Which is also a complete cop-out meant to save $$$ that lacks any basis in fact or reality.
Dota 2 is churning along quite comfortably with integrated voice chat despite having more inter-region mixing. Any time this subject comes up the Dota 2 community nearly unanimously agrees that voice chat in no way encourages "toxicity" and more likely actually prevents it by assigning a human voice to the player as opposed to just disembodied words.
I have ~1k games in Dota 2 and have run across less than a dozen ragers in voice. A quick report+mute and they're taken care of. Usually getting a chat ban in the process.
If anything it makes the game better when people start using voice. I've had games that I've given up on and people started using voice to ask for things like shared unit control for dominated creeps to stack ancients and actually communicate where they're going instead of trying to guess what's going on in four silent teammates' minds.
OTOH, I had one game on EU W where two Russians were talking (nicely) to each other and some British guy comes in and just says "I can't stand Russians. Good bye." and leaves.
And I've had my fair share of LAN cafe players with an open mic blaring music and their friends conversations. Mute and move on.
I really do wish we could mute the mic and not chat and vice-versa.
I can't speak for Dota, but I quit playing league because I got tired of how badly Riot has implemented their ranked system.
There's so much talk about toxicity in league, and very little about what CAUSES the toxicity.
Hands down the biggest issue is not coming down quicker on trolls and AFK's in ranked. They have a system in which they literally FORCE you to play out an hour long game when someone never connects, leaves after 5 minutes, doesn't get what they want so intentionally feed, and so forth.
For someone trying to climb that's automatically 2 hours gone. 1 hour for the game they're forced to play out, and 1 hour for the game they have to win to even out their ranking loss.
I have literally seen streaks of 60-70% of games with one of the above (troll or AFK). Eventually people get frustrated by it and that's when the toxicity starts.
If Riot wants to improve toxicity they need to protect the ranked experience better. I have so many things going on in my life that losing 2 hours because some asshat on the internet decided to troll is just not worth the time. 2 hours is a LOT of time, and while I loved the competitive nature of the game, eventually I just walked away from the game.
Shortly after I decided to walk away from the game, I came across the following video, and it describes EXACTLY why I stopped playing, and where my frustrations with the game where.
The day I quit was when I sat down on a Saturday to spend playing league (one of those rare days where I got to do what I wanted). I spent 2 hours waiting on dodges (where it makes you wait when you leave during champ select). I kept dodging because I kept getting trolls in champ select. And then something like 4/5 of the games I did get into had either an AFK or someone who got pissed off in game at someone and started trolling.
I just thought to myself, what am I doing? There are so many more productive things I could have done today, this game does nothing but frustrate me.
I haven't played a game since, although I still watch LCS.
In Dota 2 if you AFK for more than 5 minutes (no xp) you get an abandon and the game is safe to leave for all players. In ranked your MMR (roughly your Elo) gets updated win or lose if the game goes past first blood. The abandoner gets a loss regardless of outcome.
If you abandon 2 ranked games you get put into the low priority queue and have to play a certain number (at least 5 I think) of all-random games that don't record anything.
If you get reported for communications abuse enough you get a communications ban and can only use the chat wheel and rate-limited pings. Other reports get turned into low-priority queue time (supposedly).
If you dodge a game (even if you don't ready up) you get progressively harsher queue timeouts. It goes something like 4 min, 10 min, 30 min, 1 hour, etc.
There is also rumor of a hidden queue pool of toxic players. Kinda like a shadow ban but it lumps all the ragers and dodgers and AFKers and feeders together to play with each other.
Honestly, LoL never appealed to me. Every champ is about the same with about the same skillset and every game has the same laning. Riot seems to not really be able to make changes and their community management is bad.
If you can get past the turn rate and inability to spam spells in Dota you might enjoy Dota more.
See, those things I could get behind because they protect the ranked experience.
The LoL community has this idea that dodging is an important part of climbing BECAUSE of how often you auto-lose games from circumstances outside of your control. And they're right, but only because of how badly Riot protects the ranked experience. I personally hate dodging, but I hate wasting an hour or two due to trolls and AFK's even more.
It kills me to watch riot spend so many resources trying to "fix toxicity" when the real problem is how they give other players so much control over your time in league.
I played 2 games of Dota last night. One 35 min (ranked) and one 43 min game (unranked). It took less than 5 minutes to find each game. I had one game fail to start due to fail to two players failing to load. Reborn has been having some server issues so it's not unheard of. Total time in game was like 1:30.
The ranked game was a complete stomp - 59-14 in 35 min but the losing team stuck it out for the entire game. We could have ended it 10 min earlier but we didn't for whatever reason.
No rage quits or gg ff calls or intentional feeding. I'm not highly ranked (no clue what the equivalent is in LoL; I'm just at or slightly above average) but it's rare to get RQs in ranked at my level.
As an avid Dota 2 player I can attest this. If people start flaming you, replying on voice chat and saying something positive, like "Sorry, my wife was calling me. But don't worry we can win this", will change the tides immediately.
