Why Solo Queue Gets Worse Every Season | League of Legends 

Fundamentally, winning doesn't feel rewarding. It's a relief more than an achievement. You're not banking on whether you can outplay the opponent, but whether you can outplay the opponent _before your team tilts and ints._ Your own teammates are bigger threats than your enemy. Accidentally hit a cannon minion or accidentally KS and your teammate will now do everything in their power to make sure you DON'T win the game. And there is absolutely no consequence for them. Conversely, there's no incentive to actually play to win, no rewards for good performance. Once a game is "unwinnable", the team afk farms and spams FF.

League is a strategy game, a team based strategy game. And Riot has done everything possible for players who enjoy strategy to not want to play league.

The enforcement of roles and how clearly defined they are is absolutely the major factor in why league is so toxic. Dota is also a toxic game, lots of flaming etc, but the lack of defined roles just means people lash out at random yes you can play mostly 4/5 in dota and be called a support player, but 4/5 is not nearly the same role as support in league. there are huge differences in a 4 tidehunter and a 5 Io. (It's like comparing malphite to yuumi) in dota roles are based on what your character is doing in the game, not where on the map you start. if you are focusing on cheap items, warding, prepping the jungle camps then you are 5th position, if you focus on teamfights but not farming, you are 4th, and then 2nd/3rd is malleable, whomever is doing better gets to be a 2nd position and whomever is having a worse time/matchup defaults to 3rd. 1st is sometimes included in that, but some team compositions have a hard carry that only works as a 1st position. IN league, because everyone has a narrow path they are allowed to walk, anytime someone falls down it stops everyone. where in dota if your mid laner has a bad game, your 3rd position can step up and become a carry. This is in part due to how gold works in dota, allowing more comebacks, but also because a huge concentration of gold is set up in the jungle, with no defined role for clearing it, you can modally shift that gold around to the people who need it or who are carrying most effectively. Basically, the jungle role is the main reason league is so damn toxic. by dividing the gold portions of the map up so thoroughly there is no wiggle room to adjust based on circumstance without eating into someone else's portion and causing team conflict.

For me the biggest issue is that winning doesn't even feel good, while losing feels terrible. Most games are decided by the worst, not the best players. Whenever you win, chances are there was someone simply losing the game on the enemy team. If you lose, well, you probably got that "one bad" player on your side. One person doing terrible outweighs four people doing fine. In fact, even if the average performance of a given team is better, if they have that one "bad player", they probably lose to 5 people playing mediocre. Doing bad is super impactful. Doing well isn't. Victories feel unearned, loses feel underserved. EDIT: spelling

I'm convinced at this point that ranked autofill was the dumbest idea Riot ever came up with. Randomly throwing people into roles they aren't experienced in isn't fair for that player or their team and ruins the competitive integrity of the match. In low ELO, there is an even bigger difference between a role mains and an autofilled player as they just have less game knowledge overall so can't be expected to switch to a completely different play style at random and play well. I haven't heard a single convincing argument for why it's even in the game for ranked. The only thing people can come up with is "longer queue times" but honestly, would anyone actually care about longer times if it meant that everyone is playing on role? That's literally what they did for champions queue and that was one of the biggest positives about champions queue. I would be much happier knowing I lost a close competitive match instead winning a stressful clown fiesta match where half the lobby has no idea what they're doing. There's no doubt in my mind that removing it would help with some toxicity or as least not waste people's LP and time everytime they have to dodge a lobby of autofilled teammates.

I'm (relatively) new to the game, and learning everything was actually a fun experience. The community is virtually the only thing that really sours the experience for me. I personally can live with frequent losses, it just doesn't bother me that much, but losing only really feels awful because of the sheer amount of toxicity. Literally if there's just one guy that's nice and vibes through the whole match, I'm happy with whatever happens. It's just genuinely sad that it's so rare to find those types of players.

The problem I have is every game is a stomp and the game is basically decided in the first 15-20 minutes. Either you get destroyed or you destroy the other team. You also can't surrender early unless 4/5 teammates agree to do so, forcing you to play a pointless game.

One thing I'd love to change League is the autofill. Just let the players play the one or two roles they want, and we're all just okay to wait, rather than having an AP Malphite trying to kill as a support. It's by far the easiest thing to do for Riot. That would massively decrease the toxicity in lower tiers, where most players are.

I am a competitive person by nature, but since I stopped playing ranked and only focus on normal and special modes, the truth is that my experience with LOL has improved a lot, I stopped thinking too much about what would happen if I lose and just started to enjoy and play quietly normal and get chests on Fridays, I think that when you understand that people who spend criticizing you are simply because of their own insecurities, everything improves at least a little 🌚🌟

For me a fix would be to have more for fun modes to let people take a break from SR and play champs they want to play. I thoroughly enjoyed the PVE gamemodes I want to see more things like that. Maybe a gamemode that's like 30 minutes max with 3 rounds of 10 minutes max to idk capture objectives or something? I think a lot of leagues problems come from there not being enough options for people to have fun- we need to have modes for dedicated 1v1s, we need stuff like an endless doombots, we need more wacky stuff to ease the burden of playing league how it's supposed to be played. Sure people queue into league to play SR with the goal to win but I think many more people queue up to play their favourite champion and your best option is sitting through SR. It's difficult to get the league community excited about other modes except URF which never fails to draw people in but I think if Riot focused on matching people's power fantasies then maybe they can lessen some of the burnout

We are in a day and age where missing a Canon minion can be enough leverage to blackmail people in game.

