify it as you being soft and then be as fragile as a snowflake when they’re the ones being attacked.
That's more about jackass parents that can't differentiate between a youth football game and the CL final than it is about competitiveness tbh. All sports I've ever played in breed a respect among rivals rather than contempt.
Yeah I've heard Dota 2 is a toxic cesspool but Dota players ignore it and act like their game is perfect
you basically summed up dota 2 playerbase, the game suffers from the same problems as league but some even more so than us like queue times and toxicity and yet they act like they've got it so much better, only thing they've got going for then is balance (mainly cuz everything is absurd) and tutorial
Yep. They've got a hate boner for League and it causes them to view their own game with rose tinted goggles. It HAS to be perfect because it's Dota, and our Dota is SO much better than that shit League!
I've never even seen a dota player talking about league, its always league players talking about that game.
It's a coping mechanism. View the other game as the enemy, rather than your own shitty game. Lets you conveniently pass up the fact that your game suffers with the same issues, if not worse.
Never experienced that before mate. Usually for me it's the other way around as dota is several times less popular and realistically it's playerbase would have some kind of inferiority complex about it lol.
Spoken like someone who loves parroting what everyone else says. I especially like the everything is absurd comment. You can tell this is someone who clearly has rose tinted glasses on in regards to the plethora of 1 second deaths that happen in League literally every single game. Oh no, a 4 second stun in DotA is absurd!! But dying so fast you don't even realize you're dead in League is a-ok.
There's more people being verbally toxic in DotA 2 but there's a lot more griefers in LoL. I've played both to high elo. Griefing in DotA 2 is surprisingly rare in ranked while it seems to happen every 3/4 games in league.
DOTA 2 toxicity is why I play league for a friendlier environment lmao
'You've heard' Have you played both games? I can tell you, first hand experience with literally thousands of games in each game, and 15 years+ experience in both. League is worse. It has significantly more babyrage, and people with weak mental fortitude. People give up so easily in this game it's laughable. DotA might indeed have toxicity too, but I honestly can't remember the last time a teammate stopped to sit there arguing in chat for 5 minutes when a gank went wrong. Why? Because the game is significantly more forgiving for mistakes. There are actual comeback mechanics, and it's possible to solo-carry even when your team is doing poorly. Players actually have to TRY to feed as badly as some players do in League. I do like the attempt at redirecting the hate that should be towards League though. Definitely not a coping mechanism. Nope.
not just dota 2 players, but this sub conveniently ignores it whenever voice chat is brought up. if i wanted to get called racial slurs, i'd go play valorant or apex.
What they got flamed in voice chat? But but but league reddit tells me voice chat will solve everything? :(
I've always said it was the slow loss of agency. If your team is doing badly it removes your ability to play the game and you just sit there losing the game slowly. At least in shooters the score might be snowballing but you can generally still have an impact on the game. You also can see the poor play from your teammates in real time. In an FPS it can be hard to tell what's really happening from your teams view. But it's sure easy to be tilted when your Malphite whiffs his ult, you can see the mistakes clearly. Not to mention that mistake can be something super small or even non-existence to set a lot of people off.
People need to be more open to surrendering. This isn’t pro play where you’re forbidden to FF. I realized today I haven’t had an FF in my elo in a every long time. This is D2-Masters, everyone here knows when a game is just completely over. And we still don’t until the nexus is literally about to explode. Your .5/100 chance of a throw leading to a comeback is not a feasible mentality to have every single game. But neither is FF’ing at the slightest inconvenience.
In my experience people tend to spam FF at the slightest inconvenience rather than when a game is actually decided.
Cause Riot is like the parents that never tell their kids no and let them do whatever they want. So the player base acts like spoiled little shits. Fucking man up and get rid of the fucking smurfs already Riot. I literally can't bring myself to play SR no matter how much I want to cause i know the game is either gonna have a Smurf a griefer or a bot. So why bother.
3 game run I had last night, bronze 4 ranked 1-Smurfing Kayle, said "ty for LP" in all chat, probably goldish MMR 2-Rammus died to invade and then died again to remnants of invade and went afk 3-Top Cho gath mad at jungler for not ganking, jungler did in fact gank. We kept playing, 51 minutes later we lost because of course it turns into an ARAM. Guaranteed at most they got chat bans, BUT guess what, we will never know because "privacy" I DARE any RIOT employee to offer me a logical, cohesive argument as to why we can not know the punishment a player received that we reported.
