I’ve had a couple particularly bad games recently, mostly thanks to unapologetic trolls or unbearable wannabe pros. In a couple games I’ve tried to be a force of change, asking my teammates to not be so negative, but for the most part I prefer to just drop everyone on ignore and be done with it.

It seems the community attitude, at least the worst of it, has been wearing on the Rioters lately as well. Guinsoo recently tweeted that he was sad to Irelia do well in a test game after he had nerfed her. The community jumped all over that, hoping to stave off a harsher nerf. Guinsoo replied as pictured above:

And you guys wonder why we don’t post here?

All I did was say that it made me sad that she can do this. There are so many overreactions and hyperbole here it’s not even funny.

Good day.

It’s not surprising that he feels that way – I’d imagine any company with as much public interaction as most game developers have feel less than warm toward their customers from time to time. It is surprising that he would come out and say it on the forums. I see it as a pretty clear sign that the community is in bad shape, and it’s not the only evidence, either. The formation of leagues like the Runeterra In House League also point to the fact that players are unhappy with the queue experience and want a higher quality play experience.

I’m hoping that last part will help drive some change in the community. It’s tiresome to play with trolls and know-it-alls, and even more so when the forums around the game don’t offer any relief.

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.

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?

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.