The problem is that it takes 2-3 good performers on your team to win, but only one to lose. Especially with the way bounties work and how much insane damage/cdr you get nowadays

The problem with league is the matchmaking algorithm where when you lose it never really feels fair, games are usually too easy or impossible to win. You can be the best Soraka in the game but it doesn't matter if your team doesn't deal damage, gank a lot as Shaco but your top laner can't keep his 3/0 lead that u gave him and is useless. camp bot but as soon as you leave they lose a 2v2 instantly. Few days ago I played and won against an 18/0 red kayn, we couldn't kill him all game but my top laner split push and no one in their team stopped him. The problem is not losing, the problem is that it doesn't feel fair.

I would also like to add to this by saying that. Riot has also done a lot of this to themselves. They haven't really balanced the game state to be properly competitive, they have balanced the game to be entertaining to play. We see this in how the game has been a spammy one shot meta since 2018. Every role used to have safe picks or play styles in some fashion Mid had Ahri and stable mages, Jungle had Amumu and tanks, Top had tanks like Garen, Maokai, Mundo, ADC had MF and Trist, and Support had Soraka. In all of these roles and on these champs these play styles are easier to play. But they were also fairly reliable if you put in a bit of time to learn them. But when something needs a ton of skill in some fashion to do great on the player base would suddenly grab hold of it and the win rate would go down. Riot buffs them while people are learning, they learn and then suddenly the win rate gets too high and then they nerf it a ton while people are trying to learn how to play against it. But Riot keeps doing the same thing of. Nerf something until people stop playing it to make the meta change or maintain the 50% winrate. No matter the amount of skill that has to go into said champion. Riot doesn't look at the fact that a high skill champ only gets played mainly by high skill players. So in diamond to masters. Those champions should have a high winrate if no one is really playing that champ except in the highest of skill tiers. Now if said champion is popular but also hard to play it's winrate should be low because lower skilled players will be more likely to lose. The power state of a champ being easy to pick up and reliable making it have a high winrate because it's easier and more people will play it in silver and gold but also into challanger also makes sense. In no role can you just have the "I can be useful" pick anymore. In a couple weeks they are going to be trying to tackle the biggest issues that has the game in this state. The one shot meta. When you are playing a hard tank, sure you shouldn't be able to carry as well as any other role. But you should feel tanky and feel useful. You shouldn't need to play tanks that are wildly over tuned tanky just to be a tank. Simple easy marksman should be a nice backup pick for people when their main get's hard countered. Top lane shouldn't always be so devastating. Mid laners should be able to have a safe farming mage if the enemy picks a hard fighter. You should be able to have something simple and reliable in the jungle to not get devastated by 1 or 2 moves. It's not fun to always have to be trying at your peak level always all the time. I'd be nice if after you have come home from work, got home from a rough day at school, did a bunch of chores, or just had a bad day. To be able to pick up the game and be able to pick up malphite and just farm and be tanky when you aren't feeling up to try to outskill and outclass people. I also might be burnt out on league.

Do you think that somesort of Replacement Queue could help in that regard? A Queue where the players can join ongoing games where players are afk and replace them. There could be a list to choose from. You can see the items, stats of the game and by joining you take over the afk role. If it is a ranked game that fits your rank in the ladder you gain more points for winning. If you play this queue often you get rewards for none toxic and helping behavior. Maybe a unique Honor Reward of some sorts. A cool skin that can't be obtained otherwise. Maybe noone would use this.

Fixing ranked state needs to be the most important priority for Riot. The incredible lack of competitiveness in most of LoL rankeds is something serious. Matchmaking is trash in multiple ways, and I could give you clear examples with proves.

10:39 That's what i noticed too. One of the thing that sets league apart from other moba games is it's "uniqueness". With roles, the game makes every individual player feel like that only they can do a certain part therefore making you a vital part of the game but what if you have instances where you fail to do your part? Unlike other moba games you can't fill in for the player that's failing. Why? Because you're not equipped for the part even if you really want to cover for the player. You have champions intentionally designed for certain roles paired with selected runes and summoner spells that locks you further into your role. If your carry is performing badly you can't fill in for them when you're using a champion like Braum. If your jungler is far behind you can't switch with them cause you have no smite. The dependency on every individual in your team is more so as compared to other moba games combined with certain restrictions to gameplay makes league stand out among the games of it's genre.

I feel its way more tilting to have "x gap" after getting stomped then if you did the stomping. Hearing "jungle diff" from the 1/9/2 Lee Sin after a loss is him jokingly saying "I know you stomped me, but I got hard carried"

Autofill should be removed and you should be allowed to queue just as many roles as you want, even if it's just 1. Autofill helps no one. It doesn't speed up queue times dur to dodges and match quality is worse.

-Autofill -Snowballing -PvE I think these are the core things that need to be looked at. Autofill is obvious, putting people where they don't want to be causes bad matches and dodges. I dunno what to do here to keep queue times reasonable but it needs to be looked at. Snowballing is a bit simpler, I think it primarily is the new items. When you finish a mythic, you have like twice the kill pressure you had on your first item before the item update. Now champs are being balanced around this but it's gotten very messy and still doesn't feel like quite the right pace. Finally PvE, League of Legends actually really does feel great to play. It's smooth and very satisfying gameplay. If someone wants to play Jhin and just run around one-shotting braindead AI in a wave survival type gamemode, he should be able to. A player should not feel obligated to queue for ranked just to feel the satisfaction of playing a particular champ. All that said, I feel like everyone that complains about League is often part of the problem themselves. I get toxic crap thrown at me constantly and I grew numb to it. I used to try and be nice or turn the hostility into fun banter, I gave up on that and am just silent once people start getting tilted. I don't feel any desire to yell back. It does nothing. Just try my best, GG, go next, start fresh, just a game. I like League.

