Tag: trolling

How do you deal with trolls?

June 12, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

I jumped into a game today with my brother, hoping to enjoy a relaxing normal 5v5. The game started off pretty poorly – our mid was feeding, we lost two towers within 10 minutes, and the enemy Vayne had a very nice minion farm. I made a poor choice early and went for a tower dive on Mordekaiser as Nasus. I was halfway through the animation for Siphon Strike, an attack that surely would have ended the 6 HP Mordekaiser, when tower killed me. He quickly responded, “u bad?”

We proceeded to stomp the enemy team for the rest of the game. Somehow, despite the bad start, our team just started to move around the map together. Our Kayle got farmed. My brother started lighting up their carries with Veigar combos, and I was Siphon Striking for 700 damage before it was all said and done. Of course, I couldn’t let Mordekaiser’s trolling go unchalleneged, so when he died, I would respond, “u bad?”

Usually trolls will just argue, but he actually asked me to stop being a dick. I complied, though I reminded him that he started the “u bad,” and that he shouldn’t troll if he doesn’t want to be trolled back. Then he typed the most surprising thing I’ve seen in a while – “you have a point, I take it back.” It was a roundabout way to apologize, but much better than anything I’ve seen in the past. It’s amazing how showing a troll just how foolish and obnoxious they are can turn things around. I’m not advocating counter-trolling in every case, but in its more mild appearances, it sometimes helps to shed light on what is probably my least favorite convention of gaming/internet culture.

Editorial, league of legends

counter trolling how to deal with trolls trolling trolls trololol ubad umad

Assholes are assholes, even in Co-op vs. AI

March 13, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

When Co-op vs. AI launched at the end of the week, I took a couple hours to test things out. Though I wasn’t particularly impressed with the bots, I was shocked to see just how rude players were to one another when playing against a computer.

To break in the new bots, I played champions like Gangplank, Veigar, and Kassadin – champions that can kill an underfarmed player very quickly if they streak out ahead. It was a lot of fun, despite nearly constant cries from my teammates to “stop ks noob.” I sort of understand the anti-KS mentality in PvP. There’s reputation at stake for a lot of people, and everyone likes to have a nice K/D/A ratio. Against computers, though, who cares?

In my last Co-op vs. AI game (Kassadin), I had a player calling me a noob the whole game because I died a few times. After the game he went on and on about my win count, how he hoped to meet me in ranked, etc. He went on like that for two full pages of lobby text with no response from me other than, “yeah, I was trying my hardest.”

It’s a strange thing to join a Co-op game mode if the only goal is to berate your teammates. Have you had a similar experience?

Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

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Riot encourages employee interaction with the community, admits training may be necessary

October 6, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

In all the recent activity on the forums (I won’t get into it here – head over there and read, or dig your way through the dev tracker), one post stuck out to me today, and got the attention of Riot president, Marc Merrill. The post points to an obvious trend – that every several weeks or so, a Riot employee mishandles a community issue and then has to publicly apologize for the action. It’s a frustrating thing to watch, because I really do believe in Riot’s ability to create and manage a community.

The reason Merrill stepped in was to admit that the community interaction is encouraged, but that maybe there isn’t enough training around employee/consumer relations. Here’s what he said:

I think it’s fair feedback.
We have a goal of wanting everyone at the company to directly interact with the community to continue to foster relationships, but we probably need to improve our training in this area.
We’re OK with taking our lumps when we’re out of line, it’s the only way we can improve!

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve often been shocked by the things some Riot posters are willing to jump on and say. I wrote a while back that trolling is among the worst things you could do to your community, and I’m glad to see Marc looking for solutions to the problem. I’ve noticed it most from the recent community hires. If you read the forums much, you’ll see certain community members go from black or purple names to red, but still try to maintain the same identity in the public realm. While it’s fine for the people who know those members well, the responses can be jarring and off-putting to new members of the community.

I hope Riot and its leadership continues to think on ways to improve the community experience. After all, this is a team game, and without the community around it, the game would wouldn’t be nearly as good.

Editorial, league of legends

community relations customer relations forum issues forum posts forum troll trolling

I think we’ve hit post Season One stability

August 13, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I don’t know how much time you guys spend on the forums, but I’m there pretty much every day just to keep up with what’s going on in the game, even when I’m out of town or otherwise engaged throughout the day. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past week or so, though, it’s that things seem to have stabilized.

I’ll be the first to admit that Season One brought enough frustrations to warrant a lot of the grief that happened on the forums, on this blog, and even in-game to an extent. Some of those things have been reverted or changed – the level requirement for ranked, some of the matchmaking algorithms – but for the most part it seems people are settling in to the new mechanics around the game. If the biggest thing the community complains about is the price of a rune page (which is expensive, but not totally unreasonable), I think things are definitely calming down.

What has your experience in game been like? Most of my recent games have been pretty tame. There are the random idiots that seem to make the world explode, either by their own rage or encouraging it from others, but even the typical “we lose because of x” has slowed back to what I consider normal levels.

league of legends

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Riot staff should stop trolling

July 21, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I understand that the crew at Riot is probably a little miffed at all the negative feedback surrounding the launch of Season One. Despite the problems, LoL is still a free game with an impressive feature list, and I’d probably be a bit peeved if people were constantly bitching about this thing I was offering up for free. But trolling isn’t the way to deal with that frustration, and it’s probably going to make things a whole lot worse.

Take this most recent troll post from Zileas, the game’s design director wherein he claims they’ll be making Xin Zhao’s ultimate refresh any time he gets a kill or an assist. It’s a joke, but if you weren’t reading the forums regularly and didn’t know that they were planning to nerf Xin’s ultimate you might easily assume this is real and get fairly pissed off.

Now, some would say it’s the responsibility of the reader to find out what’s real and what’s not – can’t trust everything you read on the internet. I would say, though, that it falls to Riot to keep its forums safe and enjoyable for old and new members alike, and making troll threads just to get a laugh out of the council and the forum regulars doesn’t do any good for the community. If Riot wants new players to get involved in the game and the community on the forums, it has to put an end to this crap.