Really hope you enjoyed this remastered episode gang! Brand new episode to follow next week :D If you enjoy our content please consider supporting us on patreon

@ponytail336

5 ай бұрын

you should pin your comment c:

@AnotherFatGuy

5 ай бұрын

love the show mate. lots more pls.... piiimp.

@GustavoIto

5 ай бұрын

pin is important so we can be sure you are yourself xD we never know these days

@aiodensghost8645

5 ай бұрын

Wait, this is a remaster? Could hardly tell

@narraetsor

5 ай бұрын

I love that the minecart is full of salt

It usually boils down to this "1 person alone hardly wins a game but 1 person alone easily loses a game"

@revimfadli4666

5 ай бұрын

Sounds like XP sharing/splashing (with more portion to the least performant) could be the key, like what Rise of Winter chill was going to do

@HalIOfFamer

5 ай бұрын

@@revimfadli4666 no literally the opposite. Those single players who are having a terrible game will be useless for the rest of the game even if it goes for 60 minutes and everybody has full build and juice. Because they were not having a good time for the 1st however many minutes of the game, they are just gonna play bad because they don't care. What would be better is, comebacks should be rewarded more than straight wins. So if you came back against odds and won, you'd get more rank points. But it could not be cheased that much because if you give lead, you might lose instead and get nothing. That way if the bad player cought up with the team he could have that inspiration of trying harder to get the bonus points.

@Dwavenhobble

5 ай бұрын

@@revimfadli4666 It's more down to a very specific and annoying design element not actually brought up here. The character roles. Specifically Carries who start off pretty weak but as they gain stats become more powerful and with even a small advantage in levels due to how their stats scale it can give a huge power advantage. The issue being you need to have these carries get fed to start with. And carries tend to attract more glory hunting "Look how 1337 MLG I am getting all these kills" types who often don't get how the game is played or just want to pull off stylish kills to take stupid risks. Meanwhile supports have to run round babysitting them half the game and then hopefully spending the 2nd half of the game watching the carries win. However screw up and late game supports become easy lunch for the enemy carries and tend to end up with bad K/Ds when the enemy team snowballs so will then be some of the first blamed by the carry whose 3 deaths in early laneing seem like nothing compared to the 12 support deaths but those 3 deaths set the ball rolling for the enemy to be able to get those 12 support kills later.

@Dragonoid269

5 ай бұрын

I'll agree that one person can easily lose the game, but the first part is far from true though. If you see any smurf playing in lower elo, you'll know how easy it is for one person to stomp a game. Even without smurf players abusing their massive skill gaps, it is fairly common for players to just randomly get fed when having a good game. Certain champions will also become monsters when they get fed to the point where the enemy team will just surrender due to that one champion (e.g.: certain assasins can feel unstoppable against low cc comps when they are far ahead, certain bruisers when fed will just go in 1v4 and score a triple kill as their sustain is higher than the damage they'll take). This is not something you can simply make a 'their lane opponent is losing the game for the other team' argument for either as it also happens when junglers get fed. One person can indeed not win the game when the other four players go afk (unless they're diamond+ and are facing bronze/iron players), but it is far from unusual see one person winning the game for their team.

@sotvrno93

5 ай бұрын

@@Dragonoid269 This. Its very easy to blame other teammates when you don't even know what to do when you get the chance to. Poor wave management, poor timing (a.k.a. dude on mid just staring at his enemy Syndra on tower instead of granting/negating vision with just 1 min to dragon spawn, or roaming or going B), and the obvious mental diff when you're playing from behind. There is so much to do.

Can't wait to send this to my friend. When I asked him this very question, he basically said "Losing isn't necessarily your fault, so people are way quicker to blame the four other dumbasses you have to share a team with."

@bigblue344

5 ай бұрын

It's interesting that I had more teamwork happen in casual games like in overwatch 1 and paladins then I ever did with the comp scenes. So I feel frustrated not only when I lose but also when I win, because I just carried a whole bunch of people who deserve to lose but the game counts everyone as working equally as a team. Now other people of a higher rank are going to have to deal with these morons.

@AnonJuggerbot

5 ай бұрын

Or as the great Dunkey put it, "My team is Hitler on four computers, I'm only on one".

@FubukiTheIcyKing

5 ай бұрын

I've never play LoL but I have played Pokemon Unite. The amount of people who don't know basic things can make it frustrating. Let alone if someone is AFK or not grinding on minions to level.

@yuuneeq9494

5 ай бұрын

Isolation is the biggest source of toxicity to me. You can’t see the other lanes. So if a bad apple is doing fine but the team is losing, they’ll tell themselves "I would’ve done their lane better". And yet, there’s no real way to know that. This is the second point of isolation, first from your teammates, and secondly from any possibility of being proven wrong about "doing their lane better"

@turtlenator6249

5 ай бұрын

@@FubukiTheIcyKingEven in ranked, people either don’t remember or just don’t call roles at all. It’s frustrating.

I think the feeling of being powerless also plays a big role. The main way to stop being angry at the game is to focus on having a fun time. But being in a lane and having your ass handed to you by an enemy who's obviously stronger is not fun. Anything you do is a risk, and after falling behind enough even hugging the tower won't save you. You'll need your team to help you, but like you said, if it goes wrong then the game is basically over. And there's nothing you can do about it anymore except play another match and hope the enemy is not as good as the one you were playing against. And if they are, then soon enough you're not enjoying the game anymore and playing something else. But there's another option: you get better. You read, practice, train yourself, and suddenly you're winning games. But then your teammates start feeding, and your jungler doesn't gank, and you're not winning anymore, so you get angry. But being angry isn't fun so you try to focus on having fun again, slowly crawling back to the part where you figure out the game isn't fun if you're not good. That's the loop that'll burn you out. You either quit a casual player, or you play long enough to become toxic.

@goodtimerobotboy4955

5 ай бұрын

rigth on the money

@Alloveck

5 ай бұрын

I've never touched this genre, but I get the conundrum in the general PvP sense. It's not fun to get stomped, but putting in the work necessary to get truly good first isn't fun either. You just want to play a game that's fun as you are right now, not sign up for a new job that doesn't pay you. Getting better as you go is fine, but you should be having fun on the way to good, not having to get good before any fun happens at all. So, maybe this is a super dumb question, (again, I've never played any game in this genre,) but couldn't you have fun while being casual/new the same way as in other genres- by being matched up with equally casual/new players? I would think that proper skill matching would be the solution for basically anything competitive. I mean, that's why leagues exist in real life sports, different people have different amounts of time and effort they're looking to put in.

@TheOblomoff

5 ай бұрын

Yes, but upping your own level - doesn't mean you would be winning more. That's the worst part. You'd be winning the same, at least on average. But on higher level, where there's even more of a requirement for reactions and knowledge, and mistakes are punished harder.

@Havainus

5 ай бұрын

@@Alloveck Definitely, but that's where smurfing comes in sadly. I've played a lot of MOBA's before playing League, and the thing I noticed was the insane amount of players who played perfectly with a low level account. It also depends on the quality of matchmaking, if that's good then you'll more often have a good time. Still, those games where you're literally forced against the wall from minute 1 sting really bad, and they can sour 10 good games easily.

@Alloveck

5 ай бұрын

@@Havainus Yeah, I suppose that just as surely as skill matching can solve the problem, smurfing can un-solve it. It always surprises me how willing some people are to create one account after another or otherwise game the system just to stomp lower level players.

I'd like to see something deeper than a surface level look at league toxicity. I think there are many factors that aggravate the problem. Having 3.5 resource streams in a 5 player team, designating "carry" as a role, having a report system that invites misuse, and very little individual mitigation for abusive behavior.

@MusicaX79

4 ай бұрын

Former League player that escaped. The main foundational problem with the game is that it has been out for 10+ years and the game still does not have a system in place to teach players how to actually play the game. Age Of Empires 2 died years before, AOE2 came back from the dead got a rerelease and a remaster and it has The Art of War. Where it teaches you the basics you will need to play the game properly. League after 10+ years does not even teach last hitting. There are significant other issues with the game that end up making it toxic. But when you have a developer that will not even teach its players the basic functionality of their game. You are going to end up with an extremely toxic system between the people that can even slightly play and the people that are just there.

@BigDaddyWes

3 ай бұрын

​@@MusicaX79Like most things, the only way to learn is through gaining experience. Tutorials teach you how to play, not how to win. The Art of War is a distilled, specific circumstance/challenge. It teaches you things that are applicable to real matches, but it's not actually going to make you good at the game, and it's not really meant to. It's not the game's responsibility to make you good at it. It just takes time and effort, like any other skill. Think of any traditional sport, or playing an instrument, or learning a tradeskill. You can read all of the books you want about a topic, but if you don't go out there and actually practice throwing a baseball, you'll never have good aim. You know what I mean? People are really quick to blame complex video games for not teaching them how to win at them, but that's such a (pardon my rudeness please) loser's mentality.

Spot on. Snowballing mechanics crossed with "you're on your own but your performance will affect the whole team" leads to massive toxicity.

@bigblue344

5 ай бұрын

A lot of the time if somebody is at least trying I am disappointed but not angry with poor performance. It's the selfish players who refusing to help or triple up on sniper that gets me angry and then I am muted for being "toxic" when I tell the edgy sniper main to move twenty steps to cap the point because literally everyone is dead but him and could win us the match.

@CADClicker

5 ай бұрын

​@@bigblue344 Maybe try to learn how get be helpful without coming off as toxic

@YorkJonhson

5 ай бұрын

Yeah, and no one wants to be the one that's blamed for everything when shit starts to hit the fan, so people will preemptively lash out looking for any excuse for why their team is losing. My favorite is when I'm playing support and people will complain about the lack of healing in the middle of me actively healing them.

@leithaziz2716

5 ай бұрын

Snowballing mechanics would probably be fine with some groups of people in non-team based competitive games, (look at some fighting games, mainly the Marvel Vs Capcom series). it's the part where one player can affect the whole team is when it's not really healthy in the long run.

@jorgemontero6384

5 ай бұрын

@@leithaziz2716 And in MvC, the match lasts to minutes, not 45+. It's a perfect storm of mechanics that cause rage, on top of each other. We can only make it worse by, taking a note from Magic The Gathering's Ante, or straight out gambling, charging per game, and handing 80% of the proceeds to the winning team

This is actually pretty similar to bad workplace structures and incentives where you judge a team based on individual effort but every person works on something completely different and you’re not able (or allowed) to help because you’re swamped with your own work. If one team member drags your team down, you feel like they weren’t pulling their weight because you did everything perfect. Terrible.

@pirojfmifhghek566

5 ай бұрын

"Group Project: The Game." Your entire life's trajectory depends on your grade and your grade depends entirely on your group members who either trash talk your work, don't care enough to do their own work, or they're simply in way over their head. I have no idea how people are able to play these kinds of stress-multiplier games and have fun.

@octo448

5 ай бұрын

@@pirojfmifhghek566 In my opinion it's similar to gambling- the high of the wins carries players over the stress and disappointment of the lows. Also like gambling, they are convinced that their own skill will eventually win out over the random nature of the game itself (Weather that's the random odds of winning in a casino against the house or the random placement of other players and enemies in a match). They think "If I just play one more game, I'll win and it'll be worth it". This mentality is even stronger in a MOBA because of the way placement and matchup mechanics work. They get to play with- and against- better players if they themselves do better and win more games. That means not only does each individual game have the permanent stat effect, the whole ACCOUNT eventually begins to have the permanent stat effect. Once you hit higher tiers, it takes a lot of repeated losses and low scores to land you back in the lowest player tiers.

@heychrisfox

5 ай бұрын

@@pirojfmifhghek566 For me, I just LOVE the mechanics. When you really master a character, you enter this flow-state where you kinda transcend the game, and do these wild plays. And once you get pretty good, you start to be able to "solo carry" games. There was a streamer who said, "You basically want to get as strong as possible, as fast as possible, until you - by yourself - are the raid boss of the match." And when you actually get to be that, oh man is the game fun. It's also fun when you meet people you click with. When you find a random person who is hungry for a good fight in the game, and they have strategic thinking that lines up with you. And that awesome fun-feeling gets extrapolated the more people you're playing with of a similar skill level. It's also fun when you fight other players at a similar skill level to you. You start hyper-analyzing millisecond gameplay moments, in real time, to get that teeny tiny advantage over an opponent. So it's this mix of the mechanics being really rewarding, and being able to work with strangers in this weird tug-of-war match. Another thing a pro player said was, "You should always expect to lose about 20% of your games, and expect to win another 20% of your games, just because you win and lose based on random chance sometimes. However, that means 60% of the games are entirely in your control, and it's up to you to prove you can win." And I love that, because it really is true, especially the more about the game you learn. It's a high-stress game where there basically is no ceiling to learning, which is so rewarding.