I think part of the issue is that, despite being a team game, league feels like it emphasizes individual play more so than team play. It probably comes somewhat from how a lot champions are designed to be able to 1v9 carry (and how those champions are often very popular), as well as how everyone that isn't in botlane is essentially playing solo for a good chunk of the game, and everyone except the support is usually focused on getting themselves fed enough to be the hero and carry the game. Also if you are finding league just isn't fun anymore I genuinely recommend trying dota. It'll be hard to get into at first, because the game is incredibly complex, but the complexity makes it very rewarding to learn and master, there's a higher strategic complexity which makes games more diverse (and often more chaotic), and personally I usually find it just more fun and less toxic. Admittedly I've had a max behavior score for as long as I can remember, which helps a lot, but in dota I can sometimes actually go for a good 5 or so games before encountering a really toxic teammate, where as in league it feels like a miracle if even just one of my teammates ISN'T toxic. Also max behavior score in dota is not hard to achieve, I've done my fair share of trash talk and flaming but still managed to keep max behavior score by just mostly shutting up and playing. If any league player does try dota though, I recommend taking a bit of time with the tutorial or bots to get a feel for it before jumping into matchmaking, since while your league experience will give you a good foundation there is a lot that's different and a lot to learn.

I got into a queue that ended up being a 5 stack of autofilled supports (including me); most non-toxic team I’ve ever had, and we didn’t even win

Another big thing you fail to mention is people's lack of awareness of a game. Sometimes, really far behind games are winnable, but other times, it is quite literally a player difference. You could be equal in items, objectives, everything and would still loose the game every time if their players are just much better players than your team. I have learned to just mute all and focus on getting as much CS as possible and warding when I get held hostage in a game and it has helped me learn to not rage. Like often I hear "let the ADC get CS or they will never comeback" when the same ADC will push out with no wards, support, or turrets while 0/7 to take Krugs and complain when they get one shot. That player won't be useful if they have a 1000 cs because they are playing poorly.

Btw you mentioned Val having no longterm effects. It its true that every round is on its own but theres still the aspect of the money economy (you gain money buy Round wins and kills) which impacts every round. So if youre loosing alot youre gonna have on average worse weaponry then your opponents when they can save there weapons and also get more money (there is a loss bonus system but still you get punished ofc for loosing rounds, but on the other hand it is easier to win rounds from "behind" economically if you have the skill). Also you still usally play in set positions (anchor on sites, roamer, lurker, entry etc) and while these arent usually set in stone in soloq you will most of the time find people filling these and especially on defense you mostly stay on your site, so it can happen that the enemy always goes your site that it is like getting camped by the jungler for example and it also creates a negative feedback chain. Also while it is definetly alot easier to 1v9 in Valorant it is also impossible if the enemy plays it right. (if youre in 1vX) situations. So yeah Games like val give the player alot more Agency over the course of a game but there are still negative feedback chains that exist and tilt people (as there should be tho cuz you shouldnt be rewarded for loosing). Hope this gives you a bit more insight ^^

I think one fixable issue is not adressed here. Maybe its "back then was all better" bias but like 5 years ago there where much less snowball and gold in the game. Also the games averaged like 10 min longer. That means it took longer to decide a game, leave more room for errors and more combacks. Also in the later game you loose one big fight and the game is actually over in the next 5 mins. But before that both teams had a game worth playing out. That way i actually enjoyed some of my losses because they where fun to play. Now games are decided most of the time after 10 min. The winning team cant end yet but also can only loose it by their own. So all you can do is suffer for the next 15 min and hope the enemy fucks up. - Fix snowball and game pace and give us a chance to have a loose thats a gg in its original meaning.

This comes from personal experience, if someone is new to the game, or even if they've been playing for awhile STOP EXPECTING THEM TO KNOW EVERYTHING! The game's tutorial teaches you a bit so you need someone to teach else you. And telling people to get better doesn't help, you need to tell them why they need to do things. Screaming at people to attack the enemy ADC, but then complaining they didn't get a cannon minion. Then when they finally start fighting complaining they're attacking the wrong person. Just don't expect everyone to know everything, no matter their level or even rank!

This video is oddly therapeutic for me lol. Just hearing a real voice for once saying the exact same things that I believe to be true is something I haven't had the pleasure of hearing in a long time.

I deactivated the in-game chat like 2 years ago, I think it was the best choice I made in this game, there's always someone in post-game and the champion select chat that tries to ruin the game for everyone, but it's definetively a lot better, I recomend doing it and communicating with pings, and if you see someone making "?" More than usual just insta silence them.

I think a small change they could make that would positively afect soloqueue is a system more based around you and your lane opponent, like how facecheck compares you with who you were against. That would give players more of a feeling of comtrol over their lp, as it is decided in a more 1v1 scenario

Here is my take. There are multiple things that affect the solo queue experience but for me one of the worst things is being punished even if you played right, if you manage to get feed and start stomping the team fights 6 games out of 10 your team will get reckless and force team fights even if you are not with them which can end up in disaster, I know that lots of people say "if you're that good just carry the game" but it is difficult to do so when your team goes on suicide missions and the enemy team starts to gain bounties, I am by no means at a challenger level not even diamond I would say but more often than not I manage to place my team ahead only for a very bad call to turn the game around and this is specially true with the new bounty's sistem.

