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Comment by namidark | Hacker News Reader

I actually found league's community refreshing compared to DOTA2 which was a toxic mess in low MMR

I actually found the opposite.

DotA2 actually has some measures in place that lessen the impact of trolls or AKF'ing/quitting players, such as sharing their gold and control among the remaining team, or disabling their abilities that can harm their own allies. In League of Legends, it's a guaranteed defeat if one ally decides to troll or quit (assuming comparable skill on both teams.)

I've always thought that instead of reports and bans, team games should have a peer reputation system, like Reddit or HN's voting.*

MMR/game skills should not be the only criteria for matchmaking; it should include reputation/social skills as well. Oh and disallow global chat in ranked matches.

EDIT: Yes, it makes for a nice thought experiment to come up with a reputation system that would be resistant to "gaming" or abuse, as others have mentioned.

One possibility is to associate a cost to upvoting, and/or make downvoting an earned privilege, similar to how new accounts on HN cannot downvote.

The problem is that the reputation system is hard to do right. Players will game it or unfairly "down-vote" people to troll them.

Its not hard at all. In Dota you only get a certain number of down votes per week, so you don't waste them.

And it appears that some of those "downvotes" (called "reports" in game) are automatically cross-checked by the game. For instance, reports of "feeding" (that is, deliberately dying to give the enemy team an advantage) might be discounted or ignored if the hero being reported hasn't died repeatedly.

Also you get extra votes for reporting players who lots of people are also reporting for the same shit.

There is such a system in place actually [0]. It is believed that the playerbase is separated into pools [1] somewhat based of this number. How it is calculated is anyone's guess.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/46y4v8/dota_2_behavi...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/351mdk/discussion_do...

Then it's not working. There are console commands that will print your toxicity metric. I routinely score ~9800 out of 10,000, i.e. friendly, and several times a week am matched with very toxic players.

Are you on the extreme ends of mmr? I have a high rating and rarely get people that don't get along. On the other hand, with the introduction of international ranked, maybe they shelved this for a consolidated pool.

I noticed as soon as my rank was high enough that I wasn't facing brand new players it became much more enjoyable.

It's hard to get much benefit from a reputation system in a free-to-play game where trolls can create new accounts at will.

Dota 2 addresses this specifically with a time-sink. A minimum number of games is required to play competitively, which increases the cost related to "new accounts at will".

In addition, even for non-competitive games, players who obviously troll and are flagged by the community are pushed to a separate pool with other trolls.

The system isn't perfect but appears to work fairly well for new players.

League has the same deal. Also, in League, you either have to sink more time or pay real money to play the champions that you like, so that further increases the cost of creating new accounts.

You can buy champions with IP (in game currency) and not RP (real money). The only thing you can only buy with cash is cosmetics. All runes/champions can be obtained for free.

GP did say "either sink more time OR pay real money, to play the champions that you like."

Assuming reputation starts at zero then a new account wouldn't be in the good pool nor the bad pool, just unknown.

Also, in LoL the relative power ceiling of any one character is smaller than in DOTA2. If someone goes afk or trolls, your chances of winning in DOTA2 will be higher since their hyper carries can rip through a team (compared to LoL) if executed properly.

I don't play LoL, but I have seen Dota games where the short team wins in a 3x5 match. Experience gets divided out among the players in range, so if you get to the point where you're trading kills the short time advances relatively faster.

It's very close, but not quite a guaranteed loss at 4v5. I've won (and lost) a number of these.

We almost even won a 3v5 once, but we didn't quite close it out fast enough, so they finally caught up enough to take us down. And it was down to the wire.

That was actually one of the better games I remember, just because it was so intense, though that certainly isn't normal.

Then again, there is another side to things. I once had a team where we all completely sucked and we got pounded into the ground... but every single person was still nice and friendly. We all made friends after game, joined into a group, and played a lot of games together for some time after that.

Depends how low.

In the very high skill bracket (3.8k+), I've found players on US East and US West are extremely toxic, and the playstyle is relatively boring. So these days, I queue on EU West or EU East.

It might be because when switching to a new game, a player normally would be treated more harshly because he/she would be considered a burden to the team.

Especially true, since Dota2 is generally considered less newbie-friendly than LOL.

Dota continues to improve between patches, with the last penalty pool changes going a long way to helping keep toxic players out.

Both games are awful. Compare them to, say, SMITE. Which is still awful by the standards of any genre other than MOBA, but is far better than both LOL and DOTA2.

But I think the general consensus is that LOL is worse.

Both are bad enough that I stopped playing them very quickly. SMITE I stuck with significantly longer.

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