@MrWhygodwhy

5 ай бұрын

@@pirojfmifhghek566 A lot of them aren't having fun.

@Gilthwixt1

5 ай бұрын

@@pirojfmifhghek566you have to intentionally focus on only the highs and ignore the lows. Some people just can't do that, it's natural for them to see only the lows. But if you can realize that all of your highs were earned and you (generally) aren't always at fault for the lows, especially if you did well and weren't toxic but some toxic player went 0/5 and flamed chat, it's actually possible to enjoy the game and not get stressed at all. You have less control over the people and world around you than you have control over how you react/respond to them. A positive mindset in that regard is good life advice in general, not just gaming advice.

The best advice I got from a stranger when I started playing was "quit until you get better." I did and my quality of life jumped immediately.

@rcbinchicken

5 ай бұрын

I got that advice too. They never explained how I'd get better at the game without playing it, but they must have known something I didn't, because most days I wish I'd taken their advice.

I've only played HotS, while it still has toxicity I think it tries to mitigate a lot of these elements. 1. Most games are 20 minutes to 25 minutes in length, with the game almost forcing the game to end with objectives. 2. Team XP makes it so that if someone struggles, they aren't a weak link permanently. 3. If you're behind on XP, not only do you have shorter respawns, you also gain significant bonus XP from kills, so one good gank or teamfight lets you turn the game around.

@bloomleaf8310

5 ай бұрын

It still suffers from the lanning problem though, which they made worse in a lot of ways by making the xp a physical item you have to pick up. I also think the MVP screen + vote system was a bad idea it discourages you from playing certain characters the way they are supposed to and if someone is being toxic in game and gets on the board / gets MVP it reinforces that behavior.

@Quazey

5 ай бұрын

@@bloomleaf8310 If you lasthit, you get the XP rather than it dropping as an orb, and they float to you from a pretty generous range. In my thousands of games I haven't seen any toxicity or righteousness based off the MVP screen. HotS shouldn't have been mentioned as having those commonalities with the other MOBAs, its design (no gold, team XP, mounts and map size, rotations rather than a jungler) make it an exception.

@tyrus1235

5 ай бұрын

Only toxicity I recall from my time playing HotS was people thinking my Abathur was AFK'ing when, in fact, I was jumping from teammate to teammate to help them on PvP fights (until I got ulti, which I then used to curbstomp one of the lanes).

@bloomleaf8310

5 ай бұрын

@@tyrus1235 so when it had more of a player base, the only real toxicity that i ever saw was people being overly harsh on new players on characters like abathur, TLV, nova, and zeratul ( which was always sort of blizzards fault highly technical characters should not have been on free rotation.). or the frustration was at blizzard for stuff like bad role queuing back when specialist and support had really unhealthy overlap with some of the heroes. and a lot less was focused on individual players i have also played a bunch recently and not run into any toxicity of my own, but even with a long time away i have a handful of characters that i played so much they are ingrained and i can eek out a decent performance. but from my understanding the brand new players trying to get into the game hit a pretty heavy wall of toxicity that runs them off before they get very far.

@RuneKatashima

5 ай бұрын

I never liked the team xp mechanic. Because it was boring.

The Litmus test I try to hold all competitive multiplayer games to is "Any game can be fun while you're winning. How many games that you *lose* do you walk away from saying 'That was fun, I like this game.' " This is already why I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering and other cardgames, because I find that while fun games you lose *exist* the *vast* majority of the time, if you're having fun is mostly determined by if you're winning or not, and Mobas are that, but an order of magnitude worse.

@starry842

5 ай бұрын

Good point.

@CrazyFarseer

5 ай бұрын

The design talk for Marvel Snap focused on fun for both the winning and losing player, and some tricks about making retreating players feel clever. That’s the only game I can think of which explicitly tried to handle this, and it isn’t super competitive either. I wish I knew of more.

@BladeTrain3r

5 ай бұрын

There will always be sore losers in life, not to mention those who don't handle a win gracefully. Games without sore losers are often the ones where stakes are low and audience not massive, anecdotally. Although the manner in which this misconduct is handled often does make the problem worse than it could be. That and some people are doing it because melodrama gets attention.

@Thanatos2k

5 ай бұрын

Yeah like...imagine putting a pro Moba player on a team with 4 incompetent noobs vs a team of 5 competently skilled players. They'd never win, and it would be absolutely infuriating for the pro regardless of how they played in each game. But like...do the same with a game like Counterstrike. Yeah the pro and scrub team would still lose most of the time, but the pro would likely have a positive kill death ratio and feel good about how they played. And maybe they would singlehandedly win a few rounds (which is basically impossible in a Moba).

@chrondeath6142

5 ай бұрын

Yeah. There's a lot of board games I like for this reason--I lose more than I win but I still built a nice farm and "beat the game" by keeping my workers fed, or I built an engine that ran well but not as well as someone else's. Can't say there's been many online pvp games that have managed that for me.

A few of these can be addressed in the design stage. Heroes of the Storm proved you can have a MOBA with short match time and less individualized laning phases, reducing the pressure on an individual player. Meanwhile Dawngate, which tied a player's power to their behavior through a plethora of means, managed to stem the tide of toxic players into their higher tier matchmaking queues, while also providing a non-PVP experience with their Living Lore community vote system, and ended up cultivating a much calmer experience. I say this as someone who played both and experienced it firsthand. League and Dota 2 only won the MOBA wars of the early 2010s because toxic jerks, because of their need to win, are DEDICATED. Anger makes you stay around. Social media knows this and leverages it to great effect. I'm sure it's part of the reason that League and Dota are here to this day.

@MrMickio1

5 ай бұрын

Yea thats what i was thinking this whole time. HoTS has almost none of these problems by design.

@NotBer

5 ай бұрын

Unfortunately, the common criticism of HotS is that "there's minimal carry potential".

@consortgaming1121

5 ай бұрын

​​@@NotBer Which is crazy because, as a longtime HotS player and current LoL grinder, it's factually wrong. You can play out your mind in your lane in League just to watch another lane/jungle go 0/5 by 15m and now someone on the map one-taps you on sight and you effectively don't get to play the game. In HotS, even if a lane was totally getting crushed, you were rarely down by enough to not win a teamfight through skill diff, and the few times you were, it was never by more than a minute or so of playing safe and giving up objective/camps to soak XP. The real difference imo is in League you occasionally get to be that 5/0 at 15 minutes monster 1-tapping everything. In HotS, you had to carry the *whole* game, not get lucky or make two good plays and suddenly have a massive stat advantage to bully the map with.

@thechugg4372

5 ай бұрын

Heroes of the storm still the goat, although they really fucked with the balance in the later patches, its a lot less fun now.

@Phourc

5 ай бұрын

League even did that for a while with their Dominion map which I loved but they never gave much support. Just gotta stop making the original map design your whole identity. -.-

I think another reason is because MOBAs(especially League)hits an uncomfortable middle in gaming interaction, where in shooters or fighting games where you are self-sufficient enough to not be able to honestly blame other than yourself, while in more team based games like Deep rock galactica, competitive TF2 and Payday 2 where each member has a role that no other player can cover, you are obligated to communicate and connect with the other players enough to have a decent dialogue and make a strategy from there while also figuratively watching each others back(+ they have a less serious tone to put even more focus on the players). While in League one is independant enough so one doesn't have to connect with your teammates to do things aside of big objectives but also not enough to not be affected by teammates performance, creating this situation where you have to trust people that you really don't care about.

@toxihex876

5 ай бұрын

I remember how much fun I genuinely had back in the late 2000s with this MMORPG where certain guilds had territory wars every week. It was a huge 80vs80 fight where you also had 3 lanes and had to push carts pulled by the beefiest tanks you had into enemy turrets and protecting your own as well as the puller. There were very coordinated squads lead by the guild officers and each guild leader had their own strategy on top of the meta, which they further coordinated with the officers in a separate chat. I adored that part of the game. It was annoying sometimes when people wouldn't listen but overall it was an amazing experience which lasted for about 2 to 3 hours. There was no toxicity because it was such a unique and packed experience every week. The whole game in of itself even besides the wars was packed with options and made you feel like there was something for you no matter which stage of the game you were at level wise. Isolating matches into small maps and numbers of people really does often times make you feel like a caged animal the way league and dota operate. Like it's supposed to be up to you but there's nothing you can do. People think they know the correct decision and get mad at others for not doing what they want them to do. There's a lot more to it but the main issue is the lack of a distinct leader in matches.

@simplysmiley4670

5 ай бұрын

The funny thing about TF2 is also that, aside from competetive niche of it, it's mostly a casual game where individual player's performance matters less, especially when there's 11 other players on your team including you.

@kylejohnson6775

3 ай бұрын

That's one big flaw with individual leveling & pacing in LOL. If you get a big enough lead, you are quite independent, and everyone sees that happen once in a while. There's even a role called "carry", so there's a persistent myth of "the one guy who won the game all on his own", but that role evolved from the community before LOL gave it an official role name. But in a match that's remotely close, nobody's that independent, and even in the games with one snowball player, if they didn't have a somewhat competent team to cover their ass and keep the lanes alive, they would have failed. The ADC has a dedicated support from the very beginning. You're incredibly dependent on your team mates. But you play alone for a full 10 minutes at the start of the game, so you feel like you're independent. Except the ADC, who is taught by the design of the game to think that they're the most important and the entire rest of the team exists to make them powerful so they can live the fantasy of 1v5 ing the enemy team. More than most other multiplayer games, like the video says, you're made to feel like it's single player at first, and single player games exist to let you win after a challenge. So of course a lot of people say "ADC or feed" and then treat everyone else like an NPC that's failing to give them their power fantasy. The game lies to you and tells you you're an independent solo operator for the first third of every game, mechanically enables this idea with solo progression and solo-focused role designations, and is set up to enable really extreme snowballing if you pick certain characters. In a team game.

I think a huge part of it is that you can't leave. I mean you can, but you'll be punished for doing so. Other games might also have similar punishments, but as you mentioned, they have much shorter round limits than MOBAs. Being locked into a 30+ minute match you know (or "know") you're going to lose is ripe for bad feelings, as you feel like you're forced to waste so much time just because the jungler decided to camp yours or someone else's lane and you couldn't recover. And you can't even do like many shooters can where you let someone drop in for someone that disconnected with how the level and gold gain and stuff works. It's not like TF2 (either one) or something where you spawn with the same stuff each time so someone else replacing a disconnect isn't a problem.

@chrondeath6142

5 ай бұрын

Agreed. The thing that you *ought* to do if you're playing a game and start finding yourself getting tilted and raging at people *is* to stop playing and take a break. Stigmatizing quitting is the opposite of helpful, and I AM willing to say that if your design leads you to that path you should rethink the basis of your design.

@Zectifin

5 ай бұрын

This is why I prefer HOTS. Average game is about 15m and maybe 10 if your team loses badly. It doesn't give you an option to surrender. LOL and DOTA have to have a surrender option or people would rage quit so much and get banned that they'd have no players left to play. That have to have that option in for their game to survive. Longer forced match times breeds toxicity because you are sitting there seething in rage as your team continues to fuck up, or rage at you for a real or perceived fuckup.

@leixalkvinay2729

5 ай бұрын

@@Zectifin Dota2 doesn't let you surrender, as far as I remember.

@JDReC100

5 ай бұрын

Pokémon Unite have matches that are 5 or 10 minutes max. It also has an alternat way of winning in comparison to other mobas (points system) Not to mention a final stretch mechanic that doubles points. If you have a bad game you can't really stall like other mobas, but you also have a chance of doing a 180 turnaround near the end if you play your cards right. Basically, if your in a nightmare scenario, you can turn it around in the end. If not, the match is only 10 minutes max (you can FF around the 5 minut mark for 10 minute matches). So it not nearly as painful as LoL or Dota.

@simplysmiley4670

5 ай бұрын

Most games with focus on their competetive side of things do have a penalty for leaving, even in their casual modes from what I remember. It does reinforce that you HAVE to give it all or else you wasted your time no matter if you sticked around or abandoned it. And it reinforces that everyone on your team has to give it all or they wasted everyone's including yours time. That and it's only 5 people on your team including you. Each individual player is expected to do more and _alone_ as well. Meanwhile in something out of the MOBA genre that is a time capsule, TF2 (the valve one), teams are 12v12 and the game is designed around that, each individual player and what they do matters less as if 2-3 aren't pulling their weight, there's still rest of the team. And this is if the server as a whole even gives a damn about winning.

