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Comment by jcoby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UfO7qOHx5M

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.

Yeah, that's crazy. I don't have time for that.

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.

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