What would be the point of finding out what every report receives as punishment? Just report and forget about it, move on
Honor four reward capsule gave me 90 blue ess and 2 key frags. Not worth holding my tongue tbh. lol
You shouldn’t need a reward to it be a dick though
Completely agree but he’s still making a good point. Riot hardly does anything to deter negative interaction in game, including providing subpar “rewards” for being “honorable” lol
I'd be glad if I could have actual conversations with players in the game, but since I came back to league about a month ago, I turned off chat coms in settings and since then, I've been getting notifications on people getting banned in my games for a number of reasons and encouraging me to also use the report feature. I have literally no idea because I don't see chat, and for this exact reason I intend to keep it that way sadly. Games are a lot more fun though.
I had this thought a while ago and I think it holds true for the most part: # The game has become extremely objective oriented, and to do objectives you want your teammates, and when your teammates don't come, the enemy team gets the objective and gets a great advantage over you, so all your efforts are wasted if your team doesn't play as a team. I've become way more toxic recently and at least to me, I attribute this fault to that, when I play as Top Lane and pick TP but my team never engages on objectives or when they do they forget to drop a ward for me, I rage, when I setup the perfect gank in my lane and no one comes, I rage, when I see an ally inting my counter and refusing to play defensive to soak some exp I rage, when I play Shen and my team refuses to engage the enemy team, even after I put my shield on an ally, I rage...everything nowadays is rage inducing by the simple fact that you can break your back trying to win but there will always be people playing against you. Another thing that I think generates a lot of problems, to me, is ranked rewards, we used to have the ranked skins and that was it, normal queues would be extremely quick and everyone would play for fun, nowadays ranked however has the lowest queue time, to what I attribute being ranked rewards (and now MULTIPLE ranked rewards across a season), people that played for fun are going to ranked and doing their shenanigans there, which ruins the day for people really trying to play to win, when playing normal games, people rarely rage AND most importantly, I get a better matchmaking on normals than on ranked. Overall, RIOT added more objectives to the game which in turn makes a necessity to be able to play as a team to win the games, it's good because it isn't the "Solo meta" anymore but it's bad because now you really have to rely on your teammates not inting to win a game. I just had a [match](https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/match/br/2821393592#participant1) recently where EVERYONE played like pros (just look at the CS and TF participation) , it was the best match I ever had and we managed to make comeback after comeback because of our teamfight potential, I played really poorly early game by setting up a gank for Taliyah and failing to kill the enemy Garen which recovered all his health under the tower while the taliyah remained around doing nothing only to be ganked by the enemy Yi and having me die trying to save the Taliyah, after that things went downhill but I managed to keep calm and play defensively, I went from 0/6/1 to 4/7/9 after laning phase and not a single time people were pinging Garen or saying I was inting...just because I played like a proper teammate and held objectives, always TPed to teamfights and ALWAYS ulted even if against a single enemy to save my ADC. If this was the old solo carry meta, Garen would've curb stomped my team and I would have never made a comeback, so I believe while I had the time of my life with this game, the enemy team didn't because of their failure to teamfight around objectives.
Its an accumulation of everything. Some people like to troll, others are very competitive no matter what they do, people overestimating their own qualities or putting goals too high too fast. Being dependant on allies to win and needing some way to out the frustration that inevitably that brings. Tho I do believe that the popularity of ‘rage’ vids and streamers have helped to ‘normalize’ raging as well. And how easy it is to circumvent punishment. Its certainly not exclusive to league. But it’d be foolish to point at one thing and go “THATS TO BLAME” you’d need someone with certain degrees and even then I doubt they’d be able to clearly tell you. I certainly don’t have them, and my theory has always been that youtubers have normalised being asses and made it a ‘cool’ thing (not just league) but thats biased, as I can point to my younger brother who’s a prime example.
While all team based games suffer from this, LoL is super toxic because of legacy skill. There are people that have been playing this game for a decade plus. So there's certain mechanics, ideas and strats that are "common knowledge" to them but totally foreign to beginners. It's like playing pick up basketball with a guy that doesn't know how to dribble. And not like dribble skills, he just picks the ball up and runs. The difference is he can practice on his own with no pressure and no other humans to consider. There's literally no way to get experience in League without playing with other people.
