>The problem is if even one person decides to troll in a game then the rest of the players really have no choice.

Why is this? I've played online FPS and RTS games for about 15 years now and have never felt like I "had no choice" when it came to engaging with trolls or joining in their behavior. Granted my only experience with MOBAs is Heroes of the Storm, but is LoL that much different?

Dotalikes (I refuse to use the term mobas) are a great study in unintended consequences. The game has strong RPG elements because those are fun... but that creates a vicious cycle where winners win more. The game has defenses that are tough so that the losing teams can hang on... but those prolong a one-sided game. And the RPG elements mean you can't just let players drop and come back like an fps game, so you're committed for the entire round.

Now add in its RTS roots - an overhead God's eye view lets you watch your teammates. RPG elements means a bad player isn't merely useless, but he's actually feeding power to your opponents.

So a long game, with a prolonged endgame that often results in 10+ minutes of moribund gameplay after the match is prettymuch already decided, without even the dignity of a quick execution like an rts generally provides. No leaving allowed, either. And you get to watch your teammate (you only have 4) who brought this fate on your head, and you're stuck together for the whole round.

They couldn't have designed a game that makes you hate your weakest teammate more if they tried.

This sounds quite interesting. In chess, most grandmaster-level games are resolved by a resignation or draw agreement; rarely does it reach checkmate, stalemate, threefold repetition, or a 50-move-rule draw. I'd expect a similar solution for any other game that has a long "slowly and surely crush your opponent" ending period.

You say players aren't allowed to leave? No one can prevent someone from quitting the application or shutting down their computer. But I'm guessing that the service won't let you join a different game until the current one finishes...

Is there a way for a team to resign? Surely if a team unanimously thinks they've lost, they can surrender immediately...?

About Heroes of the Storm: players aren't allowed to leave and if they do, they are threatened to be queued with other leavers. And there's no resign option.

On the other hand, my worst experience with Dota was that a lot of players were leavers, so any sign of losing and someone left the game. And after that it's really game over. No fun to lose the game this way, even no fun to win the game this way. But with HOTS that's completely different. Almost everyone tries to stay until the defeat and it's not that rare to see a comeback and victory.

So I'm supporting that notion of not allowing anyone just to leave. It's not a chess and there are other players who might want to fight until the end. On the other hand, quick anonymous poll, initiated by one player, if anyone wants to stay, and defeat if everyone wants to resign wouldn't hurt anyone, I guess.

The system penalizes you for leaving in the middle of the game, to the point where if you do it often enough you can get your account banned.

Your team can resign, but it requires at least a 4/1 vote. You typically end up with that one try-hard player who refuses to end with dignity and get 3/2 non-resigns, forcing everyone to play out a lost game.

On top of that if you afk or troll yourself there is a reporting feature at the end of the game where you can flag players, which can also result in account suspensions and bans if they occur too often.

It really is a terrible system all the way through.

It sounds like a sufficient mechanism would be to have the following options:

* A simple majority vote for designating a player 'too weak for this level of play'.

* A strong majority vote (>75%; in a team of 5 this would be 4+) for designating a player 'a troll'.

* Either of the above ejecting the player from the team at that instant.

* Allowing all other votes to proceed as normal (N-1 required to resign a match).

A team can surrender if 4/5 teammates agree and at least 20 minutes have passed in the game. Players often believe the game is over before 20 minutes though, which causes these problems.

MOBAs (Dota, Lol) are vey dependent on balance.

To use a RTS example since you mention playing them, imagine a 3v3 game. If one player leaves and it becomes 3v2, the 3 player team has a huge advantage.

Now in MOBAs, you can let the ennemy team kill you or die repeatedly so they get more resources and xp than you. Imagine for the RTS game that it is possible and one player starts helping the other team and that game becomes a 4v2. The 2 person team will have pretty much no chance of winning.

Playing a dota game with someone feeding (ie diying intentionally to the other team) is pretty much a game ender but there is no way to concede so you still have to play for ~20min with 1% chance of winning.