I started playing ranked league recently, and Im in the lower ranks. So I see my fair shares of smurfs and inexperienced players. But the games Ive tended to enjoy are the (very rare) ones were the team has fallen behind but has not flamed each other. When they gave advice and focused on what was going well we were able to turn the game around. The way I see it, flaming in the game is a waste of energy when you can just play the game instead. If you wanna flame do it in the post game lobby.

One thing I liked about heroes of the storm was global levels from farming. I wonder what league would be like if we had that along with obtaining gold for items. It would make it somewhat slower on farming exp but it would be a tighter tug of war between both sides from snowballing super hard. But also give an incentive for players to focus on objectives and team coordination a bit more.

I genuinely feel like a competitive 1v1 mode that's bracket tournament style would make the game more fun, you choose whether you want to do like free for all where you can pick any champ or class specific duals, maybe even champ specific 1v1s. I know that probably won't happen but I have my wishes.

I think LP gain and loss should be decided by game length time. For example, a 25 min game is +20/-15 LP. A 35 mins game is +25/-10 LP. A 45 mins game is +30/-5 LP. Maybe those numbers are bad but the goal is to reward players for not giving up when behind. Though maybe you just lower the LP lose and not give more?

The more contact I have with the LoL community, the more convinced I am that a lot of people need to find another hobby, one that doesn't cause them so much pain.

I think the solution is that ranked needs to be based more on how the individual player performed in the game rather than if they won the game or not. Like if you do really well but lost the game you lose like 5 lp but if you win and do really well you get like 25 lp. It would give players a reason to still try in losing games, give incentive to work together to win and help stop trolls from ruining games since they would have little impact on other players. There is no reason that I go 10/2/23 on seraphine support and lose 19 lp because my team is 7/12/10.

I just hope for PvE modes… where it’s truly a team play and a skill showing, but not against other people, just knowing what you can do, while having fun.

The problem I see is, that the soloq ranked is considered your skill level, but in fact the rank is based on the sucess of your teams. You can play as good as you want, when your team managed to loose, then you loose LP no matter how good you played.

I think you can lower the toxicity by giving players another progression system not tied to rating, making climbing easier, make the games shorter, switch the global chat off for good, and change the game a bit where the objectives are not just optional but mandatory, where personal mistakes on the lane are not as important as losing objectives as a team. That can work.

The problem seems to be (in my opinion) that Riot doesn't seem to care about the game. They rather put resources to skinlines, events, and the pro scene while the game is still facing what has been said in the video, trolls and toxicity. Bots can also be a problem; For ranked and solo queue.

great vids i enjoyed it a lot! I do think that having a lead is important in any comp game, in valorant it give economical advantage (your team have better gun) and in smash stock are litteraly a ressources as killing the oppnent is probably the hardest thing when you play against good player. having a lead is mentally less stressfull and you get the chance to rack up damage its a run for the kill and if he cant get it you might make the game even at some point. (sorry im french trying to write decently)

I wish that our LP gains and losses were based on personal performance more. They have all that data....so if one person drags down the game either by purposely tanking the game, etc, everyone is punished regardless of how well they played. I feel like this would be a great way to encourage people to play their best.

Personally I still play League, but I've quit ranked. Last year I tried it out one more time, it was going relatively well, but then I hit a wall and I just couldn't go forward. I was noticing that I was going up against players who did indeed have much MUCH more experience, to a point I could recognize them as being smurfs at times, and I also was getting to go against premades often, as well as having my teams just not being good enough. Hell I'd even do a quick search and notice that people on the enemy had much higher rankings than I had while my team had lower. The existence of the winners queue and losers queue to me personally is also something that does not make much sense. Being sent to a specific queue meant to make you have a harder time just because you managed to win 3 or more games in a row sounds rather punishing and unfair. I prefer true RNG matchmaking than to be sent to a queue to "punish" me for either being good or being lucky enough to win just sounds demoralizing and, quite frankly, insane. So for this season I just said screw it and have not touched ranked at all. I play drafts, aram, tft and some of the special modes. I can't be bothered with ranked when I know the game will activelly try to screw me over for doing good. That is not a fair system, it is unfair and frustrating to deal with. I've found much better, friendly, and skilled players in normals than I have in ranked, I have found much less toxicity in normals than in ranked, I've found more appreciation for the plays I make, for the things I do in normals than I have in ranked. I don't need ranked to enjoy the game, it's needless stress, so it can stay right where it is. I'll just be enjoying my time with normals.

I feel it gets worse the higher you climb. Player pool is smaller, you meet the same players several times in a short time span and if you had a bad experience with them, it can lead to very toxic games. And dodging is not always possible (0lp, promos, long penalties). Sometimes, I feel like removing names from your teammates should be done, not only an option.

I definitely agree that the potential game length can drastically compound negativity. It's a real shame that nexus blitz didn't work out because I thought that the small scale format was a cool idea

What i really like about you and your channel Vars is that you are so down to earth, you are so relateable, you dont go out of your way to make yourself seem like an angel who can do no wrong, but rather you embrace that you some times end up being A, Quote: "Keyboard warrior", I tend to be rather chill when playing but do some times fall into that hole too. And i Every player apart from that one Saint does too. It just feels nice to know that i'm not the only one who is like this. Keep up the good work :)