This could be me personally, but I also think the constant pushing of these games as competitive outlets also plays a part in it. It's not enough to play and enjoy the game, you have to win and improve because the games are competitive. The highly competitive nature leads to a lot of "Correct" answers, like what the optimal build is for a specific character or the best choices for the current meta. If someone is playing for fun, they're more likely to build items that lead to a playstyle they enjoy or pick a character they enjoy instead of pushing for the Optimal Strategy, which can cause friction with people who are wanting to play the game competitively. Yes there are Ranked Modes for people who enjoy Try Harding and normals for those who don't. Tragically the world is nuanced; What's Competitive to one person could be Casual to another. So while one person thinks they're being competitive because they're playing their best character, someone in the same match could think they're being casual for picking an off meta champion. Someone could think they're playing Casually because they're just pressing buttons on their favorite character while someone else thinks they're being a try hard because said character is the strongest one in the meta.

@oddtail_tiger

5 ай бұрын

"The highly competitive nature leads to a lot of "Correct" answers, like what the optimal build is for a specific character or the best choices for the current meta." It's not just you. I tried League of Legends once (long ago), and I even quite liked it for a while. Then I was overwhelmed by people talking about meta and the game stopped being about playing with a build I'm comfortable with for me. It became about learning the exact correct way to play. I figured "I'm not gonna be that good at this anyway, so if the entire game will just be me being an imperfect imitation of better players, I don't think it's my cup of tea". Haven't touched the game since.

@goldlight1322

5 ай бұрын

@oddtail_tiger You hit the nail on the head. I played League for years and I came to despise the very concept of the Meta. It felt like optimizing the fun out of the game, and it sucked knowing my favorite characters were no longer relevant or even good when some items got added/removed or numbers were changed around.

@iller3

5 ай бұрын

I was in a TF2 community with hundreds of people and we all knew what eachother were up to most days and this was **Right** around the time that people were burning out on Minecraft, then HoN fizzled and LoL tooks its place as the "New Thing" everyone was trying out. I say this with 95% certainty: All the people who got into LoL super hard, WERE already the most overly-competitive players in our community. It attracted them like flies to $#%t

@DirranProductions

5 ай бұрын

The boys and I just played customs, and bot matches to earn new champs. Throw everyone we had anywhere and see what works. Enjoyed my ~200 hours in league and maybe played 4 PVP proper games

@Ukyoprime

5 ай бұрын

I came down to make this exact comment. There is a section of players who believe they will become the next Faker, and being a regular human being on the same team as someone who is playing "Eye of the Tiger" to go with the training montage playing in their head? Friction is inevitable.

A sister video to this one about how games like Deep Rock Galactic discourage toxicity would be pretty cool, i think

@iller3

5 ай бұрын

so long as you don't count the Scouts always begging for a *_*special present*_* from the Bunky Bros

@masonasaro2118

5 ай бұрын

karmazoo was BUILT for this

@EmperorSmith

5 ай бұрын

Dwarves stand together.

@Khorvalar

5 ай бұрын

ROCK AND STONE! :D

@Squirrel412

5 ай бұрын

Was thinking the same thing. Rock and stone?

I remember a Penny Arcade comic that summed up MOBAs so well. One of them was playing Heroes of the Storm & was asked if he won. He replied, “No, but it took us an hour to lose”. Like you mentioned, I think that’s why people get so toxic in League. When you’re getting squashed in a match, it feels like a major waste of time compared to other multiplayer games where the suffering is at least over in 5 to 10 minutes

I think win/loss economy in games is a contributing factor to toxicity that most people don't discuss. Yes, there's the in-game factors, but games that balance their overall rewards on wins and losses encourage a hypercompetitive mindset just so you can make progression, and because that progression is tied to the performance of your entire team, it means your progress can be slowed or outright halted by players being bad or intentionally griefing your performance.

@MrTrombonebandgeek

5 ай бұрын

I will agree, especially since the most typically sited games for toxicity all tend to be competitive games rather than pve games, like CoD, LoL, Dota 2, even overwatch or fortnite. Which I do wonder if there is a way to make a more supportive community in a game where at its core everyone is against one another

@heychrisfox

5 ай бұрын

@@MrTrombonebandgeek It's possible to do. You just kinda have to be the change you wish to see. Sometimes in League I'll just say hi to people, or wish them luck in the game. Or I'll cheer someone else on when a good play happens. And you can tell it really bolsters the morale in the lobby, and people just act more friendly and less toxic. The problem is making thousands of other random people you'll never know and never see again to be nice on the internet. Good luck with that lol.

@iruns1246

5 ай бұрын

@@MrTrombonebandgeek well if we go back to the objective that games exist so people have fun, maybe we can have an additional system where players are rated not by their wins but how fun the games they're involved in have been. Winning is the competitive part, and making it fun is the cooperative part. At the end of the game (or maybe also when you quit the game) you're given chance of rating how fun the game was. Other players' rating affect you, but not your own. And the rating is relative to the average of the players of the game, so you don't get trapped with the worst players, and you also have to keep the fun rolling when in high fun rating games. You get to level up or down on both skill and fun ratings, and get to play with player with both ratings that match yours. I think there's a game that uses something like this and kinda dump toxic players with other toxic players, but I think that's too much of a binary system and tend to work like a prison where you trap people that might've made some fixable mistakes in a cycle of toxicity, instead of encouraging gradual growth.

@bloomleaf8310

5 ай бұрын

⁠@@iruns1246. Heroes of the storm has something like this you can rate your matches at the end, and the game tries to pair you with teammates who have similar ratings. It worked pretty well when it first got put in but the player base is so small now the game can’t really call back to it without bricking Que times

@MrTrombonebandgeek

5 ай бұрын

@@heychrisfox I personally don’t play much multiplayer games outside of OW, but it something I do try if it is possible in game

🎵And this is why I'll never play a MOOOOOOBA🎵 Why would I want to give my time to people who actively ridicule new players when I could be doing anything else? I'll simply get on with enjoying challenges in which I am not mocked by my own team if I make a minor mistake, thanks very much. Anyway, great piece as usual!

@mono_vt

5 ай бұрын

Mhm, toxicity is why I moved away from competitive gaming in general. I have no interest in competing with the best, I just want to do my own thing now. It's not just MOBAs that has this toxicity problem, though I reckon it's more prominent in MOBA gameplay. We have a similar problem in both PVE and PVP with MMORPGs. You let the group down, you waste other people's time and they get all on your case. I don't disagree with that, other people's time is valuable too. But it was damaging my mental health so I left it behind me. I didn't actually draw the line until like... 6 years ago? After my last go at raiding in WoW. Nowdays, I waste my time, that's entirely on me to handle.

@disky01

5 ай бұрын

@@mono_vt Yeah, I play ESO and I've never done a single bit of high-challenge group content because it's just not worth the stress of it. It's funny, Planetside 2, which seems like it SHOULD be high-stress, is actually very easy to get in and have fun in groups because of how it works, and what a surprise, I've got a thousand hours in that game.

@_Bungus

5 ай бұрын

@@disky01 The interesting thing about Planetside 2 is that you can suck balls at it and it won't really affect the game or your team because there's SO MANY people in the larger conflicts that your failure is almost inconsequential. Likewise you can wreck shit and do very little to forward the battle- because what's 100 kills when there's 50 enemy players in your sector who can rejoin the battle within a minute of dying? Even if your team is losing, the sheer spectacle of the large-scale battles is so great that it's kinda hard to care what's happening and how well you're doing anyway. It feels awesome to be a part of it. I should start playing PS2 again. It's been something like 5 years since I have... is it still active?

@disky01

5 ай бұрын

@@_Bungus It's been a few months since I've played but when I was playing, I was seeing queues during prime-time, so I'm sure it's still active.

I think the time sink is a very important one. It can frustrate some of the most chill and laid back players, of anything, to grind and fight for well over 30 mins to end up loosing, and games with ranked mechanics even more. Talked with a friendo about being leas harsh in the loosing team if they put up a good fight, but they pointed out that it could be exploited, so yeah, quite a issue.

@megapussi

5 ай бұрын

Yeah as someone who dropped mobas for fighting games I think thats a big part of it. Even if I get tilted in smth like street fighter 6, one game is less than 5 minutes. Its way easier for me to just walk away if I start getting frustrated, so it very rarely turns into anything beyond mild annoyance.

@lewa358

5 ай бұрын

This is probably a huge element, yeah. I'm never one for strategic-ish games, be it RTSes to card games, but this past year I found myself getting obsessed with Marvel Snap. There's absolutely a "meta" and optimal strategies, and I probably lose as much as I win--frequently due to luck--but matches are less than 5 minutes long. Even if I'm absolutely getting my ass kicked, I'm usually more impressed my my opponent's strategy than I am mad at them for ruining mine. Because none of it matters and I'll be back playing a new match in just a few minutes. (of course, Snap is 1v1 and LoL is 5v5, so it's not *quite* the same thing.)

@IplayTeemoasaWard

5 ай бұрын

A similar example can even be found in a PvE game such as Warframe. Its almost a meme now that the community is more wholesome than 1TB of cute cat pictures, but in almost polar contrast to that there is whats called Eidolon Hunting. its a kind of Boss Rush activity that is 1. time-gated aka only available every few hours 2. on a timer itself, so you want to be as fast as possible for max loot, 3. massively more complicated to execute than normal missions and 4. holds some of the most rare items in the game. So when people that grind out these things regularly get matched with inexperienced or just chill players, complete mayhem ensues. I played the game for 4 years before that and the worst thing somebody said to me in that time was "poopyhead :3". When this gamemode was released I racked up like 4 death threats in under a month.

@iller3

5 ай бұрын

No it's definitely not the time sink. I've been in Lots of MMORPG dungeon sessions that went on over 2 hours with total randos that hit either DPS/Gear checks or Class-quotas that gated us hard but most of the time everyone left on good terms and had overall a positive social experience

@crashstudi0s

5 ай бұрын

​@@iller3 Well, 2 things: MMORPGs don't have that heavy focus on PvP as MOBAs or FPS' do, so if you're in the mud after 1 or 2 hours, it's not that frustrating because usually the bots don't taunt you back. At most, you have a salty player that you can just ignore in future quests. Or, when there is a a PvP event/zone, is usually a part of the content, not the whole game, even if it's a sizeable chunk, in those games you can usually not get involved in it, a do PvE, history missions, raids, etc. And secondly, even the most competitive MMO's usually don't implement a ranked system like some of the other examples do, and when they do, it's usually a global ranking where you see how the guild is doing, who got the msot gold out of something or something. So, even if you loose some raids, that took hours on end, it's rare that you see a number go down, or a pretty icon become a less pretty one. While I'm well aware there are a ton of reasons in both MMORPGs and other games that people can become salty, in the MOBAs, or some shooters (R6 siege, tarkov) where it can feel like you just wasted the evening, the time sink can be frustrating, so if a player can avoid it, by leaving the match, throwing the game, or surrendering, they will. And it will impact other players too, whether in their team, or the enemy. I don't belive that, even if you can somehow fix it, getting rid of the time sink will fix salt in video games, but it can at least make them a little less frustrating.

I like to relate it to fighting games due to their differences. In a game like SF it is literally a 1v1 but people despise introspection so much that they still find ways to blame it on anything but themselves, the character is bad, the opp is spamming, etc. This just gets escalated in team based games as you can just as easily blame the other people for all your problems because surely you have not made any mistakes and played perfectly “it’s just my team that sucks.” That mentality is what makes these games so awful to play

@youtubeuniversity3638

5 ай бұрын

A Note: Even if they are Right and they played perfect and were dragged down by others, that does not Excuse the toxicity.

@bloomleaf8310

5 ай бұрын

@@youtubeuniversity3638 extra credits made a good video about this point a while back, the gist was that people who legitimately play well tend to not be as toxic compared to people who play a game a lot but don’t play as well since even in the event of a loss they tend to be able to recognize that they played well and have a lower propensity towards toxicity

@Eyclonus

5 ай бұрын

I slightly disagree, in fighting games, players who don't have introspection don't play for very long or play many games. Fighting game players tend to play a spread of games, often changing with the times, but also backtracking to older titles due to niche traits (SF3: 3rd Strike for example), resulting in a community where things can still be toxic but its rarely the shallow kind of "not having my way" kind of toxicity.

