In my last piece on League of Legends, I talked about the game, its features and purpose and why I'm done playing it. However, it is impossible to talk about LoL without addressing the issues surrounding the community. Infamous for its generalized hatred towards non-straight-white-males, nor anyone who dares treat the game as anything less than Serious Business, LoL's community is a two-headed dragon when it comes to internet jerkery. Having an extremely low barrier of entry (the game client is free and requires only a low to middle end computer) opens the game to a terrible case of GIFT. Having actual money on the line in the highest levels of play inspires the same kind of madness suffered by the participants and fans of what we must now refer to as 'physical sports' as opposed to 'e-sports'. Combine the two, and it is easy to see how LoL's atrocious reputation emerged.
There are enough (too many, frankly) horror stories I can direct you towards that I will not be spending a thousand words on explaining how playing LoL turns you into a racist woman-hating homophobe with the grammar of the average meth-addicted cave man. I will instead tell you of my actual experiences, where I met some fun folk, some obnoxious folk, and a whole lot more who just want to play a game about wizards and warriors and everything in between.
Let me begin with saying that I by no means met every single member of the community, nor do I assume my experience to be typical. However, I did not find LoL to be that wretched a hive of scum and villainy, certainly not out of character for the rest of the internet. There were absolutely some people who just could not get over themselves, people who insisted they knew how to play your character for you - this got particularly funny when they were so busy micromanaging everyone else that they failed to notice how bad THEY were doing. Naturally their failures were everyone else's fault and never their own. Once ignored, though, these trolls generally go about their miserable ways - there's no point in trolling someone who doesn't care, after all.
There were the usual 'clever' user names people use to get around censorship on technicalities - replacing letters with numbers in racist slurs, for example, or insisting female players get back in the kitchen. It's extremely easy to use ugly language against others when the only punishment for doing so is getting a free account closed down - even then, only after numerous complaints do accounts get shut down, and there's little way to prevent offenders from simply making a new account and continuing to verbally abuse others. Though impossible to stamp out entirely, negative folk like this are a priority target for the Tribunal program.
As a quick aside, I should explain that the Tribunal essentially is crowd-sourcing of moderation. The idea is that account holders of a certain level are allowed to vote on whether to punish reported players. Reasons for reporting range from intentional feeding to harassment and everything in between. I can't speak to the success or failure rates, since as established, offending parties can circumvent bans if they are determined to ruin the day of others. However, I do cheer the attempt at getting people to think twice before being a jackass. There are specifics about the program that are explained in detail on their FAQ.
For every racist, sexist, hetero-sexist, elitist, and generally disruptive player, however, I ran into far more who just played the game. Public teammates tended towards just doing their job, offering advice and encouragement on occasion, but mostly sticking to themselves and saying 'gg' - Good Game in internet shorthand, kind of their equivalent of 'have a nice day'. And for every jackass, there was at least one decent human being who was, if not Best Friend For Life material, then certainly pleasant to talk to for the duration of the match. As mentioned above, I eventually met enough in-game folk to play with that public queues weren't necessary, and those were some fun games.
All in all, the problems I had with the game were not the result of the community - a rarity, in all honesty. I would not say LoL's fan base is a perfect utopia by any stretch, but it is not Satan incarnate either. The bad apples - ones that exist as a natural, unfortunate, and unavoidable consequence of internet anonymity - are not enough to condemn every member of that community.
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