I play league with my friends, we play a lot of normal drafts and we have fun, and when I switch to ranked, either because I am alone or I have just one friend online to play with, I really feel the difference beteween the modes.The real problem is, imo, that everybody thinks that solo/duo is the mode that determines your skill level. You could have the same micro and macro of a challenger and nobody would care, as long as you're bronze. It is not unusal for me and my friends to be matched against plats and diamonds in normal, but even if we dominate them all game long, in post-game chat the fact the we are lower rank player automatically takes away value from our win, and this mentality put a lot of pressure on anybody who dares to join a solo/duo queue, because in this community playing ranked is like doing a test in "league of legends", and your LP are your grade. I've found players that will say that your opinion has absolutely no value if you are not x of y rank or above, and even if you're saying something like "if you bring the enemy nexus HP to 0, you win the match", in their eyes you will alwyas be wrong, and this is one of the biggest problem with the game, and it is not something caused by Riot.

my personal problem with soloq and league in general is, that you see some people locking in certain champs and you know EXACTLY how the game will go. Irelia gets picked? toplane feeds 2 kills to the enemy and just afks or flames all the time

I hope you make a video on the 12.10 durability changes. Love your videos :)

Congrats Vars you perfectly summed up my experience with league :) its been 9 years and after my first 3 seasons i left ranked and played dominion and twisted treeline. They were the only solution to play this game peacefully. Then rito deleted those game modes. After that ARAM or custom game arams are left as my only option. Rotating game modes are fine but not all of them great. For last 3 years i play custom aram games with friends and we are happy. We play whatever we like. All adcs all mages all tanks or we can play same champ for a year at every game without worrying about team composition. Also games last less soo win, win :D Also since its not ranked or anything winning the is not the objective. It is the action. Even if our win is guaranteed we can surrender and show our sportsmanship if we enjoyed the game.

Also this is why I dedicate most of my time to fighting games. If I lose the fight I know it's entirely my fault, I have no one to blame but myself. And I know training will improve my skill granting me more wins and make them feel rewarding. The only thing holding me back from winning is my own performance.

For me, League is a test of character and patience. After playing lol for a long time, I honestly felt like my tolerance for the negative behavior of people around me and my ability to remain cool headed in a hostile environment became better than before. It's about perspective. Instead of thinking of league of legends as a way to have fun, think of it as a double-edged character building session.

I'm actually really happy about Riot's new direction for the first time in a long time with them finally tackling the one-shot meta.

I really wish they would add new maps or bring back ones like TT I feel like the more variety there is the better the experience players can have because they're not stuck just playing the same thing over and over, idk

I've been saying it for a couple years now, riot screwed the pooch By not attacking toxicity when this game was THE game. Had it been tackled then, when the player base was still expanding to its eventual peak there would have been less business/ income/ profit impact than now when the base is smaller, and seems to contain a fair share of toxic d bags. Unless they're ever willing to take the financial hit that hard banning toxicity would cause it won't ever see real improvement.

I think the bigger problem is algorithm deciding before the match whether you should win or lose. I was in a game where bot and support were autofilled as each other and they both sucked. Win too many times and the game decides it's time for you to lose via autofilling, usually the jungler

I'm here to share an experience I had a time ago. I was playing jg and got busted open by the enemy jg (Master Yi with M7, supposed to be toxic, right?), my whole team was getting destroyed by him and him only. I had a Yorick top that wanted me to gank a Mordekaiser with ult and started spamming "jg diff" in chat and quit when we didn't ff. That pretty much ruined my night, then the Yi made a Quadra and asked gently for the penta. We said he quit and he was pretty chill and was a nice dude in general, we all agreed he had a "spiritual penta" bc he reported the Yorick after the match was over. That's it, made my night better by just being nice, BE LIKE THIS GENTLEMAN PLEASE LEAGUE COMMUNITY, don't be like that Yorick. If you are like him, know that you're most likely ruining someone's humour.

Having started to play semi-regularly a year and a bit ago with friends, I ended up doing my 10 solo placement matches in a row a month ago. I did not meet too much toxicity (I mean the one I recall apologized when he remembered he was in Bronze). However the reason I probably won't play much more in solo queue is that I did not feel I had any impact on the outcome (good or bad), granted at least 1 or 2 players per team were smurfs, or at least of highly higher skill than the rest of the players. From my point of view, rolling a die to determine my team's win or loss would have been pretty much the same thing

I think there is also a problem about how the game grants you satisfaction. First, the laning system makes it much harder to have real team plays in early game in low ranks, so you are alone with your negative experience if you start losing. This is because it is often more valuable to help the winning lane than the losing one, because of the snowballing capacity of some champions. Nonetheless, nothing feels nicer than being helped by a non-toxic player to feel your impact and the fact you can help. Also, the numbers are incentified too much in League. Too many players will take you KDA, farming or items as an argument to prove their "point", that is usually that you are irrelevant and bad at the game, but it is because this is the only way the game shows you the progression of people. Having a good CC score or vision score is never clearly rewarded in game, whereas these are crucial game mechanics. Finally, people tend to not make a difference between having a bad game or matchup, and being either a feeder or an incompetent. This is heavier when you are autofilled.

A Diablo-style game with League’s champions, items, and an item fusion system would be very interesting. Heck, I’d love an open world campaign mode. I love the gameplay and the satisfaction of throttling enemies and the waves, but lord do I despise having to try and cooperate with people whose only joy is a microwaveable hot pocket. The dopamine feedback loop is just sooo satisfying and that’s the main reason I keep coming back

I cant wait for Riot FINALLY implementing skins for Honor 5. I think this is best way to combat toxicity by rewarding those who behave. But still it would be also good if honor also impacted solo que by giving you less Elo drop and bigger rewards for you ACUALLY been good team player. Remember his "teamwork OP" video. I thnk that also our behavior should impact how much Elo we lose. Some games also implement same metod by giving "contribution points" making our actions acually matter to rank system. But because it almost have 0 impact on how we do is reason why people get salty.