@abadidea5984

5 ай бұрын

@@Eyclonus To further reinforce this, because fighting games don't have anywhere to dump accountability, players without introspection (and thus the capacity to learn and improve) are more likely to simply stop playing fighting games altogether, because if they can't blame another player, they blame the game, and if the game just isn't going to let them win, they'll likely just quit. By contrast, multiplayer games have multiple avenues to dump accountability, making it much easier for a player to queue into a new match and say "NEXT time will be the good match" because they won't have bad teammates, or they'll just have 'better luck'.

I think another aspect that wasn't brought up that also impacts the toxicity of LoL is how the devs have a rather laissez faire approach to toxicity. Yeah, you can report people if they're being rude or toxic, but they rarely ever get punished. I remember someone was saying in chat that they were going to report them and the other person was like "Go ahead and do it, they won't do anything about it", which further emboldens people to be jerks to one another.

@raziel710

5 ай бұрын

"they rarely ever get punished." Really? I constantly get messages labeled "Report Feedback" that says something to the extent of a player I recently reported has been punished. Maybe cause I rarely play solo so when I report someone I usually have 2-4 other people on my team also sending the report.

@Thanatos2k

5 ай бұрын

@@raziel710 Ever think they send you those messages so you feel good and keep playing? What if they instead sent back a response to every report you made that the person was NOT punished (which likely happens most of the time)? How much longer would you keep playing?

@CheshireCad

5 ай бұрын

One huge contributor of toxicity is that developers *refuse* to address players that merely *believe* that toxic behavior is okay. Bans, mutes, and timeouts are purely reactionary, only dealing with the players that are dumb and impulsive enough to cross the line. But there are countless more that bring a simmering malice to their games, flaming and blaming teammates without dropping any racial slurs. Devs should be taking every opportunity to bluntly state "These are clear examples of toxic behavior. If you believe that this is okay, then we do not want you. *Leave now.*"

@WhiplashSL

5 ай бұрын

@@CheshireCad “If you believe that this is okay, then we do not want you.” They won’t do that, because MONEY MONEY MONEY!

@SageWon-1aussie

5 ай бұрын

Hey, lets ban 71% of our playerbase, that should work out just fine.

I decided to try getting into Teamfight Tactics recently and found the lack of guides EXTREMELY frustrating. There were plenty of videos and articles that said "here's what the buttons do" and "hoard your gold" but it took me DAYS of searching to find a video that said WHY I should hoard gold. I was fortunate the video even mentioned the unit pool limiting how many of each character could show up and even then, the person mentioned as an "as you already know" kind of thing.

Heroes of the Storm did a lot to help mitigate toxicity. Characters who are designed to, if killed, give barely any experience, last hitting being unneeded and all exp going to the team, etc

I used to be part of the toxicity, but through playing with my friends and getting feedback I started seeing how unproductive and damaging that was for myself and the people I cared about. It wasn't easy, but eventually I learned how to have fun without attaching so much importance to winning that it made me angry. I never really cared about randoms flaming me, and rising above it myself has made it kind of funny to see how riled up people can get about something so trivial. I'm not sure that would have ever been possible before I took up meditation- in a way I kind of appreciate the toxic league community for leading me to a place where I actually wanted to change something about myself- if only so I could be as little like them as possible.

@iCarus_A

5 ай бұрын

For me, being quicker to notice and remember my own flaws is what stops me from lashing out in competitive games -- everyone eventually has bad games, and I really appreciate the supportive teammates whenever I don't perform. On days where it's not necessarily my fault for losing, it helps to remember that it's not necessarily the fault of the guy below you either.

I remember seeing a graphic (on 4chan of all places but that's beside the point) about the death of the dedicated lobby/server system in favor of skill-based matchmaking, and how SBMM fosters toxicity by squeezing players with disparate gameplay goals (people who want to win, people who want to screw around, people who want to troll, etc.) into the same match and forcing them all to engage with the game in the same way.

@Thanatos2k

5 ай бұрын

Here's a fun story from back in the day. I used to create Dota games all the time in Warcraft 3, and the title you used for the game had a surprisingly large impact on the type of people who would join the game. We did some AB testing on this, but amusingly putting "pros only" in the game title would result in fewer people joining your lobby, while putting "proz only" in the title instead would result in significantly more people joining, but them being far worse players.

@willeddy8775

5 ай бұрын

@@Thanatos2k Did you mistype? You wrote "proz only" twice. Or maybe you wrote "in the title" twice

@Thanatos2k

5 ай бұрын

@@willeddy8775 Read closer.

@nogravitas7585

5 ай бұрын

@@Thanatos2k I have never touched stand alone DOTA or any other MOBA but I will never forgive the genre for what it did to Warcraft 3 custom map lobbies, in the space of a year you went from seeing new game modes (sometimes interesting sometimes garbage but always new) every month to it being half DOTA to eventually just bots somehow hosting empty lobbies of DOTA taking up 90% of the listed lobbies in a given afternoon. Though this is all moot now that Blizzard themselves murdered Warcraft 3 multiplayer.

There's 2 other mechanics that feeds into toxicity, and it's a thing that happens in many other games as well. First : Respawn timers. Second : Extrinsic rewards. The first comes in a few varieties. In MOBAs they are quite obvious. You die, you have to wait (sometimes quite a long time) before you are allowed to play the game again. What can you do in this time? Nothing but watch and criticize others. In other games, there's similar effects. Like in soulslikes when the distance between a bonfire and boss is long. Making you slog through the same piece of the level over and over again instead of allowing you to try again right away. Or cutscenes/multiple phases before the boss, that you are forced to replay again on each attempt. It's bad enough that we failed in what we wanted to do, making us wait/slog till we can try again is just rubbing salt in the wound. The second is a bit more nuanced. Extrinsic rewards are used in many games after all and it doesn't make people toxic in all those game. What causes people to be toxic is that in MOBAs they aren't linked to your personal performance or RNG loot tables, but to the performance of your whole team during the whole match. It's not just about losing the game, it also makes it take longer to unlock a new character. There's a build-up of anticipation. "One more match and I have enough currency". Just for it to come crashing down and not necessarily because of you. And just like with the first point, long respawn timers and nothing to do with them gives you all the time to vent that frustration.

@Pedro_Colicigno

5 ай бұрын

While I do agree in part with both of your points, I will add this to both as well. 1. The respawn timer has reasons to exist beside being a fail state, in a normal match for example you died, 25 seconds to respawn etc, you are staring at that grayish screen, and you have now 25 seconds where you don't need to have your mind in walking, lasthitting, map etc, you have 25 seconds to look at your items, the shop, your money, the enemy disposition, timers on baron and dragon, 25 seconds you can focus on what will you do. That is something that just B-ing back to base doesn't do. For lol at least, the 8 seconds B is not a relaxing "let me think about things" moment, it is most times the 8 seconds you are looking at your map thinking if the enemy knows where you are and how vunerable you are. Then you are back at the base, you buy everything in a rush and run down your lane to avoid giving advantage to the opponent. They have different impacts. Second point, the extrinsic rewards. Currency in LoL is a joke. I've been there since season 2 and it has always been a joke. We used to farm to buy runes, champions, mastery pages. Then the rune revamp killed that grind, then what we were left was champions. Then they added chest and the like to help you get them. I made a new account to play with a newb friend, of the 120+ champions, he has over 40 before level 20, whitout focused grind of any kind. That said, once you find out the few champions you do enjoy, and have enought to play draft (something the game almost gives you), from my experience, you will buy a few champions every so often after playing with or against, or the new release, or something someone told you is good. Most people don't have the pokemon mentality. Hell, I have a 10 yo account and every so often i discover I don't have a champion. Also, you could argue that LP and champion score (the S+ hunters) are also extrinsic rewards. In summary, I think you make good points, but didn't consider all of it.

@sitnamkrad

5 ай бұрын

@@Pedro_Colicigno I didn't mean to imply that there is no reason for these mechanics to exist other than to increase toxicity. Nor would I be able to consider all points because I never played LOL for a long period of time mostly due to said toxicity. My points were made in general about MOBAs and other games. I have played Heroes of the Storm, for example. And last time I played it (which is admittedly more years ago than I can be bothered to count), there was no equipment. No gold to spend. All you could do was select some talents, but once you have a build figured out that you like, that's not even a second of time required per pick. Then you would die, and in a long match, you'd just have to wait for a literal minute or more without being able to do anything. And while you can to some limited extend gather some information about what's going on in the game, you're not actually doing anything. You're just watching with your hands tied as stuff happens. That just feels frustrating and because you can't do anything, you can't take out that frustration on some enemies. But....there is a chat function. As for the second point, while you are correct that most people don't really care about buying all the heroes once they have the ones they like. It's not required for most people to care. Most people aren't toxic either. And even most people that do have a bit of rage and frustration, have the decency to just yell at their monitor or yeet a harmless stress ball across the room. It's only a few people where this becomes an issue that will manifest in the actual game. But if you're playing with 10 people in one match, you only need an average of 10% toxic people to on average get 1 toxic person per match. So with only 10% of toxic people, almost all matches in the game will have toxicity in them (since you can have multiple of those toxic people in one match). With only 5%, still about half of your matches will be toxic. And with just 1%, still about 10% of your matches will be toxic. The same goes for point 1 by the way. Even if a game does give you some useful things to look at while waiting for a respawn, those whom are likely to blame others for failure aren't likely to make use of these. Of course I should also add, that even if you were to change/take away these 2 things, there's no guarantee you'll fully solve toxicity. But speaking as someone who has yeeted many stress balls across my room, I can say that it has mostly happened when pressing buttons wouldn't do anything.

@_Ve_98

5 ай бұрын

​@@sitnamkradAlso, there's other options to fix respawn timers. In rainbow six, dying early means waiting the entire round to respawn, so they give you a way to help your team even after death by controlling the cameras and letting you give information to your teammates. It doesn't matter if what you give them to do before respawning is not very useful, but it can't be nothing.

I think that any game that puts random people together on a team and expects them to work in a high-stakes environment is always going to invite some toxicity, but I also think that a big factor is how that toxicity is addressed by the developers. If things like banning or systems that promote positive interactions are implemented (and implemented early) into a game, that can change how the gaming community interacts. And, to be fair, sometimes it is up to the community to manage that toxicity

@omarelfakihperez4466

5 ай бұрын

The channel pirate software has some shorts saying that dawngate had a system where it multiplied your account xp based on how many random people rated you a good user, and if you were a jerk the gring to max level would be massive. Of course, League came along, was way more competitive, had a bigger market and EA decided to kill it

@theman5000

5 ай бұрын

Worst part is it isn't even high stakes. The most you get for winning in ranked is a skin every year for getting to gold. And in wild rift everyone can get the rewards just by playing so it's an entirely EGO driven experience. This is coming from someone who loves the game but man there has never been a more useful setting than the "mute communications" button

@isaacmayer-splain8974

5 ай бұрын

Look at DRG, for example. The community is incredibly wholesome despite a large part of it being high-level dudes who mostly run the hardest difficulty, because the game encourages and rewards teamwork.

@foldionepapyrus3441

5 ай бұрын

The real kicker that throws toxicity up is when you are stuck investing 40 mins of your life on a game you can't possibly win and its obvious you can't possibly win even very early on . Once you team is being snowballed that hard you are just waiting for the other side to actually finish the job with very little you can do. Something like Rocket league you might get some toxicity, but as each round lasts a handful of mins before you are thrown into the next group the penalty for getting matched poorly is negligible, loose and move on almost immediately really stops the toxicity building. But a grindy slow game like most MOBA that are often not even fun to play for the vast majority of the match - as the hanging around slowly soaking up exp for the first 20 mins with no skills unlocked yet gives you so very little to do. It really doesn't make an engaging game at that time so will really draws out your annoyance at sitting through all the tedious crap with no change of this becoming a good competition once the game reaches its midpoint. And as the game always lasts so long means you quite possibly don't even get to play another round today with a new team that really gives you that potentially winnable gameplay challenge is always going to crank up the toxic, the players get an eternity of time to pick somebody to blame (especially the worst players on the team as they sit out the respawn timer and blame x for failing to hit and kill y etc).

@Kevin-cf9nl

5 ай бұрын

Counterpoint: Deep Rock Galactic puts random people together on a team and expects them to work in a high stakes environment, and has less toxicity than many single player games I know of. They hardly do any community management, there isn't any sort of ban system, etc. and so on. I think there's lots of reasons for this: Some solid core design elements to promote how often you feel grateful for your teammates instead of angry at them, the ability to hard carry by yourself if need be and thus only really having yourself to blame if things go south, a lack of real negative consequences for playing less than optimally or failing, and most important: No matchmaking. That last bit is important. In various multiplayer games I've played over the years, including competitive ones, matchmaking is the single biggest difference between toxicity levels. Games with matchmaking promote high toxicity, because the only currency that matters is win/loss ratio, while those with dedicated or peer to peer servers promote finding people you vibe with to play with, because the only currency that matters is social standing.

