League of Legends (LoL) General Chat Thread

vinnyg

Seifer wrote: »

To be fair to Riot, as someone who has played since beta the tribunal has done a lot of good things. I very rarely, if ever, run into actual trolls i.e. people deliberately trying to lose the game for the team, anymore.
What you I do run into a lot are people doing things in a game that I perceive to be obviously very stupid. And these stupid things cause you to lose games so it feels like you're being trolled even if there was no malice intended. There isn't really anyway to fix that because one team always has to lose and it's usually going to come from someone making a mistake.

Ya maybe i worded my earlier post poorly. I agree that encountering people that are actually trying to lose games on purpose has become a much more rare thing and a dig at riot was maybe a bit much. I just always feel that there are so many players in the community with bad attitudes in general. I mean i've been on winning teams where i hated the people i was playing with. For example guys raging over the smallest things going wrong. I really dont mind people on my team making mistakes as far as i'm concerned its a game at the end of the day its the level of abuse that is dished out towards said players. I played a game yesterday where an adc abused his support for the entire game over small errors even though they were owning their lane. Then he went on to abuse our jungle for not ganking enough. Nothing wrong with constructive criticism within a team but there is an attitude i dont like where people feel the need to get very abusive to get the point across. i suppose there is nothing riot can ever do to change peoples attitudes.

Sycopat

vinnyg wrote: »

I hear you. While i love this game i very rarely play unless one or two people i know are up for a game. The lol community can be so frustrating, the whole ribbon reward scheme for good team play etc was a feeble effort from riot to sort this problem it worked for like week then nobody cared about ribbons. Can anyone see a solution for this? I know there will always be trolls in any online game but this game is on a different level from anything i've experienced.

I've mentioned before that I don't believe the community is truly worse than that in other games (maybe not here, but that's my view) but I can understand why it is perceived that way, even (perhaps especially) by it's players.

Which is a roundabout way of agreeing with you and disagreeing with you at the same time, but I doubt anyone wants to hear my speculations on the factors that make the LoL community the way it is.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how we can discuss solutions without discussing those factors, so apologies if this gets long winded. feel free to ignore it.

Contributing factors I see are :
LoL is free, losing an account means nothing unless you've spent money on it, which is up to you.
LoL is popular: With popularity comes kids, casuals, and trolls. The more popular a game is, the smaller is the proportion of it that is made up of your particular desired definition of "gamer". Which ties in neatly with:

Elitism in games:The old MMO adage of anyone who plays less than you is a casual and anyone who plays more is a no-lifer is proof enough that elitism in games has been around for a long time. How often do we see things like Bronze scrub, silver scrub, gold scrub etc.? This is an old problem that no game has been able to deal with successfully so far.

People don't understand the maths behind it: People rage about being in a different division to their team mates, despite it being common knowledge that matchmaking makes teams based on equality of ability across teams. Their your team mates because that's the team mate you deserve. If your team mates are truly significantly worse than you, it's to handicap you.

LoL doesn't reward you for nothing: An absolutely average player in terms of skill vascillates between bronze 1 or silver 5. The bronze division alone makes up almost 50% of the playerbase. An infographic here has the breakdown. What jumps out to me is that that is not a normal distribution, it looks like a poisson distribution. Which tells me Riot wants to make the higher tiers difficult to attain.

This tells me something very interesting: Being stuck in bronze does not mean you're terrible at this game, it just means you're not good at it. Just getting out of bronze means you're pretty good at this game. Getting into gold means you are very good at this game. Getting into platinum puts you into the top 2.5% of all players. A small enough proportion that you can be completely ignored when talking about the 'average lol player'.

In my experience there are a lot of average gamers I know who would not be too happy with acknowledging that they're not good enough at video games to deserve a silver or a gold star in video games. Particularly younger gamers who are accustomed to being able to unlock everything and get every reward by just playing lots.

Which ties in with the last factor I think exists:
Anti-social male gamer syndrome: First up, I don't think gamers are anti-social. I'm not talking about social skills here. I'm talking about team work skills. I do think gamers have poor team work skills. Hell we're a self-selecting group that prefers sitting in a room playing video games to getting out and playing team sports. It's not a massive cognitive leap.

And I think most of these factors exist in lots of online games, which is why I don't see LoL's community as "worse". What I see is MOBA's as a genre rewarding good teamwork more than just about any other genre at the non-professional level. LoL in particular because of the relative simplicity of it's mechanics.
It's what makes LoL easy to learn and difficult to master, and it's why there is such a rigid meta in solo queue: As compensation for the players being poor team players.
It's why players who can absolutely mechanically dominate a game and become massively fed and build a huge gold advantage can lose the game because they didn't help the lane that was losing when it needed help, didn't remind their team mates to peel for them in team fights.
A lot of gamers lack the listening or communicating skills to understand that if you lose a game because you didn't listen, or you didn't communicate effectively, it's just as much your fault as it is the guy your raging at for feeding or not having enough cs. Hell a lot of them don't understand that raging, flaming and being an asshole in game is ineffective communication and through the magic of cognitive dissonance, convince themselves that these things are not only okay to do, but effective communication and that their problem with communication is everybody elses problem with listening.