I'm an avid LoL player and not having voice chat support built in is the largest downside to LoL. Plenty of players are "side-loading" their voice chat through a variety of applications. This is a huge PITA as I need Skype, TeamSpeak, whatever the rest of my team is using.
Players aren't consistently using voice chat since it's not built in. If you are in a match up where one team is on voice chat and the other is not; the team with voice has a huge advantage as text chat is less visible and has more delay.
Or they're just doing what WoW did, WoW if I remember correctly added in-game voice support for raids years ago, but dropped it because of lack of user uptake.
No one was using it because it wasn't as good or easy to use as already existing third party programs, so they dropped it. Riot is probably thinking the same, and can spend their resources elsewhere on something that isn't already done better by someone else.
WoW already had persisting social structures that lead to those groups setting up voice servers that provided them a lot more intricate controls. People who chose to speak in game had already assembled the infrastructure to do so, why use a worse system? I played Eve Online and it was the same scenario, every single group ran a voice server and often individuals did as well.
Contrast this to LoL where you're dropped into a game randomly with others random players for <60 minutes who you don't know but are forced to communicate with to maximize strategy. Communication is utterly critical yet the best option for doing so is slowly typing a message in a micro intensive game or a nondescript ping. The resulting player behavior is exactly as one would expect.
Maybe also they're taking their cues from Xbox Live and all of the raging that comes from a similar aged user-base dropped in with random groups and don't feel like enabling young kids the ability to tell random strangers to go kill themselves...
You'll always have outliers, but nothing stops those same kids from doing so right now with text chat (and probably at a higher rate). Mute functionality is there for a reason.
Just like they support via text based chat right now. It sounds like most of opposition to their reasons against voice chat really is just end-user whining.
It does not encourage it.
It also sometimes lead to funny stuff like someone broadcasting sad music if we are losing or epic music if we are winning ahah.
And if players start turning to auto-matching voice services (Curse Voice and Razer Connect did this at one stage), they'll go and threaten bans for all.
Look into SteamRE for a good primer on interfacing with Valve chat services, although if you want gory details of server architecture I don't think they've ever written about that in detail.
There's a solution to that (considering that text is acceptable and voice is not for whatever reason) - use voice to text software to convert the user's voice to text and send it over the existing text chat.
I find this trend of social engineering via hiding info to be really annoying/disturbing. LoL doesn't even have a way for a player to find out what their ranking is - the ELO on the back end is hidden for some inane reason, and now I can't even know that I have to play with a certain guy a bit more carefully because he's half a second behind everyone else.
Knowing that I can't trust another player to launch a skill shot attack on target is valuable info - it changes the dynamic of how you'd play with that person.
> I find this trend of social engineering via hiding info to be really annoying/disturbing.
I totally understand where you're coming from.
However, there exist people who play MOBAS who are easily frustrated and -emotionally- twelve years old. Hiding the rank and ping of all players gives such people two fewer things to get angry or upset about. If they're not angry or upset, they might just either play well and win the game, or -barring that- be a pleasant person to play with. :)
> Knowing that I can't trust another player to launch a skill shot attack on target [because of high ping] is valuable info...
Back in the day, I used to play Descent and Descent 2 [0] over both a 28.8 and -later- a 56k analog modem. My ping times varied from 300ms to 700ms. There were a few weapons in that game that were -effectively- skill shots and tricky to land, but -if you were aware of your ping, and your opponent's likely motion-, landing the shots was totally doable.
In short, just because your teammate is a HPB doesn't mean that he can't cope with that ping. He might always play with that ping, and -thus- be completely accustomed to it.
Here's the problem though - Descent was optimized for those comparatively awful connections. League doesn't specify any minimums, but players report games becoming difficult around 100ms and nigh unplayable >=300ms. (From a casual google)
With LoL being as team-based as it is, knowing if/when my Blitzcrank is going to be able to land his rocket grab lets me know when to launch my ultimate and the rest of the team to join the fight. Having a high ping guy initiate a teamfight is.. unwise.
But quite honestly, I don't believe that hypothesis. If someone is going to get bothered to the point of toxicity by ping, something that is almost completely out of the player's control, they're going to get just as bothered being killed by Malzahar's global ultimate, someone picking the wrong team composition, not getting the lane they want, someone speaking a language other than perfect english, and so on.
It's like instead of optimizing for players to be able to play their best and give them the tools to do so, they optimize for, and drag everyone else down to the level of the emotional child. As someone who is not an emotional child (at least I think not): that's disheartening.
I also don't believe Riot is serious about dealing with the problem - it takes a long history of being a serious jerk before the bans start getting trotted out (talk of "correction cards" aside).
And it makes sense why - banned people don't buy champions and skins.
> Descent was optimized for those comparatively awful connections.
Descent 3? Yes.
Descent 1 and 2? No. Absolutely not. D1 and D2 were written for play on IPX/SPX LANs. All latency compensation was done manually by the player. It wasn't until the IPX/SPX to TCP/IP bridges known as Khan and Kali came out that folks could play them on the Internet using their shitty analog modems. In fact, a pretty big part of Descent 3's marketing was that it was optimized for play over a analog modem connection to the Internet. [0][1] (Source: I've -sadly- put far more hours into Descent 1 and 2 than probably any other video game. I could fly the first five or ten mines in both installments backwards, with rear-view off and not hit a wall. I also racked up far more in per-minute charges to my dial-up ISP than I ever want to think about.)