I believe the main reason for toxicity is the same system that enables for millions of people to enjoy MOBAs in the first place, being matched with random players. No matter what role or character you wish to play, you need people to fill the other roles, including the roles of your enemies, and the games wouldn't be nearly as popular and populated if it was only premade teams fighting each other. But the big downside of this approach is (excluding the difficulty of balancing each match) that you play with complete strangers that you will never meet again no matter how many matches you play (the exception being the small number of people in the highest possible brackets that tend to play each other again and again because the bracket is so small in size). Not only is it fairly difficult to feel any sort of empathy towards an anonymous person that you will never have to think about after half an hour, it's also why it is fairly easy to get angry at them and them at you, stoking the fires of anger with each new mistake, insult or intentional provocation. If the other person was someone you know and you know that you will still interact with each other after the match is over, most people (with the exception of really toxic people) will not get angry at a friend... even if you don't know someone in person, just knowing that they will still keep in touch with you or even play with you again on the same team makes is a lot less likely to behave in a toxic manner

@chexfan2000

5 ай бұрын

i once had the misfortune of living in an apt underneath four guys who all played LoL together, and they spent hours just SCREAMING in rage at each other. So it seems to provoke something regardless of your relationship to the others

JM, I find it to be an absolute sin that I never came across your work or was suggested it via Escapist. Having listened to your series this past month I absolutely love your content and the way your videos are structured. I look forward to seeing more of your future delves

not pvp, but player competition and requirements for group spots can become pretty bad in games when the difficulty or stakes for losing become too high. never got into wow because of how the systems encourage players to only look for people who have already done the content.

@essneyallen6777

5 ай бұрын

I agree! Most fun I had in wow was when I was one of a couple of people in the guild who just enjoyed showing new people around lower level dungeons. And it was in stark contrast to when I had to learn them myself and people were insufferable.

@stevethepocket

4 ай бұрын

It's like the job market! "Requirements: be no more than 20 years old and have 30 years experience in this field that has only existed for 10 years."

An Ai enemy only campaign would teach you what to do which would help. It would also let you learn a new characters a bit faster and easier.

@lilla4521

4 ай бұрын

An AI enemy only campaign? Do you mean Co-OP vs. AI? It doesn't teach you shit, but it's good for trying out new champs.

@stylesrj

4 ай бұрын

@@lilla4521 I would mostly stick to those matches in my League experience. Any time I went into PVP, I would be really bad. Same with bot matches except I had a slightly higher chance of winning :D

I tried to get into League. It's deep, and interesting. My problem wasn't so much that other people got salty, but that I was consistently failing my team because I didn't know wtf I was doing yet. That's the really brutal part. Worst learning curve in a PVP game I've ever experienced.

@1Raptor85

5 ай бұрын

I brought this up above as well but a lot of that comes down to the game being F2P, like many pvp games it actually does have matchmaking based on your level so new players are only matched with new players, has bot matches early on for training, etc, but the most toxic players are constantly creating new accounts and playing through these lower levels so as a new player you're basically seeing 80% of the other "new" players you're pairing against being experienced toxic players making a new alt....

@rcbinchicken

5 ай бұрын

Less of a curve and more of a wall. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't get better. Well, either that or I'm in undiagnosed-learning-disability territory. I've been playing it since 2016 and despite sinking more mental energy into it than any other game I've played, I almost never feel like I've improved; the sad truth is, compared to the other players I'm playing against, I probably haven't. The game is so intimidating to new players that there just aren't that many, so latecomers are forever trapped at the bottom of the pyramid; the matchmaking algorithm usually can't find anyone close enough to your skill level to be able to do its intended job.

Its why I enjoyed HotS for a long time. The fun of the genre was still there but with a much more accessible rule set that could be learned by most reasonable human beings. Had a much broader swathe of options for the teams to attempt and more than enough nuance to give skilled players a way to differentiate. Matches were shorter, usually 15-20 so even if you got the AFKer or toxic individual, the time time lost was minimal (and usually considerably less if the other team was given the opportunity to snowball uncontested). A lot of the toxicity I saw in that game was from people coming from other MOBAs that didn't understand that even several deaths early on didn't mean you were doomed; the catch-up mechanics in that game meant one team fight at the 20+ minute mark could swing things right back in your favor. Getting beaten down into the ground on my first try of LoL had me never wanting to play again and I know at least a dozen people of similar sentiment. I feel like if the toxicity issue isnt addressed, the MOBA community is just going to stagnate.

@verspunken

5 ай бұрын

Exactly. Surprised there was no mention of HotS here. FUn game, that largely addressed most of the issues raised. Shorter games, no laning phase, straight into team fights (the part of the game that's actually fun), no last hitting, shared experience, no all chat. Was a great game while it lasted.

@Sorain1

5 ай бұрын

Yup, it absolutely solved the conditions that lead to the issues. Unfortunately, those coming in had a foundation built on those bad incentives.

I very much enjoyed how Heroes of the Storm managed to combat nearly every one of the "inherent toxicity drivers" in the MOBA genre. Games are long? nope, games almost never hit 20 minutes You can see a failing player's stats and blame them? nope - the team has stats as a whole. Fixed Lanes with no way to help each other? Nope - it's very easy to swap players around to other lanes and generate better matchups, the map is fluid Lost resources because you're covering a friend? - you don't have to last hit, you just have to have someone near all the minion deaths, and you get all the xp. Heroes of the Storm very much felt like a second generation MOBA that learned from the core flaws of the genre and iterated.

@GustavoIto

5 ай бұрын

and its not hard to make a league of legends mode that works like that. They just don't care, as someone said, they even capitalize on these strong emotions, even the negative ones

@kylekonop4801

5 ай бұрын

And then they discovered that MOBA players had no interest in making their genre accessible or less toxic. HotS largely failed to take off, and I get the impression most of its playerbase is/was folks who don't think of themselves primarily as MOBA players.

@TheKrossRoads

5 ай бұрын

@@kylekonop4801 I wouldn't put the blame on the players, but rather Blizzard itself. It made a super casual MOBA, then attempted to bait in very serious MOBA players by forcing an e-sports scene with a ton of money. When that flopped because of how casual the game is built, Blizzard knew they wouldn't be taking a slice of the pro scene pie. And instead of re-adjusting the game to be "the MOBA for people who don't like MOBAs" (which there is a sizable market for), they just straight up abandoned it. Because if you're not going to make ALL the money, why have a product at all?

@kevingriffith6011

5 ай бұрын

@@kylekonop4801 HoTS was doing *fine*. The problem is that it wasn't a mega-success and therefor Activision wasn't interested in supporting it anymore. It didn't die, it was killed. And then it lived anyway because the quick play queues are still only ~2-3 minutes, and ARAM is even quicker.

@kylekonop4801

5 ай бұрын

@@TheKrossRoads I would argue HotS is casual only in that it doesn't have the 500-hour ramp-up learning curve of the competition. It's like modern vs. classic controls in SF6.

Ahh, I really like the topic here, it's something I've believed for a long time but haven't also been able to express well. Nice to see other people exploring the idea. I think most of the reasoning is spot on, too. The difficulty in helping a struggling player, the time commitment of a match, the need for coordination in the midst of anonymity, all contribute to toxicity. There's two things I'd want to add to that: first, in addition to the time commitment, most matches are determined long before their actual endpoint, even with surrender mechanics. It's common to have an experience where the outcome is already determined, but you have to keep playing the game or be hit with a leaver penalty, or even just the shame of giving up when there's still technically a chance. The second is how the meta has evolved so that particular types of characters are conventionally placed in particular lanes, which means that when a lane fails it's easy, even intuitive, to tell which lane it was. In theory that could be used to respond and do damage control, or review and improve for next time, but in practice it makes it easy for people to put blame on a specific person, especially if they're looking for a scapegoat. I think whether you can have a MOBA without the built-in toxicity depends on how strictly you define a MOBA. I would argue that Heroes of the Storm at least proved in theory that it could be done, exp shared across the team and map objectives being more siege options than character improvements reduced individual-character snowballing and specific team arrangements that make it so easy to put blame on people. It didn't fully solve things, but it made them look potentially more solvable. If there's one thing I'd want to try, it would be decoupling mid-match rewards and power from killing things. Give little to no rewards for killing minions, give few if any base rewards for killing enemy players. Instead, introduce supply caravans moving throughout the map, you gain rewards for getting yours to their destinations, or stopping enemy caravans from reaching theirs. Successful caravans keep your outposts defended and your siege engines firing. Probably give rewards for destroying structures, that's still the goal, and would have a meaningful effect on the battle. Finally, give bounties for enemy players having a run of success, either they're contributing to the battle and thus removing them for a time would have material effect, or they're making a nuisance of themselves and removing them helps your side get people to the actual meaningful fights more easily.

I think rock paper scissors style balancing can lead to it. Specifically in games like Overwatch. If someone wants to play Doomfist, but the enemy team chooses Sombra and Orisa, suddenly Doomfist is drastically less effective. But if you just love the character and want to enjoy a game, people will get mad at you for not switching out of an unfavorable match up. Then you end up with “Tank Diff” and similar stuff😊

@Loctorak

5 ай бұрын

Ooh, Overwatch. Now THERE'S a game that gave me a toxic experience. 😅

Something that always reinforces even more toxicity is teamplay. Obviously you cannot remove that from a Moba, but someone will always be more toxic at their teammates for losing than at the opponent for winning. The latter does happen, but also the latter is just way funnier? Like I don't feel bad if someone accuses me of spamming the same move over and over again in a fighting game. It's not my job to change that if I am winning. They need to force me to mix it up.

I’ve been getting back into Among Us recently and I’ve said something similar to your first point about the competitive scene in that game. The thing about games like among us is that for either side to win, someone on the other team usually has to make a mistake that can be exploited, and their teammates often can’t do much about it, even if they’re alive. A lot of games end up being decided by a single player making an incorrect judgment call. And in casual games like the ones I like this is fine, but if you try to get into competitive, this can lead to a lot of flaming when someone feels that they were right but nobody listened to them.

I used to just really binge Escapist for ZP so I dont have a reference, but I'd say I really like these videos for what they are. Gamurs really fumbled with these talents

I used to play alot of league and was mostly playing ADC or Top, but towards the end i started playing more Support and leading. I called out when objectives would spawn, ping where i thought enemy jungler was, and most importantly WARD EVERYTHING. I didnt blame others, and when i saw someone was tilting i tried to calm them down and say its not over until its over. I enjoyed it more because i felt like i had an actual impact in the game where psychology and team cohesion was the true goal. I also did the opposite, if the enemy got caught out or was making a mistake, i went into AllChat and tried to get the enemy team to start blaming each other. If theyre busy arguing, theyre not noticing the top laner split pushing into their base

I never got into League. I tried, I truly did, but I kept getting hit with this toxicity right out the gate, even when I didn't know wtf I was doing cause I was new. Shit like people screaming 'Mid or I feed' and then still bumrushing into the enemy and dying repeatedly because someone didn't choose the character they demanded the person play (even if they didn't have it). Or just the amount of people who did shit at the game and kept screaming at the team that it was their fault. It put me off LoL. Some MOBAs have done better, like Smite has had a better community for me whenever I get the urge to go play it ever once in a blue moon.

@crazyluigi6664

4 ай бұрын

I was suck(er)ed into Pokémon Unite for a couple of years myself, and this video more or less hit the nail on the head there.

Design delve episode about fear and hunger would be really cool, as this, at first glance, simple rpg has a lot of interesting mechanics

@all-bonesjones

5 ай бұрын

i agree. the game integrates so many subsystems from so many totally different genres (roguelike, jrpg, survival horror, immersive sim) that it's impossible to get anyone to agree on any genre for it and even harder to describe it to new players

I think it shows us what we are like when we think we aren’t being watched. There is a report system with the potential for getting banned but nothing to stop someone who like to be toxic for kicks to start a new account and ruin bot and low elo matches for new players. There is no permanence of punishment because you can get a new account after a ban.

This is why I'm thankful that Valve are now stepping up their efforts to reduce cheating, toxicity and smurfing in DOTA. Not even pros or famous streamers are safe. It's definitely improved the game tremendously over the last few months

The difference between RDO's and GTAO's community highlighted exactly how game mechanics influence wider community. RDO's mechanics didn't incentivise griefing at all and it was easy to just disappear from aggressive players. Whereas GTAO actively encouraged this game wise and there was little to do if someone far more powerful kept doing it.

