The League of Legends Community

[SoulShatter]

I have been playing a lot of League of Legends lately and wanted to talk about the game as well as its community. As you might see from some of my previous blogs, I am someone who believes in treating others with respect. Win or lose, Enemy or Ally, Friend or stranger, I will show you the same amount of respect online as I would anyone else in person. I am not here to push my personal ethic on anyone, but to take a look into the game League of Legends, and how players interact with each other.

... Read the full article...

[Demolition]

I usually just ignore players like that as argueing with them makes both players perform less then optimal. I do tend to rage sometimes myself so I cant play completely innocent.

I find the biggest reason I rage is when I see someone do something I learned a long time ago not to do. Its more of me expecting others to play with my experience(I have over 1200 games under my belt now) when most players don't even have half of that in normals so what I try and do is just realize this fact and remind myself of it and just sigh and go on with the game.

I agree its no fun to get yelled at so I try myself to stay away from doing it.

[Loopah]

http://www.smilorama.com/guide-to-ar...-the-internet/

[Tivia]

Since I have a fairly broad spectrum of communities I have been involved with, I will answer some of your questions.

How bad is the FPS community? Well it varies from absolute bottom of the cesspool to mild shit talk. Please note that at no point ever includes respectful.

League of legends from what I have experienced and see, falls somewhere in the middle of that pack. Honestly if you think they are bad, don't play counter strike or halo especially. Now consoles tend to be far worse then PC when it comes to trash talking. Mostly because consoles have a larger support for "Public" voice, while PC has traditionally been mainly limited to private voice such as ventrilo. Most trash talk in the PC world had to be typed for years and as such when you are talking about games where a split second means the difference between winning and losing, it tempers it some. As the PC world is offering more and more public voice options however, the vulgarity in the PC shooter world is rapidly increasing.

The simple fact of the matter is, People are complete and total assholes. I will be honest, I am among them. I have always been highly competitive and if someone on my team is being fucking stupid, I have never had any compunctions about telling them as much. Now to be fair, I generally try to help first before resorting to the insults. However in the last few years I have noticed a trend of open hostility to any form of criticism, even if it is respectful and intended to help improve that player. The backlash of this of course is it forces players like me to lean more to assuming that the "bad" player is an ingrate and isn't going to listen anyhow and that it will be just easier to berate them until they leave.

The other problem that causes this to be more of a problem than it was in the past is a concerted effort to make games more casual friendly. Now while this isn't a bad thing, the attempts that many developers in the FPS world are making at "evening" the playing field and forcing top tier players to play side by side with the casuals are throwing gas on the fire. The reality is, this is a terrible idea and the quicker devs abandon this practice, the better the community will become. If I go back in time to games just 10 years ago, you find a much bigger learning curve to play but you also find a nicer community. Part of this is because the really terrible players got weeded out quickly and you could generally assume that you would get a good competitive match. The problem with this is that people quit the game, or didn't buy it and devs lost out on money. There needs to be a middle ground and in most games there is not one. Tolerance is not a trait that most competition oriented gamers tend to have. They are there to win and anyone getting in their way of that goal is going to be treated with disdain or outright hostility.

It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding between the two groups.

Competition players no matter the game are thinking of the most efficient way to win the game. They aren't playing the game for the fun of the game, the fun comes with victory. Anything else, is not fun.

Casual players are just looking to play and have fun.

These two different mindsets do not and will never get along. Mixing these two groups of players has always proven volatile. However as games go more mainstream there is more and more mixing of these groups, which naturally results in more hostility. Now I am generalizing as there are exceptions to those two rules. I know many very competitive players that are extremely well mannered. They are the exception, not the rule however.

The next problem comes from achievement systems. Now before you rage that I am just being a hater, hear me out.

Previous to achievement systems, people played games for 2 reasons; To improve at the game, or to have fun. Post achievements threw in a third reason, to chase achievements.

Now that sounds benign, unfortunately it is not. You see the achievement chasers have proven to be even more openly hostile than competitive players. The reason is that achievement chasers are modifying their gameplay specifically to minimize the time needed to get that achievement. Simply put, achievement systems encourage douchebag behavior. Very few "achievements" are accomplished by simply becoming good at the game. Most require you to go out of your way and do something that likely will disrupt the gameplay of those surrounding the chaser. Couple this with a few competitive players who are trying to win the game and all it takes is 1 or 2 achievement chasers on the deal causing the team to lose to turn an already bad situation into open war.

Honestly, achievements are in my opinion the number 1 reason for why hostility has gotten as bad as it has. One need only to look back on when achievements first started being implemented and have been generally involved in online gaming before and after to see a very noticeable trend. Now it could of course be pure coincidence, but usually if it looks like a duck it is a duck.

After all is said and done, what is the middle ground? Well honestly nothing is going to improve so long as achievements exist. So as long as devs insist on putting these in multi-player games, I see no point in attempting to change anything else. Achievements for those that care about them, should be restricted to the single player portion of games. Stats tracking is more than ample for anything else. Want to know if you are improving? Your KDR will tell you all you need to know. Want a better KDR? Get better at the game.

Additionally strides need to be taken to keep high caliber players off the same servers as low caliber. They are either there to be a douchebag and farm points off low skill players or they are just going to be badmouthing anyone who they deem inferior. This of course won't eliminate the problem, but it will help curb it.