Edit: As I was thinking about this, I remembered that both D1 and D2 also offered null-modem (AKA crossover serial) and analog modem options for head-to-head multiplayer. Note that neither of these options transmit data over IP; the analog modem option just acted as a really long null-modem cable. ;) The analog modem option was likely added because once you've written the code to handle null-modem connections, you're at least 90% of the way to handling analog modem connections. But -again-, latency compensation was entirely handled by the player.
> ...players report games becoming difficult around 100ms and nigh unplayable >=300ms...
Here's the thing. If you have -for a little while- a > 300ms ping spike, it's going to disrupt your play. If you always have a > 300ms ping, two things are true:
1) It's the only way you've ever played, so your reaction times are going to tuned to that latency.
2) You're never going to have any basis for comparison, so (and this is key) you're not going to complain about your ping on forums.
> If someone is going to get bothered to the point of toxicity by ping, ... they're going to get just as bothered being killed by Malzahar's global ultimate, [etc.]
I generally agree with this. However, if one can easily remove two barriers to a player's enjoyment and not substantially impact the game's character or mechanics, why shouldn't one do such a thing? The action obviously produces more happiness than it eliminates.
> It's like instead of optimizing for players to be able to play their best and give them the tools to do so, they optimize for, and drag everyone else down to the level of the emotional child.
This is hyperbole. You can't seriously believe that the removal of player level and ping information from the match loading screen is "drag[ging] everyone else down to the level of the emotional child".
> I also don't believe Riot is serious about dealing with the problem...
I played LoL for a looong time. I played before the Tribunal was even a thing. I can't speak to how serious Riot is about improving the community, but the difference between the pre-Tribunal community and the community today is night and day. The improvement is vast, and has largely come through the steps that Riot has taken to remind folks that
* This is just a game.
* Your teammates are people, too.
* People who enjoy themselves are more likely to play well. People who play well win more often.
and through steps to identify and prevent chronically toxic players from interacting with non-toxic players. Maybe the isolation machinery doesn't work quickly enough for your liking, but it is there, it does work, and it has had a real, positive effect on the character of the playerbase.
> ...banned people don't buy champions and skins.
Non-toxic players who refuse to play the game because the playerbase is full of toxic players also don't buy champs and skins, and they don't introduce their friends to the game. LoL is bigger than WoW. [2] Riot gains more by permabanning chronically toxic players than they lose in lost potential revenue from said players.
[1] It's more-or-less illegible, but there's a section in the middle of the retail D3 box that mentions how the game is optimized for modem Internet play: http://bubbalou.event3d.com/descent/dvd/d3web.jpg
Heh, fair enough on Descent, I just remember a lot of time spent playing it over modem (and cursing noisy phone lines). Wasn't aware that LAN was the first class citizen there :)
But league, I was more referring to the standpoint of everyone else on the team, not the one guy with high ping. The one guy is living in a world that's offset a quarter to a half of a second behind everyone else - he can't play better than his ping. 350ms is enough time to blink, dodge a skillshot, and so on. In casual games or lower tier ranked that might not matter or even be noticeable, but get up into Diamond/Challenger? Painful.
What if one's enjoyment of the game is based on their performance and competition (i.e. the people who play in the higher levels of ranked?), rather than vague "happiness"?
I've played enough of the game to know that being stuck in a losing game (yes yes, it's just a game, not the point) sucks. It's awful and inescapable (since quitting hurts your team and penalizes you), and a lot of the time, it happens because of factors completely out of your control, whether that be internet connections, that one guy who just disconnected leaving you down a guy, or that one guy who uses phrases ending in "...or I feed". You enter this system to compete with others, and you're denied the one thing you came there to do (and knowing how long matches can take, perhaps the only time you had to do).
Competition as a system necessarily involves unhappiness on the part of one party.. I know few people who enjoy losing.
>You can't seriously believe that..
At the risk of sounding overly snarky, you just said that riot's goal is to maximize happiness. That means removing things used by children to cry about, even if the adults have a legitimate reason for their inclusion. That is the very definition of optimizing to the lowest common denominator.
>It is there, it does work..
And yet the new player experience is still awful. I can say this, because as far as League's system is concerned, I am a new player. There's a reason some high 90s percentage of my games are with friends, rather than matchmaking games that actually raise my standings- dealing with the community sucks. People who leave, people who feed, people who just act like jerks.
If there is improvement, it's completely invisible to me. Perhaps the higher ranks have been cleaned up, but the bottom of the pyramid is still godawful.
For the vast majority of the population, pings were just nice to know. For a small minority it was a contributor to toxicity. I think it's just one of those things where a minority of (ab)users was able to ruin it for everyone. Unfortunately I don't feel like this is an isolated case within the League of Legends ecosystem.