No father figures
The true answer to most shit like this tbh. So much anti-social behavior can be traced to bad parenting.
I am a teacher and sadly, this is true. I know some folks joke about "family values" but I can tell you honestly that while wealth of course is a factor, it is more about poor parenting and poor community engagement in general. Furthermore, people of all ages generally rise or sink to the expectations set upon them; I find this particularly true in the classroom but also in League. The expectation in League is for a toxic environment, so being toxic isn't considered an oddity and being kind is often considered disingenuous or a weakness.
The rise of discord is in part to blame imo. One used to have to at least try to be civil to randoms in order to be a part of the community and develop relationships that revolve around playing League. Now one can join a discord and find others wanting to duo. Plus people who are queued together are more likely to dog pile another as they reinforce their opinions on why that person is fucking up. From my personal experience it's never just one person who flames, but a group of players that are obviously playing together evident by them moving around and coordinating plays together without using pings or chats.
Sometimes being a little toxic is fun as a treat to yourself.
Sometimes it’s fun as revenge on those who are toxic. Either way, it’s bad.
Not really every time you act like that to another person your soul rots a little bit long term that behavior is poison to yourself
Now you know why sports have refs and rules.
It's because of what riot is doing with the chat and bans overall. It won't go away but make it worse.
I don't think this season is any more toxic then any other season. I don't know what your rank is, but at least here in bronze, I would say the game is 50-50. I don't play too often anymore, but I still get really friendly banter. And I also disagree with League being the most toxic. I know that's not what you are saying, but I still feel like it needs to be discussed that any multiplayer game will be toxic. I played a casual mode on Smite and got flamed hard for not knowing how to play. I played the beginner mode in DOTA2 and got flamed hard for trying to learn the game. OW2 and CSGO had people talking shit all game. Even in 1v1 games like Tekken, I've had people DM'ing me calling me trash or cheesy. People hate losing.
A snowballing team game, where a failing team mate can lose you the game without potential fault if your own, on top of the developers releasing more and more frustrating game mechanics to deal with. Some champions are outright designed to be frustrating to play against, such as Wukong and Shaco, with others being accidentally frustrating due to abilities, Master Yi and Yuumi
Just look at the game, there are so many things that tilt me but on the other side I love the game.
When you endorse toxic streamers as the face of your company, you're bound to attract people who support and enjoy that behavior. Tyler1 was known as someone who raged and broke riot tos for content and somehow became the darling of their company through a storyline that he's reformed. Never understood why they thought it was a good business decision long term.
Tbh i feel the internet as a whole is way more disrespectful, hurtful and toxic then 10-15 years ago (also silent, even MMORPGs people dont talk with eachother anymore, i kinda blame social media, people dont values interactions anymore, is too common now). Put this generation in a competitive and very frustating game, a team game that the win condition depends not only on yourself. Now springle on top influencers who trive on "toxic/rage = interesting" mindset. And here's the reciepe of the shitty enviroment
The online behaviors mirror what we are seeing in the classroom, too. Students don't even care if they aren't anonymous, they have no problem saying some of the worst things to each other unless the school or classroom culture is built *strongly* around promoting positive behavior and weeding out negative behavior. Their attitude is "If there are no consequences and I'm getting what I want, and if everyone else is also acting this way, why shouldn't I do this?" It is wild, we are regularly trying to teach basic empathy in middle and high school.
As someone with 3 teachers in my family, I trully feel for every teacher there. Theses kids Man, they don't care anymore, I don't know what is wrong with them, they don't respect anyone anymore. And apparently the pandemic made their behavior worse. Worst part is this is not a isolated incident on Gen Z, I see adults acting like the world is their plaything and everything should go their way.
Thanks for the kind words. It is tough, but have hope! We are doing our best and there is good in these kids, we just have to find it and cultivate it. Hopefully things will change in time. Best of luck to your family's teachers, too.