@negative6442

5 ай бұрын

PvP in GTAO can at least be rather fun if you're on relatively equal footing, even if the other guy is being a bit toxic. At least that's how it was when I stopped playing in 2019

@bobemor

5 ай бұрын

@@negative6442 yeah wasn't so bad if they just had a gun, but if they had an oppressor? Forget about it. But even then the game mechanics actively encouraged destroying things that took other players considerable time. RDO's conversely doesn't and often has no real negative effects for the player griefed.

My blood pressure was thankful that i moved to Arams, summoners rift is like a prison you voluntarily go into.

I don't know why but the Dawngate community was always friendly and helpful. My friends and I briefly tried LoL and DOTA2 but quickly quit due to bad player behaviour despite having a friend willing to show us the ropes. In contrast when we tried the Dawngate beta not only were our team kind and supportive but so we're the enemy team. My friend tried jungling with a new character for the first time, stumbled across an enemy player with the same character doing the exact same thing. Instead of ganking the massively under leveled player he spent the entire match teaching my friend how to jungle. The rest of us happily played the rest of the match with each team 1 player down.

This is why I switched to ARAMs exclusively, it addresses nearly every point you brought up. Very little laning and it isnt solo, shorter matches, much less map complexity, people being forced to use different champs (the champ rng is both a blessing and a curse for both sides, so sometimes it sucks and other times it's awesome). People are still toxic at times but it's much less acceptable and expected

@JanTGTX

5 ай бұрын

Interesting, that's also what I did and a good point. Long before I quit LoL for good I also played ARAM a lot. That and the 3v3 map with friends. I think I actually had the most fun with 3v3. If one player fucks up, at least the game's over after 10-15 mins.

@Inuyashapupped

5 ай бұрын

See, for me that doesn't work, mainly because my least favorite thing about ARAM is getting in a no-win situation where even with rerolls the enemy just won by having a better comp. which sadly happens far more often than you would suspect given rng. Admittedly some of this DOES come down to some ridiculous tryhards that optimize their champ pools for aram, but regardless it feels bad

I'm not sure if I would characterize optional objectives like Roshan or Baron as catch-up mechanics? Usually that would imply something struggling players have either an easier time to obtain or can gain more advantage from than the players in the lead. While it is true that a losing team could take those objectives to turn the game around, the winning team can as well to push their advantage. In fact they will often have an easier time doing so, since they can win the fights faster and will have an easier time getting to safety if their opponent tries an ambush. Especially in Dota, while I do not play anymore, I do still sometimes watch tournaments. And while I would be happy to be corrected by someone who can cite actual statistics, I have seen the Aegis of the Immortal used far more often by the winning team to protect a risky winning push than by the losing team to turn the tide. Similarly, a winning team will often flat out cut the opponent off from valuable creep camps or the secret shop. So tldr: since being ahead makes it even easier to take advantage of bonus objectives, I am not sure how accurate it would be to call them catch up mechanics.

The worse thing is that players are punished for leaving when they don't want to continue playing a lost game with team mates throwing the game by refusing to work as a team trying to solo three other people.

@corylong5808

5 ай бұрын

Resigning, even in team play, should be easy. Better to lose because your teammate is done than be forced to play with someone forced to play with you when they don't want to and lose anyways.

@Healermain15

5 ай бұрын

Restarting should be very quick in general, preferably by just making the games short.

@Thanatos2k

5 ай бұрын

It's a combo thing - everyone knows that leavers are scum. How many games have you lost because some piece of garbage left after the first hero death? So there's tremendous pressure to not be a leaver. So instead you suffer through a game you know you've already lost - and people in that situation are not nice to the others they perceive to be the cause of their suffering.

@RumpusImperator

5 ай бұрын

Never having played, I don't understand why a team doesn't surrender once it's clear you can't win. Is there any benefit to playing to the bitter end, or do some players just get a kick out of "punishing" their teammates?

There's also the respawn time. FPS games typically have a respawn time of a couple seconds, whereas even the fastest respawn in mobas is about 10 seconds (some being more than 30), and that's before you factor in that the walk back is ALSO slower. That makes it worse as a catch-up mechanic, but more important is the phycological effect of that. Giving a bit of time is good to give the player a breather and recognize where they went wrong, but too much time leads to rumination; also if you decide the fault is another player's that gives time for a full salvo of insults and slurs rather than time for the single message you have time for in games with shorter timers.

sounds like it also suffers from shard punishment personal reward. Players on your team that end up dying punish the whole team as that progression now make the other team hard via a stronger player, but any teammate that dose well doesn't disseminate that progression to other players. A lowing tide drops all boats but a rising tide only raises your boat, players are expected to work together for the benefit of other players rather then benefit of the whole team.

7:55 I can think of some sources of toxicity, and it's in my favorite multiplayer game: Team Fortress 2. People don't get too toxic in that game, but it does happen. And where it happens the most is around specific things: the Wrangler, the Short Circuit, the Gas Passer (in an alternate game mode,) the Conniver's Kunai, the Scorch Shot, the Phlogistinator, the Sniper Rifles, the Vaccinator, "facestabs,"... and random crits. They all have one thing in common: way too much influence around the pressing of a single button, specifically where undeserved. Sure, they have their downsides, but they're all outweighed by A) not having to click on the same dude twice, or B) making others have to click on you four times instead of twice. If you know these weapons, you know, but for the diligent reader I'll write each example: -The Wrangler gives 66% damage reduction to your Sentry gun and doubles its fire rate if you press '2' on your keyboard; -The Gas Passer can trivialize one-shotting most of the robots in the 'Mann vs. Machine' game mode; -The Kunai's backstabs can feed you endless healing, to prevent multiple witnesses from stopping your chainstabs; -The Scorch Shot causes knockback, potentially over 125 damage, and feeds the Phlogistinator's so-called "Mmmph" meter; -The Phlogistinator can charge its "Mmmph" meter and be given a friendly Medic's stock Ubercharge, to wipe out entire teams; -Sniper Rifles can pop someone for 150 damage (Half the classes can't survive that) in 0.3 seconds, every 1.8 seconds, at any distance; -The Vaccinator can reduce incoming ranged damage by 75% and disable their crits; -A "Facestab" is caused by latency or lag, allowing a Spy to backstab somebody who's facing them. -Random crits are 200% more damage with no distance penalty. 'Nuff said. Ironically, it's because of random crits that people don't get toxic around the Direct Hit, the Force A' Nature, and a few other hard hitters. Sure, they're "way too much with a single button," but they get compared to the stock rocket launcher firing a crit rocket that unalives 5 people at once.

@youtubeuniversity3638

2 ай бұрын

I personally would prefer having to shoot my enemies twice as much over them only having to shoot me half as much, and rather need to be shot twice as much than only need shoot half as much.

This is why I love Heroes of the Storm and hope Blizzard comes back to it someday (with the microsoft thing, we can get more franchises...) Getting rid of gold and denying, and making xp shared across the whole team, seems to quell some of the inherent toxic stuff.

@gwen9939

5 ай бұрын

well, laning is also the key appeal of playing League. It's a fun, more honed experience, whereas HotS kind of feels like you're loading into a theme park jumping from one attraction to the next. The announcer literally tells you where to go and beyond that you just gotta follow the flow. You feel a lot less powerful than you do in league and with less personal agency due to the coupled leveling and gold. It's fine to prefer HotS, but what causes League to have higher toxicity is also tied to its unique appeal of reaching a power fantasy during a match. And it's not like toxicity is absent from HotS entirely. It was just as easy for people to find that one person who they felt didn't do their job and now the entire team has less XP than the enemy at a crucial moment.

@badluckprophet9103

5 ай бұрын

Agreed. HotS feels a lot more team oriented because of those differences. A typical league game is VERY swayed by one lane doing well or falling behind. Not to mention the rigid meta where you can get lane countered or camped by the jungle and its YOUR problem to figure out rather than someone just swapping with you or the team doing counter rotations together. It's gotten better but you could get reported and banned in UNRANKED in League for doing something too off meta because anything different than the pros do is obviously trolling.

@gwen9939

5 ай бұрын

@@badluckprophet9103 people getting banned from playing off-meta? Me when I'm lying on the internet, I've literally never heard of this. You started an argument about it in all chat and it escalated to toxicity is what I'm hearing. I would regularly play Leona top and no one cared because it was unranked, and even if they did complain I would never get banned for it, that's just crazy.

@badluckprophet9103

5 ай бұрын

@gwen9939 Nah not me. Which makes my argument weaker of course because I'm repeating internet hearsay. But before they started community reviews of reports the automated system would just ban you if enough people reported you for the same thing. And people claimed (perhaps not truthfully) that they reported you for feeding/trolling if your off meta pick didn't work out. I also remember a BIG argument around some guy who played roaming support singed though I think that was ranked. A lot of people were REALLY mad that he was "support" but didn't stay bot to babysit the adc. This was also before I think some pro popularized a roaming alister support? Like I said, it's gotten better and I haven't seen NEAR the toxicity in League that I used to. But I did get flamed a lot years ago in normals for trying to play off meta (only when losing my lane mind you). It helps that pros have done off meta things as well over the years but that was/is a huge problem that everyone thought they were world tournament quality only being held back by their teams so if you played for fun instead of like winning was your job they HATED you. Pros decided the meta and not following it at every level of play was trolling and reported as such. Again, better now. I still can't play a game without seeing gg ez and the like but I haven't been told to off myself or called a racial slur in YEARS.

@kotlolish

5 ай бұрын

I have actually carried games on HoTS as my specialists.. not cause I was murdering the enemy, but cause I was controlling the map to perfection. As long as I didn't die during fights... I was out there controlling the map and forcing enemies to use objectives to stop me. Let's say Murky became a favorite due to me able to be suicidal and come back quickly. But my truest favorite Probius (or nerfed to the groundius) The reason I am saying this... This was HOTS is more important mechanic.. not fighting and murdering the enemy team, but controlling the map.. because.. as long as my Xul, Murky or Probius was out there... the enemy team COULDNT push fully through.. cause 5 of them couldn't push that much stronger then vs me. Unless they split push but then they risk me sniping off one of their own specialists. Wich was always fun for me. Specialist was my go to style.. controlling that dang map was all I did.

Smash bros Ultimate and Splatoon are specific instances where recently I feel like the multi-player encourages someone getting toxic. Simply by having a score that goes up and down depending on whether you win and lose, respectively it creates an aggression when you have a decent streak of wins which comes to a stop with specific player(s). It feeds the winners and makes you feel angry when you inevitably hit that brick wall.

@crazyluigi6664

4 ай бұрын

For Smash Bros. specifically, there's a reason why I prefer the single player stuff over the rankings of online multiplayer that was forced there.

Maybe discuss how the ways developers have designed features in their games, to be against toxicity, never actually solve the problem.

A lot of games are like this nowadays sadly. They've basically removed most or all features that provide or assist with making positive teamwork and encounters. It's safer to have no proximity/main chat at all entirely than to try and mess with filters and such, for example. Doesn't make a better game, but the people physically programming/designing the game aren't the ones making the final call either, which is how you get talented studios who seem to make extremely poor/weird decisions, not always but frequently enough.

I'd say Heroes of the Storm actually made strides in addressing a lot of these core elements. The party-wide level means that any one well-performing player can pull their team forward from any point on the map. Regular map-specific objectives encourage coming together for team fights. Creep recruitment makes jungling a lot more accessible for newcomers. The lack of last-hitting and item shops streamlines the experience of building any given character. But a lot of these elements are treated by the more hardcore MOBA fans as simplifications that dilute the experience, and Blizzard's mismanaged the game badly on the business side.

@TheMoneyhats

5 ай бұрын

I agree about heroes of the storm. It also made it much more accessible as you weren't as heavily punished if you were trying to learn a new hero and weren't doing well.

@robbybevard8034

5 ай бұрын

Yeah I really like how HoTS approached a lot of the annoyances and streamlined the game. It's a shame Blizzard just kind of gave up on it.

@MrBubblebox

5 ай бұрын

wouldin't use HOTS as an example considering blizzard bans for zero reason ignores appeals and by default sends your appeals to a bot (that refuses by default) and that world chat is filled with people talking openly about how much they want to support the funni german salute

@illusive-mike

5 ай бұрын

@@MrBubblebox And if I made any claim that the HotS community is factually less toxic, this argument might hold water. But HotS was brought up by this very video as sharing the toxicity-inducing foundational MOBA mechanics (which simply isn't true), and anything regarding the wider community falls outside the scope. Even if the world chat became infested since I disengaged from Blizzard for unrelated reasons, that wouldn't change HotS's core design as a game.

