Attitudes in League of Legends

In this article I will cover some of the different attitudes you'll find players have in game, how to deal with Toxic players and if you’re toxic yourself, how to better your attitude to make the game more enjoyable for you and your teammates.

In League of Legends being Toxic is defined as a player who is not being healthy towards their allies. Toxic players can appear in all shapes or forms, from bad mouthing allied team members to being a complete troll. Toxic players tend to be those that join a game to decrease their teams chances of winning the game to zero.

Repetition does not factor into this game. The variety of enemy types have differing weaknesses that must be exploited to further your progression and the rate in which you encounter these enemies is controlled to the point where you're wondering what else they have available to bring you pain. My worries about Dante's sections feeling repetitive was demolished after his first chapter. Nero and Dante are inherently different in terms of their abilities and their arsenal, so facing an enemy in the wrong mindset could cause you some difficulties.

How to deal with a Toxic allied player

We all know that playing with a toxic player is hard and unbearable, sadly there isn’t much that can be done during the game to deal with these toxic players. Although, if you’re one of those players that can be wound up easily by a toxic player the best thing to do for that game is click the ignore button! The ignore button can be found by clicking your Tab button to display the scoreboard and there will be little speech bubbles next to all of the players, clicking those will ignore that player. Sadly, this is all you can do, so if the ignore button is a must focus on yourself and the communication with the rest of the team for the rest of the game, it’s considerably harder playing a game with four players against five but with better communication and map control than the enemy you have the ability to pick off the enemy one by one and pick up an advantage.

Once the game is finished you can finally do something about this toxic player! Here you can report that player, it’s best to include links of what this person was doing throughout the game so this player has a higher chance of being banned since all that will be seen when this report goes through is the chat and end of game stats. Try and be specific as possible about this report since fake reports can cost more for the reporter than the reported! Once you have reported this toxic player this report will be sent to the tribunal where other players can review what has happened themselves and vote towards what will happen to this player. If most of these votes are to be punished then this toxic player will get banned for a certain period of time and if they continue with the toxicity the time banned will grow.

How to deal with your own attitude

I find the hardest thing to do is to deal with your own toxicity. You don’t know that you’re toxic until you look back or until someone close to you tells you that something is wrong. When you are a player that wants to improve at the game you have to help yourself and try to be a better player to the community and your attitude in the game is always something to work on. No matter what rank you are in League of Legends we all have our outputs of anger when your bottom lane feeds and does nothing about it or if some of your players are picking up team fights with no one about and having lack of communication. This is ok, small outputs occasionally are acceptable since these games are important to all of us and when someone is doing something large wrong like having a lack of communication it’s important for you to try and help them as well. If you are being toxic every game though and if you are always blaming others for your mistakes that's when you need to take a step back and take action.

So what can be done to help?

1. The first thing to do is to take small breaks from the game when you start getting angry, many times in games I have joined when two people were in a game previously and in champion select one player is flaming the other which builds a bad atmosphere for the new game.

2. Record your games! There are many programs that allow you to record, the most popular are OBS, Xsplit and LoLReplay. After each game look back on the game and pick out what you have done wrong to work on it in the future. Never say there is nothing wrong with your gameplay and that there was nothing you could of done to improve your game because there is always something to improve on no matter who you are.

3. Care about yourself! Watching and caring for what other people do in the game is never a good sign, it only angers yourself further and damages your own game. Focus on yourself and your gameplay, if you are not confident on a champion or feel you’re not at a strong point on a champion take it slow, take it passively and wait from a gank or help from another lane to get a kill and a possible turret.

4. A good atmosphere in a game is a good game. If you are bad mouthing other players or telling them how bad a move they made is, that won’t do anything for them. Respect and confidence is important for all players, to know this you have to think how you would feel in these scenarios. If you give first blood and someone bad mouths you and tells you how bad you are, you would feel vulnerable and demotivated. This is how others feel when you say the same thing. Instead of pointing out what people have done wrong, point out to them that first bloods happen in a game or whatever they did wrong in a game happens, they did make a mistake, they shouldn’t of done that but it's time to look forward from that and try not to do that mistake next time. Boost their confidence and communicate wins there game, motivate, don’t demotivate.

Katie Jones