Over the past month, after streamer Voyboy spoke out about the game-breaking issues in League of Legends, Riot Games has shown increased interest in addressing negative behaviors in the game. Most recently, Riot has improved the response speed of its player reporting system, and after about a month, they have gathered some surprising statistics on what frustrates players the most while playing League of Legends.
For many, the act of “keyboard bashing” and trash-talking in the game is extremely annoying and leads to endless arguments. However, according to data from Riot Games, communication issues like chat, pinging, and early surrendering are only a small part of what frustrates players. In fact, these issues are less bothersome than picking a bad champion before the game even starts.
Based on Riot’s statistics, we can see that the group of behaviors related to communication (pinging, surrendering, trash-talking in-game) has very little impact on players; however, they occur very frequently. Meanwhile, the group of behaviors related to champion selection occurs less often but frustrates players significantly more. For instance, picking Yasuo Support or choosing the wrong runes happens infrequently but can frustrate players right from the start of the game.
Ultimately, the group of behaviors related to in-game actions is what frustrates players the most. Just the act of farming against teammates or refusing to cooperate has a significantly greater impact compared to communication behaviors. The three actions that make players the most “furious” are feeding excessively, going AFK, and harming teammates (for example, while a teammate is escaping, you might use Bard’s ultimate to “turn them to gold”).
The reason for this lies in the nature of League of Legends, as the game does not require excellent communication between players to perform well. Riot even provides tools to mute the chat of other players, allowing you to still play the game as usual. Meanwhile, in-game actions directly affect the match outcome, and as a general rule, no one wants to lose, so their impact on players is much stronger.
Anyway, Riot is implementing measures to gradually improve the game-breaking situation in League of Legends. Specifically, in patch 10.14, they will introduce the ability to report players during the champion selection phase to reduce negative attitudes at this stage.