My latest article was met with some responses that my desire to have everyone try their hardest in ranked, or go play normals casually, was me dreaming. I have been told people are too toxic and the community is what it is, something not uncommon to hear for those who frequent the places where our community discuses the game. For those who frequent the sub-reddit of league of legends it is not at all uncommon to see at least one thread daily about ragers, trolls, poor attitudes etc. This has got me to wondering why it is that this is so common in our community, and a topic on which I have some great insight. See, I am at times, one of these people, these terrible people who rage and flame and get all upset in game. The question is always why people act like this and what can we do about it. The answers, at least for me personally, are probably shocking to some people while others are quite obvious. The solutions however are not as easy to define.

I have to start this out by saying I’m not going to go into too much detail for the “fun” modes. I don’t play them as often nor do I personally experience the type of rage in these modes that I do in ranked; however I am aware it exists and will use my general explanations for rage to cover those modes while some more specific ones will also apply to solo queue.

This is the number one reason people rage. What frustrates people is completely subjective and different for every player, but there are a few things that stand out as frustrating for the majority of players in general.

The first reason I believe people rage in any game mode is the time commitment to said game. A game of league of legends is a minimum of 20 minutes in most games modes (15 for some) of play time with additional time for champion select, the queue time etc. This equated into about 25-30 minutes for a game at the minimum. That is a rather large amount of time where you are locked into a game compared to popular games like counter strike, halo, call of duty and other team based games. The result of this commitment is that people get upset when they feel as if they are simply “wasting time” and it is something that i never really felt in any game before this. The effect of an AFK or troll is twofold in league. Not only did they ruin your game, but they also put you in a prison for the next 20-30 minutes where you are helplessly forced to sit there and wait until the game can be forfeited or the other team ends it. This is frustrating to so many people because there is no way around this. They can’t simply leave the game and start a new one making many players feel trapped when these situations come up. This feeling is what leads to them lashing out on the troll or raging in all chat about the afk etc. None of these things are what we want the outcome to be as this just causes one person’s negative behaviour to inspire that behaviour in 4 more players, clearly not a desired outcome.

I think that is the main reason that there is rage in normal modes, many of the hyper competitive players who can’t stand losing are already in the ranked queues (their competitive nature drew them to those modes) so I don’t see that being an issue in other queues. What is still an issue in the lower queues however is the internet ego.

I find it incredible how many people can bench 300 pounds, or are diamond 1 on their main account, or other such outlandish claims that people do not need to verify online. This ability to tout themselves as a god while belittling others speaks to a severe personality flaw within that individual. This manifests itself in every game mode (ranked and normal) as some players are incapable of admitting to their own faults and flaws and instead blame others for their failures in a very aggressive fashion. Their anger and condescending attitude towards other players is their way of expressing their frustration, some of which comes from the game but the majority of which certainly comes from a feeling of inferiority outside the game, leading to this larger than life persona inside it.

This is the second biggest factor in creating people who rage in every mode, specifically in the lower levels of play as people who suffer from this sort of egotism never improve at the game because they are never identifying their own mistakes in order to correct them. This is the one group of players i think there is no saving – their issues come from outside the game and they bring them into the game with them – these are the players you just instantly mute.

The last point I have that applies to both ranked and fun modes is the skill gap in games. In league of legends the two largest skillgaps are in silver (good players, awful players all in the same place) and high diamond1 – challenger (good players and gods) as well as in normal games. Here it is common to see flaming and raging for misconceptions about good players (diamond guy dies once in normal his team begins to flame him) and for not fulfilling expectations (diamond guy expects his bronze normal teammates to act like his diamond teammates in ranked). This type of raging can be solved by some simple shifts in the mentality of players.

First the normal games; low elo players need to understand two things. The first is that your highly ranked player is probably testing out something new or having a bit of fun. It is very possible and even likely that they will completely dominate the game, but they may not. Many high elo players have achieved their ranking through the use of a certain champion or strategy which they are not using in your game, drastically lowering their ability. It is also possible they simply want to test the limits of a certain champion or build path and may not be the god you expected when seeing their rank. These are not reasons to flame or rage at them, normals is where the goal is having fun and learning, not winning, and the mode should be treated as such. This applies to the highly ranked player as well, try and teach the people in your game or help them out. Expecting them to be as good as your ranked teammates is only going to make you angry and is not realistic. To explain the second thing they must understand I’m going to steal a quote I used to use in my halo days, “Pro players don’t have overshields”. What I mean by that is being a great player means you know how to minimize mistakes, it doesn’t mean you are invincible. If a bronze player plays a situation perfectly, or even just very well, there is a good chance the highly ranked player will die. Good players don’t have bonus stats for being good, they still die, they just make far less mistakes that put them in those situations compared to your average joe. Them dying does not mean they bought their account, and flaming them makes normal games fun for nobody.

Ranked in this situation is a strange area but i think demonstrates my earlier point about truly toxic players never progressing. The two places with the biggest skillgaps could not be more different from an attitude perspective. Toxic behaviour is much rarer at the heights of the elo charts, and that is because the players who have gotten there are highly self critical. They blame themselves for mistakes and are constantly looking to improve resulting in them being some of the best players on their server. Despite the huge stomps high elo games are often nowhere near as toxic as their low elo counterparts despite the disparity in skill being even greater here then at the bottom of the ladder.