I play a lot of Dota and don't see feeding much. Maybe once or twice in the last year.

Though there's nothing that raises your blood pressure like being accused of feeding when you're already frustrated because you're having a bad game.

Maybe not intentional feeding, but if one or two people are having a bad game, you can get to a point where you've clearly lost in the first ten minutes, but since the opposing time is refusing to advance and there's no surrender, you have to waste 20 more getting slowly crushed.

True. That just comes with the territory, I'm afraid. It would be nice if there were a surrender option.

it is an issue of player count -- with so few players per team even if one player is seriously off, you are basically doomed. That's why I prefer games with 16v16, statistically one player can't determine the whole game.

Unfortunately endemic to all MOBAs :(

It's both player count and "weakest link" syndrome. Games more like TF2, where weak or out-of-position players don't necessarily break a team, don't grow as toxic over the long haul, even if you're playing them competitively. But all the MOBA-style games have feedback loops that require everyone to play at a minimum standard or the game is definitely lost, and that just isn't conducive to a good experience in online/pub games.

Not really, CS:GO is 5v5, while having one bad player is bad, it's not crippling to the point that "you are basically doomed".

This is a skillcap issue, surely. One great CS:GO player might easily wipe out five bumbling opponents; in Dota-likes skill is much less likely to overcome numbers.

Gotcha, I thought "troll" in this case was referring to verbal behavior. Didn't realize it was more about bad team play.

HoTS has also made several design choices that reduce the negative effect of poor play by a single individual - team-shared XP, lower complexity (no items), shorter games. LoL is much more 'snowball' prone and players have to live with the consequences for longer.

40 minute games where you are heavily penalized for leaving even when someone else leaves. It's a team based game where you can see your entire team on a map. Ranked matches are competely dependent on teamwork. It seems obvious to me why there is so much vitriol in league.

Dota2 has fixed this by removing the penalty for leaving once another player has abandoned. It's a simple fix and I'm surprised LoL hasn't done it.

That only applies to unranked games. Ranked games you'll still lose MMR if a teammate abandons.

That depends, there are two distinct states.

One is triggered if there are network connectivity issues, in which case the game isn't scored for anybody. This is to get around the MMR abusers that would queue bots to leave on the other team so they would get a quick win.

The second state is usually triggered if a player has left after first blood. Even then, there are compensatory mechanisms. You lose less MMR than you would normally, and if a player leaves, your team will receive unreliable gold at a faster rate.

>This is to get around the MMR abusers that would queue bots to leave on the other team so they would get a quick win.

Why would anyone do something like that? Every time you played a legit game you'd lose.

In order to sell a high MMR account. This explains why there is massive amounts of MMR inflation across regions.

Prior to ranked matchmaking, the top 1% was typically around 4.2k hidden MMR. After ranked was introduced, it became closer to 5k. Now you have close to 8-9k MMR, because people are buying 5-6k accounts, and lose until they reach their true skill level (usually somewhere between 2-3k).

The account buyer essentially feeds 3000 MMR to their opponents, which is why a 5k player back when ranked was introduced is now an 8k player.

I still don't get it. Why would you buy an account with an MMR that virtually guaranteed you'd lose nearly every game? Are masochists more numerous than I'd imagined?

I imagine it's a form of Dunning-Kruger: account buyers feel that they are more skilled than the rating they received after calibration.

There are also those who legitimately enjoy griefing dota: their account is probably so deep into low priority stacks that it is effectively banned. Or perhaps they are shadow banned into the bot/multi box pool. So they buy a new account to try and ruin games at high MMR.

How did they do that? You can't choose whom you queue with.

Queue lots of bots at the same time, the ones that pop simultaneously will be in the same game.

Exactly. Also, queue on a low population region at say 4 am when many players from said region are not on.

Riot are testing it for the case where somebody leaves early on. They don't want to allow it for mid-game abandons for fear that it will encourage players to gang up on their team's weakest link and flame him into abandoning so the rest of the team can leave without consequence.

This is a strategy you see in unranked dota pubs, but it doesn't work against a team that's competent enough to rotate the weakest player out, pile into their lane, or use them as bait for counter ganks.

