We assume that you’ve already heard about the most popular MOBA game in the market: League of Legends. In case you don’t, you can check this introduction video:
Toxicity in MOBAs
There are other MOBAs in the market, like Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm, but none of these is as popular as League of Legends. LOL had 111 million peak monthly players in August 2018, so it’s safe to assume that the current player base count is at least 100 million. It doesn’t mean that LOL is the best MOBA, just the most popular one.
If you’ve played any of these games, then you’ve probably encountered a very common problem that these MOBAs have: toxicity.
Even Heroes of The Storm that is considered to be the most casual MOBA (one of the reasons for this is that HOTS doesn’t have a last-hit mechanic) – even in this game there is a lot of toxicity. Actually, I’ve actually played some HOTS before Blizzard announced that their killing it and I can testify that this game does have a lot of toxicity (although I can’t tell if it’s more or less toxic than other MOBAs).
Toxic Behavior in League of Legends
When I started playing League, I didn’t quite understand all the mechanics and champions in the game. This is the reason that I made a lot of mistakes and generally played bad. Some players were nice to me but others were really toxic. I was called a noob, troll and clueless kid. Others players decided to curse me and someone even told me to kill myself…
Now, I wasn’t offended by this toxicity but I can’t say that it wasn’t annoying. The only thing you can do in such an event is to report the bully and block or ignore him/her. Any response that you make will only aggravate the problem and might even result in a ban (here is an example: How come I get banned for responding (albeit toxic) to a toxic player?).
However, the thing that worries me is that some kid or sensitive person might hurt himself because of this bullying. Is there anything that Riot Games (the company that owns LOL) can do other than banning these toxic players? Many players in League of Legends claim that Riot isn’t doing enough to fight toxic behavior.
Toxicity in ARAM Games
Today I played a simple and relaxed ARAM game in LOL (ARAM is a simple mode in MOBA games where all players get a random champion and fight down a single lane). Everything was going well until the game ended (with us winning) and we saw that the enemy team are flaming and reporting each other in chat as you can see the image:
If you played League, then you know that this is a very common issue. I occasionally see flaming even in winning teams. Now, just imagine the amount of toxicity in the real competitive modes if even the non-competitive modes like ARAM are full of negativity and toxicity.
Well, at least I got a champion capsule (that everyone gets when they level-up) after that same bitter-sweet game. Yes, that’s what I felt after this game.
Winning is fun (we all love winning), but seeing how the other team flame each other is definitely not fun and represent a bigger problem that plagues all MOBA games.
I’ve opened the capsule and got Karthus, Poppy and 90 Blue essence. Was it worth it? I don’t know…