The Art of Being Toxic

Imagine a world in which you're playing as a wide receiver for a football team and every time you can't catch the ball, no matter how hard or easy the pass, your own team will flame the living shit out of you, your family, your race and sexuality, and then tell the other team "wide receiver diff".

Let me go back for a little bit.

A few days ago, Voyvoy, well-known League of Legends streamer, recorded a 9 min video explaining how insanely toxic the community is. He is right, this happens in most games, but specially in League.

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It's simple

‍Toxicity comes in different ways, but the common ones are:

• Flaming people for x reasons.
• Trying to lose the game on purpose for x reasons.

We can't really compare it to sports can we? The second somebody flames a teammate like that, everybody will physically f^ck that person up, and if he/she is trying to lose the game on purpose in pro, amateur or friendly games the coach will simply replace them, or then again, they will get in a fight.

Sports demonstrated that motivated bonded teams are the key for success.

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Actually, it's not that simple‍

But hold on... here it comes the factor of anonymity, the wonderful place where people grab their ego insecurities, turbulent thoughts and existential problems, and dump them to another anonymous person.

Part of the game right? Well... no for everybody.

It's still a community, where a bunch of people would also use it as:

• A platform to work as a streamer or pro player.
• A healthy scape from reality, if reality isn't looking good.
• A way to improve themselves as competitors, teammates and friends.
• A place to find new friends to fight loneliness.
• A place to have fun.

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Facts

1. Riot Games knew about this for years. Since they didn't do much, the toxic behaviour became the "normal" and nasty verbal abuse the "that's a bit much".
2. They used to have a player-base in love with the game, and now they have a player-base addicted to the game, with no fear to be banned.
3. I'm sure several Riot employees have been trying to approach this issue but high ranks have been kicking its priority like there's no tomorrow.

What's the solution?
In my opinion, I still love the game and I do like Riot as a publisher, and toxicity is a society problem reflected in games, so we can't ask Riot to completely solve it. However, other games are less toxic which means that Riot isn't doing enough. If it happened with League, it could happen with Valorant.

A couple cents

• Drop your ego, seek external help from both third parties and players.
• Don't approach the problem as "these are just a couple of bad apples", instead, assume the reality that a huge % of your player-base is toxic and empahize with them to understand how to fix it.
• Create forms where players could send solutions to solve toxicity and I guarantee you that from hundreds of bad ideas, you'll find two or three that will blow your mind.

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