Posted By JTRex on Sep 9, 2015 | 1 comment

League of Legends has millions of games going on at any moment, so you can only guess that a in a few of those games thing aren’t going well for some players, and that they may decide to speak to their team about it.  And in here we have what many players have been subjected too since the beginning, toxicity, a word that now is getting thrown around for even constructive criticism.  One player who knows about being called toxic all too well is pro player Forgiven, and recently he has been the topic of discussion, having a month long competitive ban that lead to his replacement on Gambit Gaming.  On followesports.com, Thorin has a great piece about Riot and their extreme toxicity stance, especially when dealing with LCS players like Forgiven, saying:

When FORG1VEN received a four match LCS ban for a solo queue-related “pattern of negative in-game behaviour and toxicity”, the impact that punishment had on his team was significant. Their play-offs chances were effectively ended and thus their opportunity to qualify for the World Championship was essentially compromised also, despite recent form suggesting they would have been a real threat to have gone deep in both the play-offs and the gauntlet.

Riot’s competitive ruling included wording which painted FORG1VEN as someone who had been fined for similar behaviour a year or more earlier, which is the case, and had then continued a similar or worse pattern of negative behaviour. The problem with that characterisation is that it is at odds with the order of events as presented by FORG1VEN himself. The Greek ADC says that only a month prior, Riot representatives had come to him and told him he was the most improved, presumably pro, player in terms of behaviour. He then says that the stress of a difficult period with Gambit and his heavy solo queue practice regime had led to the outbursts of simple complaints which led to him being banned.

Anyone who read Riot’s competitive ruling, which was devoid of any evidence, beyond context-less numbers, and simply summarised a player’s two years of soloqueue practice in a couple of sentences, would not possibly have been able to guess at such an up-and-down relationship with both Riot and the community of players in solo queue. No, FORG1VEN was branded, once more, as toxic and it was presented as if he was one of the worst offenders ever encountered and thus different from the rest of the pro players and the rest of us who play and thus deserving of his harsh punishment.

Some harsh reactions from Riot there, but what can be done?  They control the game and the rules and seem to pick and choose how they want to enforce them.  Thorin goes more into detail on Riot’s odd toxicity stance in the full article, its a great read you can check out here.