League of Legends: Toxicity levels are high

If you look around on the web it is well known that the community of LoL isn’t the friendliest place you can be in. If you are new, you’ll be subjected to the harsh criticism of your team members or the opposing team. The game can be quite complex and hard to get into. There are roles you must learn to play; builds you’ll have to understand; masteries to unlock and let’s not forget that every champion is played differently. The first few games you will be dying a lot due simple mistakes which in return ‘feeds’ the opposite team. This kind of things can fuel the anger of your teammates or the grief of your enemies.

Although the tutorial and bot training matches can help you to understand the core mechanics it will still feel as a complete different ball game when you’re playing with actual people. They have their own ideas how a match should be played out, what they want to see or what they expect from others.

What communities can mean for a game as League of Legends

Playing the game with people you know obviously removes the pressure of performing perfectly. They know you’re just starting and can give you advice on how to become better. Communities can help you a great deal with this. You can ask around for people to play the game with you and ask for general advice. Another benefit is that you’ll start to know how roles work, because they can tell you exactly what you need to do when you’re in a more supporting or jungle-like role. Overall, being able to communicate vocally will create increase the performance of your team compared to a random group of strangers where most of your communication will consists of using chat or with the use of pings.

In communities, there are all sorts of players doing their own thing, but they might be willing to come back to your game when they realize there are new people to play together with.  Although it takes a while to play ranked (you need to be level 30 for that) you can choose to start playing competitively with the people you’ve learned to play with or managed to drag back into it. Being part of a community also makes it easy to banter about the game or discuss various tactics you could use.

Overall, communities can help a new player ease into the game and even draw ‘retired’ players back into it. As long everyone has fun and is willing to learn.