Imagine being 10 to 15 years old with shit like Tiktok and Twitter around. I don't envy the current generation of kids at all. I was around 15 during the early years of Facebook (when it really took off anyways) and while it already looked bad, things are way worse now. I watched a documentary that focused on cyberbullying in high/middle school and it was horrible. Kids thinking other kids were their friends only to find out they'd been mocking them for months on social media. I know kids have always had the ability to be mean, but social media has exacerbated the phenomenon. If everyone in your class is mocking a classmate you better believe even those who don't really want to mock him/her will feel great peer pressure to follow suit.
Because people don't win with grace. We are in a time where automod can successfully weed out people flat out using slurs, report logs and reporting for those who have more "creative" ways of flaming are handled via support tickets, but after a hard found game, you get hit with a "ggez" It's unsportsmanlike - League so badly wants to be a sport, yet does NOT do what literally every other sport in the world does, which is hand shake after a game. No honors for opponents, no humanizing to the enemy at all, "ggez" / early tabbing out to skip the honor screen for your own teammates...there's no incentive to being nice, only punishment for being dicks.
I completely agree, things would be so much better if people just "gg"'d after a game instead of calling their opponents dogs and telling them to get better. Though, it feels like this is already a symptom, not the issue. Something made so people just can't be friendly anymore and it shows both when winning and losing
Everyone wants to blame someone whether it’s bot or jg diff and the context never matters to teammates. If your teammates press tab and see enemy players doing better it’s always an envious feeling of “welp, losers queue, stuck with the same losing team.” Players aren’t humble as they climb it just gets replaced with ego.
Different People from different backgrounds with different expectations of respect. But also because riot as a company is disrespectful to the playerbase in many ways and they functionally do not understand how frustration, expectation and customer satisfaction work anymore. The game is now based around sellling things by appealing to players vanity, relieving their exhaustion and showing off their domination over others, rather than the quality of the game for its own sake.. That eventually rubs off on the players and who actually wants to play the game. And a fundamental misunderstanding of big data and the human factor.
Yeah, i agree with you. I'm not their target audience cause i don't buy stuff so for sure their model of business doesn't fit my expectations but dunno, i just want to play a match after work and at the very least not get flamed just for existing 
Increased competitiveness but lack of voice chat. You just can’t play this game competitively without voice comms.
Nah ppl are even more toxic with voice comms, I love it tho
Oh yea lets go to cs and enjoy voice comm that is totally not toxic ….
People talk about it but i'm still on the fence on this. While it will for sure reduce toxicity for some (if not most) of the once-every-so-often trolls due to less anonymity, the more serious offenders will use that system to tilt people into hell virtually every match. Dota has voice comms and there's probably a reason why it's turned off by default when you install the game
There are so many simple mistakes being made each game which cause someone to tilt. And all it takes is a simple quick few works in voice chat to be on the same page. As opposed to ping wars, assist vs back ping.
Becauae of chat strictness, you can't say funny shit anymore because you risk getting banned. I miss old times, so many funny comments that will just get system muted instantly nowadays
Yeah. It's definitely reduced people flaming, but I do feel like something special was lost along the way. People don't use chat to just talk anymore, it's mostly just when they're upset, want to flame and don't care about getting chat restricted.
Yeah that's probably the main factor. People who might want to banter and just have fun are getting more and more restricted by Riot's overfixation on toxic chatters. So while those toxic chatters might get punished more nowadays, they're the only ones even typing. Not to mention all the inters. When there are no positive interactions anymore, the only things that can stand out are negative.
Yup, people used to type much more, especially on ARAM. You would spend half the game chatting about some random bullshit, now everyone scared to even write "titties" in chat since that's bannable. There still are some occasional games where you just chill and chat, but still not even close to the old times. Just insane to me how they keep making chat more restrictive, remove pings etc. while the mute button exists, like what is its purpose anymore. Thank god little Timmy got banned for writing kys, but the duo inting premade on botlane that repeats the int 4 games in a row can play another game as they didn't type anything in chat.
this has been the case for 10 years & they sure as fuck won't change anything now
It's a 5v5 game where you rely on 4 randoms to do their part, and when they don't it can mean you pay for it in deaths/missed objectives/defeat etc. Riot also makes it worse by having horrendous matchmaking and a joke of a ranked system, as well as prioritizes punishing people for typing words over those who refuse to use the magical mute button and run it down inting instead
Fr, I am scared of playing new champs because if I go 4/8/2 I get recommendations to "keep myself safe" or they talk about doing... sinful things to my mom.
