Do people rage because they seriously think it'll win them games? I've always thought that people rage because at that point they think all is lost and need someone to direct their anger towards like a punching bag. I mean I've never come across a situation where someone gets called a "LOL noob feeder" and subsequently turns it around because of said derogative flame.
You'd be surprised. People flame someone for playing bad then demand they play better, for example. Except that kind of flaming only makes people more anxious and nervous, which tends to lead to even poorer decision making and performance. This kind of thing happens at the beginning, middle and/or end of matches; not just exclusively in garbage time when we're looking at individual report cards. Flaming happens when the game can still be had and helps ensure losses more often than not.
That energy is always and will always be better spent thinking about
how to improve the situation, rather than barking at people for some current predicament. For example, flaming a carry for having low CS isn't going to help them get more CS. Maybe time is better spent looking at the minimap and saying, "how can we give the carry more space to farm?" "Do we have enough wards up?" "Can a couple of us baby sit them until they get a critical item online?"
Shit like that. Many will flame, but few think about how to turn lemons into lemonade. I mine as well own a lemonade stand given how positive I try to be. Even in the worst situations, I tend to not believe it's over and if we can help xyz person on the team get up a or b item, we'll be back in it.
Here's the GDC talk by Riot on shaping player bahviour...
http://gdcvault.com/play/1017940/The-Science-Behind-Shaping-Player
25 mins long, pretty interesting.
Damn, this was excellent. Do recommend watching in its entirety. After seeing this I'd love to hear from Valve how their team (which undoubtedly also has a variety of behavioral scientists and psychologists with whom they either employ directly or consult) go about evolving their punishment/behavior reform system.
Really, all these MOBA makers would do well to work together on this front. They all need the same kind of help.
I think Dota is a bit different than League and faces some unique challenges League has shielded itself from.
1.) Region locking. Spookie's last reply to me is really a case in point of the problem here. People are playing Dota 2 in regions far from their home region and speaking languages unknown in the region they've queued for. This immediately makes for a frustrating game all by itself, considering how important communication is in Dota 2. League avoids this problem almost completely by having different regions. In the hundreds of League matches I've played, I can literally count on one hand how many have been populated by people who did
not speak English. Compare that to our typical Dota 2 experience.
2.) Dota 2 is, without any doubt, a more punishing game than League. That's neither a positive nor a negative, rather an objective truth. The ability to deny minions, the heavy influence of invisible heroes, heavy XP gain when killing an enemy hero, heavy gold lost when dying to an enemy hero. All punishing mechanics that do not exist in League. As such, dying in League has a lower overall effect than it does in Dota. Sure the killer gets a gold advantage and meaningful XP bump, but that's really it. They can't stop you from safely farming under your tower if need be. They can't stop you from getting all the CS you can safely collect because there is no creep denying. They can't stop your item progression very effectively because you're not losing gold when dying; just losing time. These things lead to people being largely more calm about a random death. One or two deaths in the laning phase won't spell doom and gloom like it can in Dotes.
3.) All-chat disabled by default. Let's be real: most of the talk in all-chat after the initial GLHF is shit talk. Which gets people's defenses up and tips the scales towards people venting on teammates when things don't go well.
4.) You can vote to surrender early. It's something I've used in less than 10 matches, but if a game is clearly unwinnable (and sometimes it's quite clear), forcing people to stay and deal with a negative experience for the next 10-20 minutes or more as the other team falls back to farm, Roshes, and attempts to buy every expensive item in the game when they really could just push to end only makes people angrier. Anger that carries over to the next game if things don't immediately start off well. Whether a surrender option is good isn't the point here so much as an analysis of what the lack of one can do to a player's mindset for his next couple of games. Sometimes getting a game over with quickly with a surrender can get the frustration out of the system before genuine anger and frustration set in. There is value in that.
Both games still have their share of ragequitters, intentional feeders, and ragers. But there are things both mechanical (how the game is designed) and technical (how people are put together and how they can communicate with each other) that result in significantly less raging in League, I've found. The contrast is fairly stark. All-chat banter in League is often
playful, of all things. Even
complimentary. When was the last time you've seen someone get owned and tell the opponent "damn...nice play bro." in Dota2? Just about never. That shit happens often in League.
Since Dota2 can't do anything about #1 and #2 because of the design of the game itself and the service (Steam), it will be interesting what ideas and implementations they come up with over the years to extract more positive play out of people who might ordinarily be a bit more defensive and hostile. A big start for many of us would be finding a way to address the language issues. Not being able to communicate because a teammate neither speaks nor reads English on USE/W just feels bad. As for #3 and #4, I do hope they continue to consider their options here, perhaps with some focus group testing.
... Plus I made the mistake of buying items that I anticipated would sell better later on rather than buying the items I truly wanted during the sale. I bought the LGD skipper and captain bamboo with that mentality. Granted there are other couriers like the ones I listed that I wanted more. Oh well... selling them would be breaking even I guess