There is no point in this since there is a surrender option.

To which trolls will never vote yes on, and since you need a supermajority it doesn't happen as early as it should a lot of the time.

It has to do with late game mechanics, which is dominated by team fights. Thus if one team has only 4 effective players, that team will lose, even if this team did everything else perfectly and the opposing team stumbled around early game.

LoL is heavily team focused w.r.t. strategy.

I like to think of MOBAs like sports. Particularly, like basketball or baseball. It's a team game, and if one person is not pulling their weight, the entire team will suffer and lose. You can't win a baseball game with a pitcher who's wandering around in left field, eating popcorn and looking at spectators instead of pitching the ball.

You don't play baseball with random people. And if you do you see if someone is a moron and move along. You can't do this in lol.

Well, yeah! That's why people rage!

That's why I don't play online anymore (only with friends on LAN).

In ranked play, an early quit (like if your team dropped and/or kicked a badly behaving player and you decide to leave instead of playing on) can undo days or weeks of successful matches, and can even bump you into a lower matchmaking category. Which can have long lived consequences on the quality of subsequent opponents and teammates you have.

It has an extremely awful horrible toxic community, even in a genre of games which is rife with toxic communities. (And seems almost designed, IMO, to encourage such behavior-- since one person doing poorly on a team leads directly to the opposing team getting stronger.)

If you are an employee of Riot then I guess I'd suggest you avoid playing in the competitive areas. It seems like a zero sum move: your employer is monitoring you to an inch of your life (which would probably be considered unacceptable in most other workplaces!) and to win you must play in a toxic environment where it is likely you might react badly and thus be targeted by Riot's HR department.

If you must play for your job, I'd suggest doing one of two things: a. Don't play to win, play half heartedly and don't engage, take lots of breaks and report each and every negative encounter to your manager so they can see that it's potentially impacting on your mental health, or b. speak to management about the toxic environment you are seeing and work with them towards studying what the chief causes are then start putting measures into place to prevent it.

Judging by Riot's job ads and glassdoor notes, playing LoL is required to get a job there. From what I know there is no gameplay in this game other than competition.

We do hire people who don't play League of Legends, though we are looking for people who are passionate about games LoL or others.

That's good to know. The job ads imply otherwise (I posted a quote elsewhere in these comments, and this is the new language, I remember it was saying effectively "must be an LoL player" few years ago). Not sure if you care, but I am not the only one who gets this impression and excludes Riot from the job search.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll let the recruiters know.

It's actually far more simple: follow Wil Wheaton's advice and don't be a dick. I'm Bronze (not al Rioters are good) and as you can imagine the toxicity is HIGH. That said it's not hard to not be toxic. Everyone has bad days, and you can't take it personally if someone on your team tilts. If it gets really bad just /mute them.

>There is a reason Blizzard GMs are almost routinely respectful.

In my experience they tend to go far beyond respectful, Blizzard has by far the nicest customer service staff I've come upon anywhere.

It basically seems that the more competitive a game, the more toxic the community will be. And that in turn gets squared, if not cubed, by how easily game mechanics can be used to troll or grief.

Never mind that if a game has both a story element and a competitive element, the story element will over time deteriorate to placate the competitive side's complaints about balance and whatsnot.

I actually found league's community refreshing compared to DOTA2 which was a toxic mess in low MMR

I actually found the opposite.

DotA2 actually has some measures in place that lessen the impact of trolls or AKF'ing/quitting players, such as sharing their gold and control among the remaining team, or disabling their abilities that can harm their own allies. In League of Legends, it's a guaranteed defeat if one ally decides to troll or quit (assuming comparable skill on both teams.)

I've always thought that instead of reports and bans, team games should have a peer reputation system, like Reddit or HN's voting.*

MMR/game skills should not be the only criteria for matchmaking; it should include reputation/social skills as well. Oh and disallow global chat in ranked matches.

EDIT: Yes, it makes for a nice thought experiment to come up with a reputation system that would be resistant to "gaming" or abuse, as others have mentioned.