For me, I consider it really unfair that losing multiple times back to back can easily cost you all that you've earned through hard work in your previous games, if not more. The fact that I can start the season in bronze 1, but a series of bad games (be it teammates, championpicks, smurfs what have you) can throw me back as far as bronze 4 just feels like walking through mud while someone constantly tries to pull me back.

ngl this video put everything i've been feeling about the game for awhile into words. I hit masters last season and tbh after trying for it for awhile it didn't really feel very good at all it was just like a dopamine hit for 10 minutes than onto the next game. There's not really any incentive to keep trying to push for higher ranks unless you're realistically able/trying to go pro which 99.99% of players can't or dont' care enough to put in that much time/effort. Tbh it really does just feel like everyone I talk to about the game is just burnt out of it. Maybe if they actually gave good ranked rewards people might be incentivized to try more in ranked but idk it's just a thought I had but it could be wrong since it'd probably also lead to more boosting.

I feel like bringing in more fun modes and a few compromises to auto fill could go a long way, honestly I l hate auto fill but if I could que a third role as least to some what guide where ide end up if not in my main 2 roles could go miles, ide playing support or adc before jungle any day of the week but autofills had a hard on for that role for like 2 years now, I dodge.more games because of that than anything else

I think another point to toxicity goes to champion design, specially for top and jg, no matter if the enemy is making great calls and taking excellent decisions, if a player is playing with a skill expressive champion against an udyr, hecarim (whatever suits you as a "yi equivalent") then it is going to be frustrating and toxicity will rise, since "I am playing with a difficult champ, and yet get deleted by an unkillable high speed champ with no counter play", I know there is a patch coming up lowering the damage and increasing survability which could increase counterplay opportunities, but as it stands out right now, there is no counter play for low risk high reward champs which increases frustration. Just my two cents on the topic, since I for example as a main supp/adc gets tilted when I die to a Hecarim which only needs to run, but accept and even congratulate when an initiator lands their skillshots.

A tool to reset MMR would be nice. Wins (and losses!) don't feel meaningful when you're getting +14 or -16 per game. Maybe once a month you can press a button that drops you to the league your MMR corresponds to and starts granting 18LP/win again

I honestly just want to comment about my extreme frustrations of today. I decided to play ranked bc i wanna start climbing and I'm still starting off so I'm at bronze 2 or somewhere around that. The matchmaking was absolutely vile. I use one of those apps that lets you know enemies and teammates strongpoints and weakpoints and their winrates and such, when I tell you all of my team were the lowest level of iron, our adc was second timing jinx when the enemy adc is a mastery 7 62% winrate Samira, the enemy mid laner was a 82% winrate Sylas, their top was a 92% winrate Sion and pretty much my entire team were literal newbies. I consider myself a pretty decent player and I do have potential to carry games but I just couldn't when every enemy gets so damn fed. I get into another ranked game after that and it was the exact same, i was playing jungle on evelynn going on 12/1/4 with dark seal stacks on my way to carry but then the laning phase was over and the fed malphite from our 0/10 jax came down, it was game over. Ranked is actually just unplayable for me in a lower elo no matter how much i try to carry games myself its just practically impossible when my teammates are always newbies against an enemy team of otps and masteries.

The snowball is insane compared to 4 seasons ago (season 8). Riot has recently admitted that current damage output is game breaking and unfair. They pretty much gave all AP items true damage, max health damage or magic pen. Same thing with the lethality overhaul, the amount of armour pen and lethality you can get now is ridiculous (black cleaver + serylda + esclipse and 2 other lethality items and boots you're looking at like 80% armour shred at max black cleaver stacks). Same thing goes for bruiser items like divine etc etc. Even tank items are way overtuned at the moment (Leona can easily 1 v 1 an adc if she gets her whole combo off perfectly which isn't hard to do if you land e). Turret platings, the release of elder dragon and souls and the overtune of all the items and all the new champions having super overloaded kits have pushed league of legends into a state of unplayability. It's a coin flip at this point. I'm playing in high plat/low diamond elo and I end up versing challenger Smurfs almost every game or have them on my team because they don't want to wait 30+ min queue times in OCE just to get one of these dogshit rng coin flips and get stomped in their own elo, so they play lower elo for a higher chance of winning and getting to bm you like Vars is pointing out). Let's say by chance the game gets no Smurfs then it's still a disaster because you or the enemy team gets at least 1 inter and 1 griefer and mix it in with the current snowball state and it's a disaster).

I had that once for the first time a few weeks ago. I literally snapped, shouting in caps at my teammates (I was 0/6 or something within the first 15 minutes). 5 minutes later I realised how much of an ass hole I was being, and apligogised to my team, who were pretty cool about it. we still lost (although I did admittedly better after showing some humility but the damage was done) i hope that never happens again. I felt terrible (especially as I try to br the motivational one)

I swapped to Wild Rift and it's a lot more pleasant. Still has the same issues they're just diminished by rounds being faster (15-20 mins usually) and with communication options being much reduced (I don't think it's even possible to talk to the other team).

I find that the most effective way to lower the toxicity (or at least perceived toxicity) in a match is to say the most random stuff, such as pretending to be an orange running away from an orange juicer. It's surprisingly hard for people to be legitimately toxic to you if you keep it up.

I've been playing mostly Genshin, Honkai and Arknights these days and feel MUCH better by doing so. There's no pressure for winning anything, I can tackle the content at my own pace and most of all... there's no annoying and rage-inducing toxic players to ruin the experience. Heck, I don't ever interact with the co-op elements of these games at all.

