League (and mobas in general) are more toxic than other games, which is already a pretty high bar.
The primary reason is the large number and wide variety of skills needed combined with the snowball nature of the game. But let’s talk about those skills.
- cs
- Warding for lane
- Dodging skillshots
- Landing skillshots
- Jungle tracking
- Wave management
- Matchup knowledge
- Objective setup
- Team fighting (could be broken down into multiple styles)
- Lane assignments
- Knowing when to farm or sacrifice farm
- Warding for objectives
- Communication
- Managing tilt
- Influence on team morale
- Item builds
- Suvival
- Knowing when to die
- Adaptability to game state
- Adaptability to teammates
I’m sure you could easily triple the size of this list. Naturally you’re going to pay more attention to some skills over others, as will everyone else. And of course you’ll be better at the ones you pay more attention to.
Imagine rating yourself on each of those skills 1-10.
Now you’re thrown onto a team that likely has the same overall skill level as you, if you add those all up. What are the odds that the skills are in the same places? Across four other people? You’re almost certainly paying less attention to some of the skills where your teammates are better than you.
The end result is that nearly everyone you play with looks worse than you. Likely much worse.
There’s some variance between games, sure. This could just be a bad game for them. But… probably more often it’s their average game. More often you’re just not able to see how they win games.
So keep this in mind next time you think everyone in your game is terrible. They’re probably able to make up for it somehow if you let them, even if you don’t see it.
I think there has just been a shift towards competitive toxicity in the previous 5-10 years due to esports. I never remember flaming teammates for underperforming before 10 years ago being normal. Even in the toxic CoD console lobbies people were always insulting the enemy team and not their teammates. Basically it used to be like gang wars, and if you were on one team you were homies that watched out for each other.
Then e-sports started pushing this mentality that everyone has to always climb the ladder and get to top 500 or challenger or whatever and if you didn’t do this you were bad at the game. Rivalry between teammates for who could make the flashiest play always used to exist, but it was friendly competition; now it turned into everyone wanting to be the solo carry 1v9 in every game.
This is not just LoL but it coincided with a lot of people starting to play LoL. Go back to Overwatch now and it’s a completely different experience compared to 2014-2015 days. Just as toxic as LoL nowadays.
I stand by the fact that e-sports and ranked ladders have destroyed the friendly atmosphere that was common in games before. People stopped playing the game to unlock champions (or attachments in CoD, cosmetics in Rocket League) and only focus on “getting better” in a visible way through their rank/LP. You can unlock cosmetics or attachments just fine when you lose, but when you lose in ranked your “visible skill rating” decreases, so you hate your teammates for not helping you achieve the reason why you were playing the game in the first place.
This is why I play never even play Ranked in most games anymore… but unfortunately this toxic mentality has also spread to other gamemodes.
I seem to remember plenty of teammates shooting each other in any iteration of Counterstrike.