If I was thinking of a way to improve player behaviour these are factors I would take into account.

The honour system and tribunal are a very carrot and stick approach to these issues. Unfortunately the carrot is small and so is the stick and I think they gloss over many nuances of the issue. The priming being done currently is interesting, but I don't think it's going to be effective on it's own.

The most important one to tackle is I think, anti-social male gamer syndrome.
Honestly, I think a tutorial that places more emphasis on effective communication could be a really good place to start. Probably an entirely new tutorial system. I like Dota 2's system of staged introduction to the different aspects of the game, but I think more can be done even there to introduce the communication aspects.

A campaign to raise player awareness of the importance of communication would be a second place to start and arguably riot already do this. Except the player behaviour teams communications tend to focus imo on describing negative behaviours and ways to avoid them rather than promoting positive ones.

Anyway. That's long enough and has enough in it that it could probably have started five threads.

TLDR: the communities bad at LoL because they don't spend enough time playing sports and talking to girls.

Kold

So... I have 6300ip and really ought to invest in a support.

Leona/Thresh/Blitz are all my kind of support champs, the first and last I actually can play to a decent level but... Thresh op.

vinnyg

you make some good points Sycopat. I know we are all aware of the "Anti-social male gamer syndrome" that is existent in all manner of online games but i really do believe that the severity and regularity of abuse i witness on LoL is far greater than in any of the other online games i've played. From reading some of your points i drew from them that maybe certain aspects of moba's and LoL itself just fuels the whole male gamer syndrome more so than on other games. Anyways maybe i've moaned on too much about the whole thing

vinnyg

Kold wrote: »

So... I have 6300ip and really ought to invest in a support.

Leona/Thresh/Blitz are all my kind of support champs, the first and last I actually can play to a decent level but... Thresh op.

I dont play support much so i dont have much to contribute on playing these champions but as someone who plays adc alot these are the kind of supports i love teaming with. Especially Leona, she makes for a great aggressive laning partner. Played with Leona as Mf yesterday and really enjoyed it.

Seifer

Nice analysis indeed Sycopat.

vinnyg wrote: »

From reading some of your points i drew from them that maybe certain aspects of moba's and LoL itself just fuels the whole male gamer syndrome more so than on other games. Anyways maybe i've moaned on too much about the whole thing

Just on that here's a post I made a while back on that very point.

The PB&J's next big initiative is do with the issues that arise in champion select; namely the calling of roles etc. While it definitely isn't as big of a problem as it used to be I'm interested to see what they come up with. I think it's probably one of the few areas where ranked players behave better than non-ranked because they generally want to win more. Any time I try to play a normal to practice something it's just an insta-lock fest.

vinnyg

Seifer wrote: »

The PB&J's next big initiative is do with the issues that arise in champion select; namely the calling of roles etc. .

is there anywhere i read about this?

Seifer

vinnyg wrote: »

is there anywhere i read about this?

They haven't announced any specifics yet but this recent thread by Lyte is pretty enlightening (Just read the red posts): http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=40198247#40198247

vinnyg

its good to see riot are being fairly proactive about the whole situation

n1ck

Kold wrote: »

So... I have 6300ip and really ought to invest in a support.

Leona/Thresh/Blitz are all my kind of support champs, the first and last I actually can play to a decent level but... Thresh op.

Just get Nami, she's insanely op.

Kold

I really don't like the idea of queuing for specific roles. I think if you suck in a certain role, you should be punished for it in your elo. This is the only way I've been forced to learn new things about the game.

I don't understand support mains who have never become proficient at ADC. Support isn't my best role but everything I've learned about support has come from playing AD, knowing what I want them to do.

Companion box

Kold wrote: »

I really don't like the idea of queuing for specific roles. I think if you suck in a certain role, you should be punished for it in your elo. This is the only way I've been forced to learn new things about the game.

I don't understand support mains who have never become proficient at ADC. Support isn't my best role but everything I've learned about support has come from playing AD, knowing what I want them to do.

You are punished, if you first pick a top or mid lane the other team is going to try to counter the hell out of you every time.

Kold

Some champs are more counterable than others. Countless times I've gone Fizz into Karthus and gotten a good few kills off him in lane, however stopping a good Karthus farming is impossible and the amount of times I've been like "Ok I'm 4 kills up on this guy... wait... where'd he get all those kills!?"

Also a lot of people pick Ryze into Fizz but don't realise that if fizz all ins you at 2, he WILL kill you and then start snowballing.

My top champ atm in Pantheon who has a whole HOST of counters but learning difficult matchups is key to being proficient at a champ.

vinnyg

Kold wrote: »

I really don't like the idea of queuing for specific roles. I think if you suck in a certain role, you should be punished for it in your elo. This is the only way I've been forced to learn new things about the game.

I don't understand support mains who have never become proficient at ADC. Support isn't my best role but everything I've learned about support has come from playing AD, knowing what I want them to do.

