League of Legends has been a major catalyst in the rise of eSports, garnering millions of players, followers, casual content creators, and fueling many professional careers. With a community so large and globally recognized, there are bound to be a large variety of people you can meet.

In addition to its strong global presence, the game boasts one of the most popular ranking systems (the Bronze to Challenger hierarchy), which other games followed suit with their own twists. The existence of a highly competitive ranking system implies the desire for each player to win. Realistically, for every win someone gets, there is an equivalent loss for someone else.

The competition in the solo queue ladder is tight, and many players desire to climb up to the higher echelons like Diamond and Master Tiers. During the climb, it’s inevitable for some people to lash out at any players that decrease their chances of winning, especially in the form of trash talk and inappropriate behavior.

Unfortunately, these behaviors have been running amok since League’s existence in 2010. So why has it become a hot topic today?

Voyboy’s Message

League of Legends veteran Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani recently posted a Youtube video entitled “The Sad State of League Solo Q.” In this video essay, he shares his disappointment on ranked play due to a number of factors that collectively ruin the player experience.

His primary standpoint is that the game has so many instances consisting of game-ruining behavior that are left unpunished, that lead the general playerbase and dedicated content creators to feel discouraged to continue playing the game that they love.

He emphasizes the fact that no one is being punished for ruining games, even at the most basic offenses such as inappropriate language. People can swear and trash talk all they want, and they are able to get away scot-free most of the time, all because Riot has not ever taken the time to discuss the elephant in the room.

Overall, his thoughts involved the many concerned players and content creators who want to enjoy the game they built their lives around, but the toxicity is too much for them to handle, and it just feels bad to even attempt to start a game where toxicity is prevalent even at champion select.

Riot’s Response

Two days later, the company finally broke their silence as Riot’s Meddler released a blog titled ‘Quick LoL Thoughts on game-ruining behavior’. In this piece, he recognizes the existence of players that intentionally ruin games through different means, defining them across a spectrum of behavior and highlighted how streamers are particularly affected.

Meddler laid down Riot Games’ roadmap for improving the quality of games from as soon as possible to the foreseeable future.

Firstly, they plan to improve report feedback as soon as possible. If you report 10 people across 10 games, you often get none, one, or two report feedbacks out of 10 reports. They are adjusting this by bumping up the criteria for successful punishments. You may now get report feedback after several games since you reported a player, which helps you know if you did your job as a responsible player and incentivize proper reporting.

Next, they are planning to add champion select reporting and muting in the short term. Disruptive players in this scenario tend to be those who hostage lobbies by picking a champ that is clearly not meant for the role, or sabotaging the draft if they see their bad ally from a previous game.

Then, they want to recalibrate the automated system that detects intentional feeding and relevant behavior in the moderate term. Back then, they turned from a jury system named the Tribunal into a more automated reporting system and letting the AI learn and distinguish who are intentionally ruining games and who are simply having a bad game.

Their plan to recalibrate involves turning up the criteria for these types of bad behavior, at the risk of raising the chances of false positive punishments (punishments dealt to players who were detected to have game-ruining behavior, but were actually not.) This seems highly technical and hard to pin down, given the spectrum of behavior in League. Riot has to properly set up the parameters to accurately punish bad players than make false positive bans.

Concluding Thoughts

I consider myself as a League veteran, who played at the dawn of League of Legends in Garena servers (starting in Season 2.) I’ve played games from different rankings since the ELO system was a thing, experiencing all sorts of environments and recognized many kinds of mindsets.

Based on my years of experience, I fully agree with Voyboy’s points that League has primarily been less fun to play due to the sheer amount of toxicity and disrespect. What kept me to play and play all these years was the constant drive for improving my craft as a player, and eventually be capable enough to match with the best players in the region.

Toxicity is a huge factor in pulling players away from competition because with consistent ruined games and dodges simply to find a decent game, they essentially spend more time not playing the actual game on the Rift. The mindset would be something like “What’s the point?” because people are not taking the game seriously enough.

Competition cannot thrive in League of Legends if either team is not taking it seriously. Even a single player can basically ruin the experience of four others in a team. This also holds true for other MOBAs and competitive games.

What are your thoughts on the current state of solo queue? Are you also a victim of game-ruining behavior? Do you believe Riot and other publishers can finally address the long-standing issue of toxicity?