@MrBubblebox

5 ай бұрын

@@illusive-mike it does because if their changes worked then it would be atl east EQUAL to the other examples. but no it's the most toxic cess pit of the three. and always has been even before being abandoned which points to the supposed strides being ineffectual at best.

I call this the "group project effect". It reminds of group projects we do on school, where everyone says "each one does their part and we put it together to present". Everyone can make something correct and it might not be cohesive at the end and the result is not as good as if everyone did it together from the beginning. For League is a little worse than for DotA, since DotA allows you to teleport to another lane and help them out on a gank or counter-dive easier. When the top and mid answer quickly to a gank on the bot lane, it quickly changes it from a 3x2 into a 3v4 or 3v5. There is also the Teleport Gate that connects top and bottom, and two outposts for each team that allows the team controlling it to teleport there, since TP scrolls allow you to teleport only to your towers or the outposts. So while everyone is playing their own lane, maybe the dual lanes top and bottom, or the solo lane mid, you have the possibility of quickly relocating to another area of the map and making some impact there. It adds more Team responsibility to each player. Also, voice chat makes a big difference because it allows for quick communication and strategizing. Although in League, allowing voice chat without any other support to teamplay will only pile on the toxicity

As someone who has played LoL for over 10 years, and never accepts the surrender vote, I don't do it to "hold players hostage", I do it because I've seen many miraculous victories and because I understand that I can't win every game. I'd rather lose repeatedly than give up at 15 min every time.

@crazyluigi6664

4 ай бұрын

I've had miracle wins myself coming back from the jaws of defeat myself. Same thing losing games where we honestly should have won, but something screwed the team over in the end (either me or something else, to be fair). So I can relate, even though I usually wait until it's crystal clear for me to surrender myself.

NGL I found it kind of funny that the video ran Overwatch footage under (paraphrased) "other games don't have this kind of toxicity". As both a former League player and an openly queer tank main many years ago in Overwatch 1 I encountered even more toxicity in OW than I ever did in League. Losing a body in a teamfight was such a massive disadvantage in that game it often led to cascade failure and a never-ending blame game.

What a fun series, can't wait to watch more of these! You're points were also spot on. As someone who's played far too much LoL, the amount of times that I've felt meaningless in a match in spite of my own performance is staggering. Doesn't matter how well you perform because if the wrong champ/hero gets fed on the enemy team that's all she wrote. At least, it can feel that way. I always subscribed to the 'never give up' mentality despite the odds, but after a while that just degraded to cynicism and longing for the successful surrender vote. And for the times when you're the one causing such a problem it feels terrible, often leading to yourself getting tilted and can be worsened by teammates flaming you. If people would just opt to offer constructive criticism with a bit of encouragement instead of saying "lane diff" for the bajillionth time, the experience would be far better.

I think laning is a big issue. A feature to share success across lanes would help. Say I could send my minions to your lane if you're struggling. Or if I defeat a tower and you're behind the game auto adjusts them. I think the best way to do this is to create a "bet". If I send you help because you're struggling it feels like me wasting resources on you and I get mad. But if I feel more in control if I can place a "bet". By limiting my own resources for a period I give the team a boost. If I survive that period I win the bet and get a bonus reward. Then I feel like a hero. I took a risk, helped the team out and got rewarded. In competitive play this would be hard to balance. There, instead of helping lesser skilled team mates, it's a deliberate sharing of risk and reward across the team.

I played LoL in seasons 1-3, didn't take it too seriously and had a good time. Wouldn't dream of trying to get back into it now with the multiple encyclopedias worth of knowledge I'd need to memorise to even participate in casual games...

A single player campaign which slowly teaches the basics is a necessity for any multiplayer game. It doesn't need to teach bounce cancelling and wrong-chain but a good 70% of the nuts 'n' bolts of mechanics. Alot of multiplayer games I've played are fun because of the insane high level play. The meta of mechanics and finding the silver-bullet spicy solution to a problem. MOABs tend to platuo in terms of execution & strategy, at a certain point and it comes to down to endurance tests of executing proper clicks, with the hopes of outlasting the opponent.

This series has become one of my new favorites. The pacing, insights, and topics are all great.

I remember a younger chap trying to get me into playing League back in 2012... ? I hadn't heard of it at the time so I went looking for reviews and let's plays. I have to say, it was clear the game was not aimed like a guy like me. So, I simply told the other player that I wasn't interested. About two years later he threw in the towel because of how increasingly competitive every group had gotten and he felt like he had others things he'd rather do to unwind. He still loves the game and speaks well of it. But, he now actively screens for more chuckle-focused groups than competitive ones.

Totally tracks. My first time playing League, I easily made my way through the short tutorial and went into an unranked match. Not only did I not have any idea what I was doing in regards to things like the Shop, I was kicked after the game ended for "purposely feeding" the other team. Uninstalled it right away and haven't looked back.

One of the things I liked about _PlanetSide 2_ was that its scale was small enough to where one individual good play could make a difference, but large enough to where one individual _bad_ play didn't necessarily mean defeat. It was unlikely that you alone would be jumped on for a loss when you were one of thirty or more players on your side of a battle. I would never play a MOBA or other small-squad PVP game, even minus the abuse, because that sort of performance stress hanging over me is not enjoyable.

would recommend making a Design Delve on Dawngate(unfortunately cancelled), especially how they dealt with toxicity in their beta period

@spazzyphantasm

5 ай бұрын

Hey there it is.

@heychrisfox

5 ай бұрын

All my homies love Dawngate. I'm still so glad people still talk and remember the game fondly. It was an absolute delight, in every way.

This is why i personally believe that Heroes of the Storm was really a fantastic way to do a MOBA. The game forced you to work with your with a team because your levels were tied together. On top of that, most of the maps weren't to insanely large you could rotate more often to help other lanes while not giving to much of your own. Objectives in the game were so impactful (whether or not this is a good thing can be debated) that your team could not ignore it as it could swing a game to anyone's favor very quickly. The time it took to complete a match was around 20-35 min and you also didn't have to worry about "buying items", just choose a talent. But sadly because of all of those reasons, it just kinda died and this is because, you as a solo player could carry but so much before the rest of the team dragged you down. In games like DOTA 2 and LoL, a single person on a team could just wipe a whole squad. Hell thats why "Pentakill" and the term ADC exist because those were possibilities that could happen. Personally, I think that while everyone wants to play with others, they dont necessarily want to play as a team.

Its the feeling of heplessness that makes these games so toxic. I hate the feeling of playing a match well just to still have no chance in winning. The way a player on your own team can help the enemy so much is really frustrating

When you are forced to play with other players of varying skill levels and even wants out of a game you are going to run into problems. The higher the skill level needed to play, the more toxic the game will be when people don't know the basics of how to play but play anyway.

@Healermain15

5 ай бұрын

That's just a new player, which is everyone at some point.

This was a great watch for me. I've been part of the LoL community for ten years now and the toxicity only seems to get worse year on year. When I first made an account all the time ago (back when you bought those lil rune tokens and the tutorial was still on Howling Abyss) and tried to learn, even before elemental drakes and alcoves and a butt load more champions were introduced, not only did the client teach me very little but there was so much to take in from champion abilities to item buffs to objective management etc etc that I just gave up trying. I also wasn't about to waste an hour of my life per game being flamed and inted by people with 'main character syndrome' who are on smurf accounts, and with patches rolling out more regularly and Riot experimenting more everything you only just learned becomes a scrambled mess. Riot is at least trying to curb some of the in game toxicity with changes to ping systems, voting on objectives and chat options like 'deafen', but I feel like it's always going to be a beast that can't really be controlled. Which is disappointing to say, but it's the reality. For a team game, not a lot of teamwork happens.

@wrlck4841

5 ай бұрын

Decreasing the ability to effectively communicate even with pings in a team based game doesn't help toxicity if anything it increases it. It's a TEAM based tactical game some form of communication is essential. If people can't handle pings they should maybe play minecraft instead

@FizzieWebb

5 ай бұрын

@@wrlck4841 I've spent far longer than I care to admit trying to formulate a concise response to this, but... wow... Cause.. y'know, if someone just starting out, like first week or so of play, jumps into an *unranked* game, they shouldn't have to worry about being bodied by people on smurf accounts, and then have "enemies are missing" pinged all over them while team chat calls them all manner of names and slurs because they had the audacity to not be as good a pro player after bullying bots for 4-6 days. You want people to stop being toxic, then remove or change the systems that enable that toxicity. Change the "Enemies are missing" ping from ? to a pair of binoculars or something, implement a system where players that are continuously toxic can have their chat privilege's revoked, or hell, maybe implement a mentor system so that players who are commended often can queue to join a special playlist that is normally only accessible to players below a certain account level, and act as coaches and guides, teaching players the games systems. The solution should never be "tell a part of the playerbase to fuck off and play something else".

@paulgibbon5991

5 ай бұрын

@@wrlck4841 So you've never had the constant aggravation of ? spams when you die or do something they disapprove of? Even if you ignore it (and I firmly believe being an emotionless automaton should not be required to enjoy a game), it's still useless visual noise that makes it harder to play.

So interesting! Well written and well delivered - looking forward to the next!

I fully agree with this vid, i talk about these points as part of the reason why i quit back in 2016. you make an excellent point about recourse management, and how you cant do much to make up for a teammate's mistake/misplay. I lost a ranked game once because during a huge comeback, out ahri didnt get a pentakill, so they DCed and we did not have the fire power to take down their turrets... it was an ace at 70 min in...

"Your mum Fat bum Wide tum" More beautiful than any Haiku could ever be😂

@noatrope

5 ай бұрын

:D

@crazyluigi6664

4 ай бұрын

Not even a limerick, yet super quick.

Heroes of the Storm does have a few elements in place that seem to quell toxicity. Gold and Exp are shared, so no one gets left behind. Also, personal contribution isn't really visible at a glance, which means people will usually wait before going at each other's throats. That said, I also firmly believe the community in general has a more relaxed culture. The difference in toxicity between LoL and HotS is staggering, which makes me think it's not just a matter of mechanics but also of playerbase culture.

@stevethepocket

4 ай бұрын

Just _being_ a new and different game in a genre whose most popular game is infamous for toxicity probably helps, because all the terrible people are already hooked on that game and have no reason to invade another one just to make everyone miserable.

I realized pretty early in my League career that the feedback loops really didn't react well with my personality- I either get anxious to drop the lead or incredibly frustrated if I'm getting stomped. So I ended up almost exclusively playing Co-Op vs AI, which obviously got extremely monotonous, so I eventually played less and less until you get to now... I don't have League on my new PC because I haven't felt compelled to reinstall. Some genres just aren't for everyone, I guess.

I thought I'd give my perspective as someone who tried MOBAs briefly and then transitioned to Fighting Games (another genre famous for poor new player experience). My experience is 1 game of League, and a few dozen hours of Pokemon Unite in the first month after launch. In League I knew LITERALLY nothing about the game or the genre, I turned on the game, picked a random free character. And ran face first into death for 20 minutes. I mostly went... left?.. but after dying a lot wandered the jungle for a few minutes pointlessly. I realized there was a shop halfway through but didn't know what to pick so I clicked one that said damage go ^. After realizing I had been dying so much I was under leveled and that I had no hope, I gave up. I quit the game mid-match and uninstalled it. I have vague memories that my teamates yelled at me but I could be misremembering. Unite I was more devoted to, I like Pokemon and the game length was much more reasonable to me. I tried a few mains but settled on Snorlax since no one ever picked Defender and it was easy to fill that slot. I mostly went top lane and over all I think I was pretty good in low rank. I had wanted to get competitive with Unite and really climb the ladder but after a while I got REALLY disillusioned, Dreadnaw and Zapdos were such huge swings that when I saw my team handling them wrong I started getting angry. I started developing strategies taking my teamates playing poorly into account and even worse it started working. I was making REALLY bad plays as Snorlax like going into the jungle just to cover my teamates weaknesses and I knew I wasn't improving I was just carrying my team against players who had a similarly low understanding of the game flow. I realized I wasn't going to be able to improve until I got to the higher ranks so I focused on climbing, and this is where I hit a wall. It took SO LONG to climb. Every game was a coin flip. As a Tank main I couldn't swing games in my favor by playing out of my mind, which left me reliant on my teamates. So every game I would hold my ground top for 70% of the game and then an enemy bot laner would show up several levels higher than me becausd my entire team had been feeding him all game and we would lose on the spot. Nearly every game I actually played I had the least deaths but as many kills as anyone else. I felt worthless, like I had no control over whether I won or lost and could only keep flipping the coin every 10 minutes and watch my rank slowly creap up. I felt like my time was being wasted and it was making me angry. I don't like being angry so I just, stopped playing. I know I wasn't as good as I make myself sound, I play a lot of games and have a good understanding of macro-level strategy but I only did a few hours of research into ways to improve. But sometimes I think if I had a way to skip to the next rank, would I still be playing? Would I have reached the point I was the problem and found joy in improving myself? I found Fighting Games enjoyable because at every level there was something obvious I could improve on. Motion Inputs, Buffering, Neutral, Anti-Airs, Combos, Setups, Whiff-Punishes, Safe Jumps, Option Selects. There is always something to optimize. I'm sure it's the same in MOBAs, but to me it felt like I was better off waiting until I had good teamates, or just not playing at all.