Playing TF2 also taught me that in a 12vs12 game, where no one keeps track of anyone, it's a lot easier to suck

There's also the fact that with the state of the game right now (or since mythics), you are punished a hell of a lot more for any mistakes, or simply not picking something that's meta, or someone got their perfect item and just hits an insane powerspike for no reason. An 11/0 ADC can still get one-banged because enemy 0/6 midlane got a Ludens Echo. 0/8 Yasuo comes bot and miraculously gets a double and now he got his mythic he goes 24/10. Tank buys Sunfire Aegis and now he just walks into a teamfight and gets a triple because he did 1000 item damage to each champ. Thank fuck they are changing that soon.

Great video! Tho with valorant there is a bit of a snowball effect sicne the winning team gets more money and therefore better guns the next round, so if you lose the first rounds you have to play with pistols while the enemy team gets a better gun, which can snowball for multiple rounds unless you save money to get more the next and have equal guns, but there is still a snowball prob specially on the first 3-4 rounds which is why there is also a “ff” spam on valorant too after round 4. Funny how riot is unable to target snowball and toxicity on both of his games XD

One thing that I think you got wrong was the Valorant example; The rounds are more of a "soft-reset", winning or loosing a round or multiple rounds in a row can have big implications for the whole team as they gain most of their cash by winning rounds, not by killing enemies, and if you have no cash, you got no good weapons/abilities whitch usually leads to more lost rounds (at least until you got enough for a full buy).

So we need a smaller map to shorten the time of a game so that going next isn't too far off and maybe one or two less players to increase the likelihood everyone gets their role... We need Nexus Blitz meets Twisted Treeline. Also, I think kill and minion gold should scale, or the passive gold should be increased like they do in those faster game modes. If we had that, snowballing would be less impactful. Granted, that brings a slew of other issues with some champs preferring late game and other enjoying early game. But if the new, fewer set of roles compensated for this, I don't think it'd be a problem.

The point is first mistake isn't the worst. What make a game unplayble is not thinking about the lead ennemies get from the mistake and getting rolled over because of that. Riot gave so many way to come back it's getting harder and harder to use a lead correctly because if you lose just a little time exp bonus and bounties are making them as strong as you.

One thing that I recommend to everyone I know that starts to play is to disable the /all chat. In my opinion it's one of the most useless (cause why will you want to talk with the rival apart from saying something like GL at the start of the game or GGWP at the end) and rage inducing features of the game, as there are a lot of players that like to mock their oponent after they have killed them or just trash talk in general. I think that is one of the features that should be removed, because the amount of toxicity that comes from it outweights the whatever good things that can be done with It.

I feel a lot of this could be mitigated by introducing a new casual game mode. Like say something like nexus blitz, a quick game mode were casual fun is the incentive and games are meant to end quickly.

I think the snowball effect of toxicity you mention means riot absolutely needs to address player who do toxic things. as long as players see toxicity being unpunished, they wont stop doing it. be it the old justice system, or ia, or massive mutes and bans, matchmaking will not be sanitized

You worded the part about wasting each other's time very well. That is my number 1 pet peeve with LoL at the moment. Players who will not surrender an unwinnable game where they continue to make it worse with their bad decision making. Bot lane is 0/7 and like 50 CS down? Nope they want to claim that it's "Good Practice" to play to try to play from behind. Top lane is 1/5 and can't leave top while their super fed lane opponent is terrorizing the rest of the map? Can't surrender that one because they not only want to keep trying, but Mid is ahead like 5 CS and is 1/0. It's frustrating. We all have bad games, we all have bad days, we all can be toxic, but that doesn't mean we have to waste each others' time on a 30+ minute game that is really easy to tell isn't going to be winnable without a miracle.

I recently had a game where it was basically a cat fight between me and my botlane who were duo and then I was somewhat useful in the game winning teamight and after they game they in chat typed "wp you actually played well" so they didn't totally admit defeat by saying sorry but it was so great

One thing that did help me not get tilted though, is to just disable chat (both allied and all chat). Yes, it has it's downsides but it allows me to focus on more important matters.

I lost every game I played last night, all five of them. And I still complemented my lane opponent afterwards for their well played lane phase. Be the change you want to see.

I played on SR since about late February/early March (after coming back to the game in September last year) with chat disabled and it was rather enjoyable, with a slight pause around the "split preseason" when normals got overrun by those left behind by the ranked armageddon. This September the matchmaking started pairing up utterly imbalanced teams (rank-wise) against each other and the game is no longer fun for me. I do not play to tryhard or anything, however getting stuck in 10+ loss streak with the limited time I dedicate to the game means that I could go even as much as 2 weeks worth of matches without seeing a single victory. That is simply an unacceptable proposition to me. Nowadays I just play Coop vs AI matches for the FWotD bonus and Nexus Blitz for the weekly Hextech chest. If Riot does not fix the matchmaking I hope they at least bring on some good gamemodes (Nexus Blitz is quite fun, but I do not know how long til it gets rotated out) otherwise I don't think I'll be sticking around much longer.