Like you said learning new roles makes you a better more well rounded player so in essence not learning new ones will punish you in the long run in terms of your general gameplay. Not that i'm much good for trying different roles myself i often find it hard to jump out of my comfort zone.

TheDoc

n1ck wrote: »

Just get Nami, she's insanely op.

Nami has fallen of a bit imo, Thresh and Sona look to be the two strongest supports at present. Janna will always be there and there abouts.

tuxy

Blind pick in an important Korean ogn match the other day had both teams picking Sona.

n1ck

TheDoc wrote: »

Nami has fallen of a bit imo, Thresh and Sona look to be the two strongest supports at present. Janna will always be there and there abouts.

Nami hasn't fallen at all really especially at our level. Her stun is now 1.5 sec instead of 2, it's still insane. The amount of **** threshs out there is annoying as **** too, if you can't go balls deep he's useless. Nami always has her use even if she's behind because her ult into a bubble is insanely good.

Sycopat

I am... inordinately... pleased to have lucked my way into being placed in silver v.

I know it's pretty much smack in the middle of average's ville, but feck it, I was expecting bronze 2 or 3.

Guess now I have to see if I can get out of it

vinnyg

Sycopat wrote: »

I am... inordinately... pleased to have lucked my way into being placed in silver v.

I know it's pretty much smack in the middle of average's ville, but feck it, I was expecting bronze 2 or 3.

Guess now I have to see if I can get out of it

So how are you finding it three days in?? is the level what you expected?

Sycopat

vinnyg wrote: »

So how are you finding it three days in?? is the level what you expected?

I've only played 3 ranked games since... won one, lost one, and was well on the way to winnning the third when my internet cut out

People in ranked actually seem nicer than people in normals though.

n1ck

Just wait. :P

Sycopat

n1ck wrote: »

Just wait. :P

I'm kind of looking forward to it tbh. Observing the wild "elo-hell" rager in their native environment.

Guess it's just morbid curiosity

Taylor365

Sycopat wrote: »

I'm kind of looking forward to it tbh. Observing the wild "elo-hell" rager in their native environment.

Guess it's just morbid curiosity

Duo Que later so?

Splinter

still sitting in b2 and it's killing me. It's the attitude people have that ruins it for me. i've been muting people who start but it's still irritating

Sycopat

Splinter wrote: »

still sitting in b2 and it's killing me. It's the attitude people have that ruins it for me. i've been muting people who start but it's still irritating

I hear that, finally had some in my last ranked game. Not that they flamed so much as just were constantly negative. Everything was everyone elses fault. Every mistake "lost the game". Bad team fights were always the fault of the person not there, never the person who engaged 4v5. No point in arguing because you know they're just looking for a target to blame everything on.

It's that attitude that keeps them there I think. I learned some useful stuff, so even though I lost again, I'll be able to do better next time.

What position do you main?

YouSavedMyLife

Sycopat wrote: »

I hear that, finally had some in my last ranked game. Not that they flamed so much as just were constantly negative. Everything was everyone elses fault. Every mistake "lost the game". Bad team fights were always the fault of the person not there, never the person who engaged 4v5. No point in arguing because you know they're just looking for a target to blame everything on.

It's that attitude that keeps them there I think. I learned some useful stuff, so even though I lost again, I'll be able to do better next time.

What position do you main?

This tenfold. I often mock people that scream "Report report!" And its never that the enemy team may be better players and are winning because of high skill or better team play. No. Its always someone on your own team "feeding" My favorite is when bot are losing their lane and are giving kills to the enemy team. Whos fault is it? Junglers obviously, no ganks, no ganks

Splinter

Sycopat wrote: »

I hear that, finally had some in my last ranked game. Not that they flamed so much as just were constantly negative. Everything was everyone elses fault. Every mistake "lost the game". Bad team fights were always the fault of the person not there, never the person who engaged 4v5. No point in arguing because you know they're just looking for a target to blame everything on.

It's that attitude that keeps them there I think. I learned some useful stuff, so even though I lost again, I'll be able to do better next time.

What position do you main?

Support or Jungle for me. so its constantly "not enough wards" or "not enough ganks". Bit painful but meh

Rikand

Splinter wrote: »

still sitting in b2 and it's killing me. It's the attitude people have that ruins it for me. i've been muting people who start but it's still irritating

You'd think one of the highskillers here out of the goodness of their heart would friend you and babysit you up to silver, it wouldnt take too long

n1ck

Rickylovesuall wrote: »

You'd think one of the highskillers here out of the goodness of their heart would friend you and babysit you up to silver, it wouldnt take too long

Because if you were that person playing in silver with a person that is meant to be in bronze you'd have some ****ter in your game, and it's really annoying when that happens.

Rikand

n1ck wrote: »

Because if you were that person playing in silver with a person that is meant to be in bronze you'd have some ****ter in your game, and it's really annoying when that happens.

Silver is already full of Plank 5's - a Bronze 2 player would be an improvement