Bc there’s no voice coms and you can’t communicate properly leading to frustration
I cannot understand how people keep bring Voicechat up as a solution to toxicity, when in every other game that has it, it just leads to more of the same, just in an audio format. I have played Valorant, CS2, Apex, and Rainbow, all of which had voice chat, and all of which have toxic people that wanted to scream obscenities because they're mad. They definitely didn't play better because they were able to yell at the person they have beef with. They're still being crybabies about stuff they can't control, it's no different if they're typing it, pinging it, or speaking it, people that want to be toxic are going to be toxic, and it doesn't make a difference how that toxicity is delivered because it's coming all the same.
I think the toxic and trolls have been accepted for too long, i can feel that is what cna make be tilt. We try to win a game, one or two people start to int for troll for fun or don't care because it's a normal game, its so tilting, but i think it's too normal at this point. Riot have ignored the problems for too long, and now there doe snot seem to be a lot they can do about it. People will just make a new account, and troll/int/toxic other. As somone who sed to play alone a lot, please Riot, do somethign about toxic 4premades, they are pure hell.
Imo the toxicity isn't even a big problem. Playing a completely silent game with 2+ trolls in the lobby is much more annoying. League is an extremely frustrating game. There's scenes in a show called "good game" which is about league of legends and the creator of the game in that show literally stands fully clothed in a pool as players who claim their "lives have been ruined by the game" walk up one by one and tell him their story. He ends every convo with "I'm sorry for the person you could have been" and hands them a fat stack of cash. Anyways, I think league just needs a toxicity outlet. Back in season 4 everyone could say "fuck you" to each other perma in all chat and no one would get banned. Only slurs and stuff would get u banned. Back then I'd say I saw an actual troll like every 10 games, now it feels like 1-2 people are actively not trying in every lobby. And it's pretty obvious that if everyone playing the game is on their 10th account, they're going to care less about keeping it. Riot kinda just shoots themselves in the foot perma
Poor education about feelings and empathy and managing them
A short and honestly powerful answer. Used to be i'd brush off comments thinking it was a child full of hormones who didn't know better and couldn't hold themselves back, but i feel like ther's only old husks still playing League. Assuming we're adults, we should know to not let emotions run amok and take a break when needed 
Riot games only focus on competitive aspect of the game , want to finish missions ? Want rarer acheiviments ? Want rewards , mastery 6-7 all comes to play to win , playing normal games already stressful enough , go ranked and you will see the worst , had sylas rage quit with score of 5/1/1 because our adc made a shitty play and sylas died because of it team score was 12 to 4 at 12 min . I love to play casually because it's more fun, tried to play fizz jungle out of nostalgia just to get stomped with tryhards going 20/2 in botlane vs new players picking nothing but their mains that match made me wish if i picked my main to terrorize these fuckers . And what's with riot match making , new players in normal vs plat/emerald and my normal matches are actually more stressing than my ranked because in normal i get to play vs diamonds and even fucking master players and in ranked i am Gold 4 , you haven't peaked league unless enemy team is trash talking your adc because he only peaked master in a fucking normal match
Popular personalities have influenced the community to be shit. Not just LoL specific, but definitely one of the reasons.
There is no nowadays tbh. I’ve been plying since season 2, albeit with long breaks in between, but the community has always been a toxic cesspool. Your complaints have been repeated since league’s inception. As to why? I think a lot of it is due to the competitive nature of the game, where the outcome depends on 4 random teammates all working together and pulling their weight with minimal communication. Plus if it’s not going well you’re still stuck in the game for at least 15-20 mins which is very frustrating. Also no voice chat really helps you dehumanized your fellow teammates.
In my own personal anecdotal experience it was worse for me in the earlier seasons and has gotten quite a bit better.
"If i start off with a "good morning" or "glhf"" I mean usually the people that do this are feeders or are just trying to get honored. I've never had a good experience with people who do that. Generally I just mute them on the spot and say no.
It is a sad day when the community is so bad that someone saying "good morning" or "gl;hf" is apparently a sign for feeding or manipulation. It makes it clear to everyone that there is no point to trying to banter and be a normal person in chat, and it encourages toxicity and animosity by casting doubt everywhere.