What an excellent breakdown of the genre. I found this one fascinating. I usually steer away from this style multiplayer, but I get why it’s so fun for people

This video shows the experience in game design. I always wondered why. Amazing

I think you said it best when you compared LoL's design to a petri dish. Because the most common use for them is to isolate specific things, or to see if something is present. And then they're sterilized and destroyed, because keeping them around on a petri dish is just asking for bad things to happen. Being toxic isn't just something *you* do: it's also something that other people see happening, and something that happens to other people. For the people seeing it happen, they see that that's an acceptable way to behave. So they're more likely to be toxic. For the people it happens to, they either stop playing or they also get to see that being toxic has no repercussion, so they're also more likely to respond poorly. As of today, the game is like a cat cafe. A wonderful idea... provided that someone else is taking care of all the cat hair and cat poop and cat pee and angry cats and people who were never taught how to behave around cats, et cetera. And the devs are too busy making another six billion things to make sure that happens.

I loved this take, I have never been able to put it into words! Keep up the great work!

Most of these points can be expanded to all games with a competitive scene. Nothing breeds contempt more than giving people an individual rank that other players can easily affect.

@lordxmugen

5 ай бұрын

ranked modes in team games is such a joke considering how analog a skill rating becomes when you begin adding multiple variables beyond something as binary as W/L record. To the point where even if you ARE GOOD at carrying babies, you are actually negatively impacting your own ability to play with other people because the queue just gets longer and longer trying to match you up with people of similar stats that youre better off smurfing just to be able to play the game at all.

@Noximillien-LHorloger

5 ай бұрын

exept them youll get randomly curb stomped by way better players, wich feels terrible too. in LoL its similar to smurfing, wich is already a big problem, so no fcking ty!!!@@scrittle

@_Bungus

5 ай бұрын

@@Noximillien-LHorloger I can confidently say that I vastly enjoyed the dice roll of getting placed with random people of random skill levels over the shitty dance that is bouncing between games that require you to push your hardest to succeed, failing, and getting put in games where you can sleepwalk all over the enemy team for a few rounds until you inevitably get put back in with your "skill level." Makes me bored and frustrated far more often than not. Thinking of old CoD games, at least- when one guy on the enemy team was fucking everything up, I could still kill the other teammates. And if I got put in a lobby with a clan I could just leave and queue back up for a different lobby with actually normal people. I was enjoying myself far more often than not. It's not ideal, but it simply works better, even if for no other reason than people have the freedom to play however they want because they aren't constantly being pushed to their limits to be "good" enough to feel like they're actually having a good game- which is just a carrot on a stick because once you get "good" enough to start having fun, you get bumped up a skill level and play with people who will push you even further.

@lordxmugen

4 ай бұрын

@@bugjams The problem with eSports is, unless its a fighting game, theres no "actual way" to get to the "sport" part. That part is largely made for show, like most "legit" sports are. With no way for an average player to access to the upper echelon's of supposed "esports" because of a lack of minor leagues and ways to engage in most organized play from the game client itself, how can you call such a "sport"? At least with fighting games, its as simple as finding where a big tournament is being organized and showing up. THIS is why most ranked matchmaking doesnt matter.

There was one game i heard of called dawn gate that fought toxicity by incentivizing being nice to people. Essentially the experience you gain from each match would double if another player voted you positively, and it stacked up to like 32x. So if you were rude, it would take you way longer to rank up, and everyone was nice to each other

@Tortferngatr

5 ай бұрын

Dawngate’s karma system idea was nice in theory, but in practice it kind of fell apart the moment norms around bothering with the karma system did. If people stop caring about the anti-toxicity system, then it stops functioning. (I think some of that is on some other iffy reward design choices Waystone/EA made as well, but still.) The karma system needed more reasons to encourage people to engage with it for its own sake than just keeping up community expectations.

Very interesting. A friend (who wouldve thought) introduced me to league a few months ago, and my theory for toxicity has been the fact that both nothing and everything happens at once. You're technically using a single button to move and attack and a few occasional ones for abilities, but at the same time you've got like 6 minions to take care of, the enemy, denying farm for the enemy, objectives, and so on and so forth. Moreover the long respawn times and the slow ass walking speed out of spawn create an environment where half of the time you could just as well type in chat, cuz you've got absolutely nothing else to do

I used to be a smite player but backed away because I got tired of most of my games devolving into half the team arguing instead of playing. If you have time to type you have time to do your job. We don’t have to win, I have had so many losses I loved because it was a fight both ways for the victory, or it was a turn around upset at the end. I have also hated wins due to stomping the other team so badly that the match is over in minutes. And this is a message for the players who base everything on what the Pros do when they play. Unless you are a pro player it doesn’t matter how you play or what build you use. Play in a way that works for you and only you. And don’t expect other players to play the same way. They are not you.

I want to say I appreciate you and this series. Someday I hope to make video games, so I try and study this sort of thing. Used to watch Extra Credits until they put both feet in their mouth. So thank you for doing this.

There is a massive difference between playing with a friend group on a full team, and playing with randoms within each MOBA. With friends, you can mess around, learn more, and get better at a relatively decent pace. With randoms, you will learn new and colorful swears which puts Tenma to shame. Plus, the addiction aspect of MOBAs doesn't help. I know many end up playing the game over being productive, eating, sleeping, or any other meaningful action. I ended up like that too, and had to quit cold turkey. I am never going back to that hard drug of a game.

I keep track of a lot of statistics about my ranked games in an attempt to climb better. This includes things like cs tracking at several different intervals, how many of what kinds of fight I take (1v1s, 2v3s, etc), my personal objective damage, and how many times I died for nothing. My favorite stat to get blindly mad at is what i call 'helping', which is like ganks, but covers the entire game. Anytime another play takes the initiative to move over and help in any way, that counts. In platinum elo, as top especially, i can go 25 minutes or more- sometimes entire games- without a teammate helping me a single time. Meanwhile, the average amount of help my enemy gets by 15 minutes, when i consider the lane to be over, is just under eleven. Eleven, to my personal average of 0.09. It has been 29 games since i was last helped in top before 15 minutes.

Loving this series! Keep it up :) On the topic, it sounds like the inflexibility of the meta and long game times is creating a pretty awful environment for generating toxicity. My only thoughts are either a MOBA with more round based combat (seems silly and I don't even like that) or a MOBA that has capture points which spawn more mobs for the side that holds them, but these mobs are also weaker to feed experience to the side that's behind. It would be difficult to get right but I think it could create a new risk vs reward aspect for capturing a point, and supporting the teams who are behind I haven't played a moba in years though, so it may not be the best solution

A lot of the stuff in this video is stuff I'd kind of figured out on my own, though framing the source of laning phase's toxicity as "I can't afford to help because it'll hurt my own lane's performance" instead of "my idiot teammate is losing us the game" is an angle I hadn't considered. Objectives, on the other hand--well, I have a specific problem with objectives, and it's that you naturally have to fight the enemy team at them. This hampers your ability to turn that objective into a comeback, because...well, if you're already behind, you're not magically gonna have extra damage just because you're fighting over Baron or Roshan. Fundamentally, taking a comeback objective in League of Legends requires you to be able to fight the enemy team effectively, and that's something you _CAN'T_ do if you're already on the back foot. They don't function as comeback mechanics, because in the very situation that you _NEED_ a comeback mechanic...it becomes much, much harder to actually trigger the mechanic.

@CrysJaL

5 ай бұрын

If anything Baron and Dragon are jsut snowball mechanics. All they're there to do is encourage teamfights as the midgame starts and yes, the stronger team will usually win. Sure superior coordination and luck can see a lucky swing, but not very often.

@TehNoobiness

5 ай бұрын

@@CrysJaL It's a shame, because ambushes and sneaky dragon/baron plays are actually some of my favorite parts of the game--they emphasize the combination of macro-level strategy and micro-level teamwork that makes League interesting to me. But...the game's not really designed around that. It's designed around letting one or two players snowball until they're too powerful to stop.

@CrysJaL

5 ай бұрын

@@TehNoobiness Indeed. At the team level it works, because you're coordinated and can plan strategies around certain objectives. But League doesn't have a voice chat system, no way to easily communicate quickly for the normal player. You do occasionally see a steal, or otherwise a sneaky play but it's far less common than "won a teamfight, let's get Dragon".

@TehNoobiness

5 ай бұрын

@@CrysJaL Frankly, I think it's more that early-game struggle that's highlighted in the video. You're conditioned to think of your teammates as primarily a burden, because...9 games out of 10, at least one of them _is._ It is an objective statement of fact that if one of your teammates dies a couple times in the early game, they become more of a liability than an ally. _Because_ of this, coordinating to take a dragon is...well, something you only see with premade teams, because who would trust the 0/5 Vayne top to actually play well around an objective? She can't even play well around her laner...

I remember some 2-3 years ago there was a student thesis regarding how modern online games encourage toxicity. Brings up alot of the points that were brought up here and even uses League as its prime example.

A great companion piece for this remaster (tysm btw) would be looking at how Heroes of the Storm, for example, works its design to mitigate those issues - in particular match length and snowballing

This is spot on. I tried to get back into Dota last year but hadn't kept up with all the changes. I was playing with a friend and he was helping. The match feel apart because there was no coordination. I didn't help because I hadn't gotten the mechanics of the character down. I heard a never ending stream of hate because I wasn't playing top tier with my character.

Personally, Elden Ring, Dark Souls 3, and Dark Souls 1 PvP is where I've encountered the most toxicity, but in the way thay people like to cheat. Whether it's the arena in ER or open world PvP, the number of people who are flat out immune to damage, have auto-pull weapons, or who can instant-spam spells whose cast time is purposefully extended in the name of balance is ridiculous.

@leithaziz2716

5 ай бұрын

Good luck running into a DS1/3 PvP try-hard player that doesn't either pull out a one-shot dagger after a parry or does the "point down" emote after beating you. I think what kills Souls PvP for me in these games (besides the bad netcode and connections) is how long they drag on. After hitting a player twice, they'll keep running for minutes to find a healing spot and proceed to loop this untill they ran out of Estus. Elden Ring in hindsight makes this problem worse by just having a bigger field to keep running.

@Loctorak

5 ай бұрын

I never bother with pvp in souls games - for me thats not what those games are made for and I think the lack of overall development investment on Fromsoft's part kind of supports that. Sure you CAN do it, but like you say it's easily exploited and obviously not heavily policed if that's your predominant experience.

Virgin league of legends design vs chad deep rock galactic design

Would love to see a similar video on survival games like rust and Ark. The powerful keeping the weak weak is such a interesting power dynamic in games in which there is always on PVP, server wide stat permanence, limited resources and map space not to mention the HARSH reinforcement loop of getting wiped.

You mentioned Pokemon Unite but I think it's a good subversion of this whole thing. Yes, mistakes pile up but the removal of the voice chat alone is a godsend. You have a set of standard phrases like "push", "retreat" or "I need help". You cannot yell at your support that they're not pulling their weight. Everything you can say pertains to strategy, not assigning blame, which makes playing support less of a chore. The point system also invites less toxicity because there are levels to contributions. The objective is to gain point for your team instead of a fixed objective that can only be done or not done. Killing the enemy players is obviously beneficial but so is sneaking around them, using gaps in their defense and just scoring when their home base is defenseless. The maps are also small and matches are short. That keeps everything fresh and you don't get stuck in a bad match for too long. Also not playing ranked actually helps in Pokemon Unite. Ranked is mostly coordinated teams of friends who talk over discord at the same time. Normal matches are mostly being thrown together with randoms but after every match you can ask the randoms to stick together for the next match, which I think is nice :) All in all, Pokemon Unite is a good MOBA. I wish more people still played it.