Silver on the other hand… oh boy. This is where things get ugly. Silver has players who just hit level 30 and managed to pull out 5 wins in placements playing alongside experience veterans. While nobody in silver is a great player there is a huge discrepancy between the best silver players and the worst. The fact they wind up on the same team, combined with the fact the better silver players desperately want to get to a higher ranking is what creates so much tension in this area of the ladder. People feel cheated being matched with people far below their skill level when they are in a division of the ladder that is widely looked down upon as “trash” by the community. This desperation to escape silver combined with the widely varying skill levels make it the most toxic elo i ever played at and made my time at that elo very difficult to enjoy. Its hard to contemplate what we could do to mitigate this based on how the ladder system in league works. I like the system in Halo as everyone starting at level one meant you had to progress to each level instead of having the first two tiers of players be a crapshoot however this is highly unlikely to ever be implemented into league of legends which leaves me not really sure of what we can do to make that part of the ladder more enjoyable.

The next few points are the ones I have personal experience with and will be more representative of the ragers in ranked modes. Let me be completely honest here, I have said some AWFUL things to people in ranked games. I am an extremely competitive person who hates to lose at anything (losing with grace is a personality trait i’ve been working on) but I’m not insane; I understand some games I will not win and there is no sense in getting all worked up. So knowing this why do I rage sometimes?

The first reason is when people just don’t try. Relating back to my last piece on the west falling behind Korea I stated that a big problem in the west at least is our attitude in solo queue being “its just a game”. Want me to start raging? Display that attitude in ranked.

I am well aware that people have bad games, look at my match history at any point you will see a game where I did poorly, but that typically isn’t what makes me mad. What angers me, and I’m not alone in this thought, is when I can see my teammate has made a mistake and instead of owning it and attempting to fix it, they bring a defeatist attitude. Saying things like “GG” or “ff20” when they have died early on is a really easy way to get the whole team raging.

This brings me back to my first point where by saying those things you make the whole team feel as if they are trapped in this game with you creating unnecessary hostilities among teammates. This nonchalance towards ranked modes is what makes people rage more than anything in this mode, at least for me. When I see someone select an off meta champion that they are 0-5 with, and I’m in promo it makes me angry that I am trying to win yet my team doesn’t seem to share that same goal. Taking the game seriously and trying your best at all times when in ranked modes would go a long way in reducing the number of people who rage and flame in game.

Do not confuse this as me telling everyone to suddenly be a diamond 1 player, I am simply stating that you know what your best champs are, and how well you can play when you are doing your best. To not at least attempt to do that in every game where people’s ranks are on the line is going to incite rage in people who play the game seriously and is honestly just selfish and immature. Do what you want in fun modes but in ranked the goal is to win and improve, if you go in with any goal other than winning YOU are the problem – not the person raging at you to stop feeding.

The other main reason people rage in ranked is purely competitive, people hate losing. If you make a mistake at the end of the game that costs your team a win you will almost certainly hear about it in a less than polite manner from one of your teammates. While I don’t agree with this outburst I certainly understand it. When competitive people lose they are going to be upset, and like I stated earlier about people on the internet, they often use you as a person on which to vent their frustration for the loss instead of contemplating what they could have done better to prevent the game from reaching that point. This type of raging is hard to prevent but is thankfully nowhere near as damaging as some of the previous forms I have mentioned. I see it as a way for most people to vent their frustration before going into another game, without it really affecting the current one as the anger comes out after the game has been lost.

I don’t think its an accident that many of our best players were at one point or another considered toxic. They wanted to win and improve and be the absolute best, and this was evidently displayed in their frustration towards their teammates when things weren’t going so well. This is definitely not the mature and appropriate way of dealing with that frustration but the competitive drive of our top players explains both why they are so good, and why at one point many of them tended to rage – they wanted to be the absolute best and you can’t be the best when you are losing. Calling them toxic and flaming them for discovering this is how they were is silly, their attitude towards others may not be appropriate but ultimately the passion that allowed them to get as good as they are is the same passion that drove them to being toxic towards people in the first place.

This is where our community really needs to come together to determine what we feel is “toxic” behaviour as right now the word is used far too frequently. In my opinion, toxic players and ragers are two different animals, but they are related. Toxic players, by my definition, are people who ruin the game of others. They do this by trolling, feeding, or spamming chat with hate filled speech or other nonsense. These “toxic” players create “the rager”. This is the person who reacts to the troll and gets agitated by them, typically resulting in them lashing out at the troll and their other teammates. This agitation tends to travel into their next games with them where they may become toxic themselves, thus perpetuating the cycle.

Our community has two distinct branches, and its time for us to recognize that. We have both casual and competitive players playing the same game, and when their goals are different we get clashes. It is important to define what we want from each game mode, as a way to set expectations for the behaviour of players in those modes. Normal modes should be to have fun and improve at the game, this is where winning and losing is irrelevant it is all about playing the game and enjoying that experience, and our consideration around appropriate behaviour in those modes should reflect that. Ranked however should be a safe haven for players who want to win every game in which they can surround themselves with like minded individuals. Our expectations for how to behave in ranked modes should be different from that of normal games and this should be clearly defined so players know where to go and what to play depending on their objectives each time they play the game.

Did I miss a point you thought was relevant? Have a suggestion to deal with some of the mentioned problems? Leave a comment below or in the reddit thread to get the community discussion going!