Gamasutra.com writes “League of Legends
has become well known for at least two things: proving the power of the
free-to-play model in the West, and a "vicious player community.”
In the wake of
yesterday’s article about the perma-ban of pro League of Legends player, Christian Rivera, for his bad in-game
behaviour, I decided to ask some of the South African LoL community how they felt about rudeness in the servers, because
really, WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?
Rory: I don’t
feel that the community is that bad, it’s just that when someone rages it
stands out in your mind, so if you got 1 person raging in 4 games that’s like 1
in 40 people.
Matt: South
Africans retain a distinct advantage in the verbal filth-swinging wars on the
internet. Due to our understanding of Afrikaans and a passable education via TV
of Spanish, a fair portion of Europeans insults are swiftly understood and
rebutted. However, due to the relative obscurity of our languages, we have in
our arsenal an absolute plethora of gut-churning, oh-no-you-didn't local
insults that can be levelled at those well-deserved Europeans that leave them
with a blank stare . . . only to be enraged minutes after the game when they Google
it. Realistically South Africans are mostly just passive aggressive just
dropping incredibly dry sarcasm telling you how great you are, and then waiting
until you try start a fight with the enemy team and walking away and watching
them die in a teamless and lonely rage.
Rick: Well there
is 'bad behaviour' in all players no matter where they are from...I'd say of
anything the South Africans naturally can be quite 'teamwork' mannered where
even the noobs try and help team mates out as compared to say, the Russians,
who are known to be bad mannered and terrible sportsmen. Also, you don’t often
get other teams raging at your team, normally just at your own team raging at
itself.
So why does
everyone get so mad? Here’s a possible
reason:
Jo: LoL is one of the only games where you
actively hate your own team-mates more than the enemy team. In most video
games, your team is mostly incidental to what’s going on - you can just be individually
skilled and do fine. You might lose but you played well and you look good. But
in LoL if someone dies on your team
excessively they cause the rest of the match to just be the most horrible time.
You are investing on average, 45minutes to an hour of your time that you could use
to be doing ANYTHING else and often, playing LoL feels like being in a prison knife fight except for the fact that
you are attached to 4 drooling morons for the duration.
Well, I have to
inform you folk that Riot Games has formulated a Player Behaviour and Justice team, which includes two PhD’s – a cognitive neuroscientist and a behavioural psychologist
– that aim to mind-plorp you into being kind to each other. One of the ways in
which they are doing this is through the “honors system” where good behaviour
is rewarded with points (you can read more about it here). So play nice
friends, because even though I don’t really know what will happen if you don’t,
it’s just fun to do sometimes.
Also, have this video of the most brutal LoL rage ever:
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