One possibility is to associate a cost to upvoting, and/or make downvoting an earned privilege, similar to how new accounts on HN cannot downvote.

There is such a system in place actually [0]. It is believed that the playerbase is separated into pools [1] somewhat based of this number. How it is calculated is anyone's guess.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/46y4v8/dota_2_behavi...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/351mdk/discussion_do...

Then it's not working. There are console commands that will print your toxicity metric. I routinely score ~9800 out of 10,000, i.e. friendly, and several times a week am matched with very toxic players.

Are you on the extreme ends of mmr? I have a high rating and rarely get people that don't get along. On the other hand, with the introduction of international ranked, maybe they shelved this for a consolidated pool.

I noticed as soon as my rank was high enough that I wasn't facing brand new players it became much more enjoyable.

It's hard to get much benefit from a reputation system in a free-to-play game where trolls can create new accounts at will.

Dota 2 addresses this specifically with a time-sink. A minimum number of games is required to play competitively, which increases the cost related to "new accounts at will".

In addition, even for non-competitive games, players who obviously troll and are flagged by the community are pushed to a separate pool with other trolls.

The system isn't perfect but appears to work fairly well for new players.

League has the same deal. Also, in League, you either have to sink more time or pay real money to play the champions that you like, so that further increases the cost of creating new accounts.

You can buy champions with IP (in game currency) and not RP (real money). The only thing you can only buy with cash is cosmetics. All runes/champions can be obtained for free.

GP did say "either sink more time OR pay real money, to play the champions that you like."

Assuming reputation starts at zero then a new account wouldn't be in the good pool nor the bad pool, just unknown.

The problem is that the reputation system is hard to do right. Players will game it or unfairly "down-vote" people to troll them.

Its not hard at all. In Dota you only get a certain number of down votes per week, so you don't waste them.

And it appears that some of those "downvotes" (called "reports" in game) are automatically cross-checked by the game. For instance, reports of "feeding" (that is, deliberately dying to give the enemy team an advantage) might be discounted or ignored if the hero being reported hasn't died repeatedly.

Also you get extra votes for reporting players who lots of people are also reporting for the same shit.

Also, in LoL the relative power ceiling of any one character is smaller than in DOTA2. If someone goes afk or trolls, your chances of winning in DOTA2 will be higher since their hyper carries can rip through a team (compared to LoL) if executed properly.

I don't play LoL, but I have seen Dota games where the short team wins in a 3x5 match. Experience gets divided out among the players in range, so if you get to the point where you're trading kills the short time advances relatively faster.

It's very close, but not quite a guaranteed loss at 4v5. I've won (and lost) a number of these.

We almost even won a 3v5 once, but we didn't quite close it out fast enough, so they finally caught up enough to take us down. And it was down to the wire.

That was actually one of the better games I remember, just because it was so intense, though that certainly isn't normal.

Then again, there is another side to things. I once had a team where we all completely sucked and we got pounded into the ground... but every single person was still nice and friendly. We all made friends after game, joined into a group, and played a lot of games together for some time after that.

Depends how low.

In the very high skill bracket (3.8k+), I've found players on US East and US West are extremely toxic, and the playstyle is relatively boring. So these days, I queue on EU West or EU East.

It might be because when switching to a new game, a player normally would be treated more harshly because he/she would be considered a burden to the team.

Especially true, since Dota2 is generally considered less newbie-friendly than LOL.

Dota continues to improve between patches, with the last penalty pool changes going a long way to helping keep toxic players out.

Both games are awful. Compare them to, say, SMITE. Which is still awful by the standards of any genre other than MOBA, but is far better than both LOL and DOTA2.

But I think the general consensus is that LOL is worse.

Both are bad enough that I stopped playing them very quickly. SMITE I stuck with significantly longer.

Interestingly enough, games like LoL have communities with heavy influence historically from Blizzard's own Battle.net, as it descends from DotA on Warcraft 3, a UMS cloning other similar UMS maps on wc3/Starcraft.