League of Legends faces the same problem that many team-based online games have: other human beings. You are playing 5 vs. 5, and what are the odds that you can get 10 random internet people together without at least one feeding (intentionally or not), trolling, griefing, leaving… at least cheating, hacking, and glitch-exploiting have not been problems I have run into, despite their prevalence in other games. Even if everyone were trying, I don’t know how well the system does with balancing teams. The mix of newb and pro on each team often leads to some kind of balance in the aggregate, but then you have the apocalyptically awful as well as smurfs.
My rage of the day is simply getting a 5 vs 5 game going. Of my last 6 games, 1 had no disconnects. (Connectivity seems to be a commonly observed problem.) Some of those were against bots, so we had 4 vs 5 despite only have five possible points of failure. Even the bots are pretty rough in a 4 vs 5 fight.
: Zubon
Slightly off-topic, but what is “feeding” in the context of LoL? I got tired of the game before I got far enough into to get the lingo.
Getting killed repeatedly by enemy champions. You might do it because you’re not very good or because you are griefing your team.
It seems like the matchmaking system tries to keep you as close to a 50/50 winning percentage as possible. Often times that means putting a pro or a noob on your team. I will say that the potty mouthed jerks and the leavers tend to lessen as your ELO ranking goes up, but they never go away completely. Just par for the course in any moba game in my opinion.
I have to wonder what it is about the MOBA space that increases one’s exposure to trolls and jerks. If I had to guess, I’d say it was because they are all free to play games that allow you to be competitive in PvP right from the beginning. Also the anonymity aspect that plagues any system where you’re not likely to see that player again. Or maybe it’s the bang for your trolling buck. Like Zubon said, 1 player on your team that isn’t helping (or just leaves) will make it very difficult to succeed even against the AI.
Maybe all of the above?
As afk mentioned, higher ELO cures a lot of this. After 1300 disconnects are pretty rare (the ELO hit is double that of a loss), and I noticed after 1400ish feeders and trolls disappeared for the most part.
Anytime I play Normal games I fully expect trolls/feeders/4chan in my game. That’s just the price you pay when the entry cost is zero and getting an account back to 30 is trivial.