This week we talked about League of Legends and it’s toxic community. In the article How League of Legends could make the internet a better place, it has stated that “the players who just love to be mean, only account for a very small percentage of the negative behavior… More than 90 percent of the vitriol comes from normal players who occasionally act out while playing.” As a part of the League community for a number of years now, I would say that these statistics were mostly accurate to what I have seen from playing. There was a time where I would play many games of league daily with my friends after school. I would say that we are relatively positive players but on those days when we would have a bad day I found that we were more inclined to start BM’ing during our matches. We would go into matches tilted and underperform because of the circumstances we experienced during the school day and just generally be at a poor mindset. I’ve had some experiences where we would be losing and just give up and start to troll our teammates.

One system that Riot added to combat the toxicity is the Honor System. This was released to the public in 2017 and is a system where players can be rewarded for behaving positively during matches. At the end of the match, every player can choose to give an honor to one person on the team, generally for performing well or being a good sport. Based on the number of honors you receive over time, your honor rank can level up and through that you can get prizes in the form of in-game goodies. Personally I feel like this has worked pretty nicely to lower toxicity as over the years I have noticed less extremely toxic behavior in my solo queue games. However, there are still bad apples that simply don’t care about the honor system and still choose to BM and troll. Although they exist, I have experienced this less and less.

Recently, Riot has added another gamemode that I feel is a good way to combat toxicity. This gamemode is known as Clash. Clash is basically an online tourney that Riot hosts on weekends once or twice a month. Players get to make premade teams of 5 and compete in a highly competitive bracket for big prizes given to the winners. However, one requirement in order to participate in Clash is for the player to have at least a level 2 honor. Not only does it stop the player from joining but if a player doesn’t reach the honor requirement, the whole team cannot participate. Because of its lucrative and highly competitive nature, players are more inclined to behave positively and maintain a high honor level in order to participate when Clash does come around. Not only is this a good way of encouraging positive behavior, it gives something for players to look forward to and work towards.