1. I find playing bot games for a bit then just playing ranked till you lose helps a ton. Then again i stopped caring two seasons ago and just try to have fun if i climb while doing it then awesome! 2. mute all does help quite a bit i went from wanting to say stuff that would get me banned to just chilling and trying off meta picks usually my teams are nice and kinda just vibing.. usually...the enemy team why even have chat onwith them who cares just mute them and win or lose having contact with them makes you play worse. 3. Oh(lissandra support is chill af...get it? Yes im horrible)

The problem with Solo queue is that games become frustrating very quickly because of the huge advantage early kills give, while at the same time last way too long, especially if someone doesn't vote yes in the surrender vote. If 60%+ of your time spent playing is either in stomps, where you're just waiting for the enemy team to give up, or in completely lost games where you only have a miniscule chance of victory it can start getting frustrating very quickly, hence why people start being toxic/giving up after a while. The only thing I can personally think of, that might help at this point, is if they somehow made games shorter. That would be pretty hard at this point, considering how many things something like that would affect, but honestly spending an average of 25-30 minutes/game when I can accurately predict the outcome of my games 90% of the time by the 10 minute mark brings context to just how frustrating the solo queue experience actually is.

Knew I wasn't the only one feeling this way. I've started to ween myself from League and started to play other games like Bloodhound which is really fun, And I'm somewhat starting to enjoy gaming again. I may play LoL here and there but its not improving fast enough for me. I've played since Season 5 and its a tough decision to make, but you know you'll need to make it when you simply aren't enjoying playing the game anymore.

I think with you always expecting your team to be toxic when you’re having a bad game and than your team is more supportive it helps more than if League’s players weren’t assumed to always be terrible people

I quit playing the game actively 2 years ago, occasionally I play Howling Abyss once in every six months or so, this game you can either play with friends and have some fun, or play solo and watch as your sanity, mental health, and if you're on the Nordic East server, love towards the Polish language decreases drastically.

They say you have to play as a team in a solo mode. There's no voice chat. There's no cohesion. You lose if your teammates aren't playing properly. Enjoy -15 lp. Not to mention there's no loss mitigation for performance like in Valorant.

The environment and atmosphere in the game adds fuel to the toxic fire. I noticed that the addition of emotes gave another tool to mock your opponent. Chat is already toxic and emotes made it even easier to show a persons "internet tough guy" behaviour, especially when triggered.

They could implement systems that they did for wild rift, like the fortitude system that rewards you with "fortitude points" every game and some extra points based on your "personal performance" that game, meaning if you get S you get a lot of extra points, then after collecting a specific amount of points (Amount differs with rank) you get a loss shield, meaning your next loss doesn't make you lose anything, but consumes that shield, that way I as a good player who gets S,A and MVP/SVP consistently, I get a lot of points and loss shields that when I meet that one bad player or my team ints, my loss shield is there to protect me from losing "marks/LP" making my experience in that kind of lost games a lot less toxic and and I can easily just shrug it off, also the amount of points you get per game doesn't differ if you win or lose the game, its only personal performance and the strength of your opponents. This system is great IMO and has enhanced my solo Q experience on wild rift making it more enjoyable and less stressing.

I actually think that toxicity isn't as impossible to remove as it may seems. But players have to take their responsibilities in order to solve it. Yes, a "x diff" message can do a lot of harm, but so can a "gj x, keep it up !" do good to your teammates. I sincerely think that positivity can be as strong as negativity, at least from my experience. Next time you hop into a game, just mute all at the start after warning your team, and encourage it when it does good, without flaming or commenting any bad play (unless you have some responsibility in it, in case a "mb" can help the rest of the team chill out). And look at the results, you'll see how it pays off. Not only will you get more honors and respect from your mates, but your winrate will go up. To conclude, stop feeling condemned to suffer from toxicity. Isolate yourself from it and do positive reinforcement in game, you'll be surprised by how good a win can feel when you really fight for it.

One note on the Valorant comparison. Valorant's rounds actually do have a very large impact on subsequent ones due to the way their economy works. Each round, you get a certain amount of money to spend on guns/abilities which is earned from round wins, bomb plants/defuses, kills, etc. This introduces a snowball, not unlike that in league, where the winning team is able to purchase stronger weapons and the losing team has to try to either pick consistently mediocre weapons or fight with pistols until they have enough money for a decent buy. However, the main difference between this format and that in league is that stronger items only means better guns, it doesn't mean better aim. In league, an silver player with 3 items would most likely win vs a 1 item challenger player but in Valorant, it's more likely for a Radiant player with a Spectre (cheap gun) to win vs. a Silver with an Op (expensive gun). However, actual 1v5s are still incredibly difficult since you still have to right click 5 heads before 5 people try to right click yours with better weapons. Keep in mind though that I don't play Valorant myself, I only watch streams so take this with a grain of salt.

Start banning inters and boosters. Even manually case by case. Have 10 devs review 10 games each day before or after they work. It's not gonna fix the problem over night but you don't need to be punished to behave, you need threat of punishment. As an example, if I got Perma banned on my main(and only) account I would not come back to the game ever. I play sporadically since s6 and still don't have all the champions. If I had to grind all of it again I'd just quit. Again, this would not work right away, but over the course of a year people would notice. Also making examples of notorious players would help.

As a new player, I have no problem losing and learning almost every other game. But as I've been playing for the last month I've realized that the reason every champ has a 50% win rate is not because the game is balanced, it's actually the opposite. No matter how good you are, there's a 50% chance you win or lose before you've even loaded into the game. People have to exploit the "smurf" system just to avoid this rigged algorithm.

I miss 3v3 for a reason. It was faster, it was less tense, it wasn't ranked. You could just go in, play who you wanted, and kind of deal with it. The alternate game modes were always better than just throwing 40 minutes of my life at summoners rift for a game that was decided in 8 minutes

It's a game where I'm constantly fighting myself to play for the love of the game and for gaining lp. I'm in this situation where I just want to get to a certain rank and never touch ranked ever again. Once I get to that specific rank, I'll be happy. The only problem is that I'll have to lose a part of myself to get there.