Sometimes players ruin your game and that's life

With a new patch so recent, it seems strange to pop in and have some kind of sagely wisdom or annoyed complaint about solo queue. So this week, instead of suggesting that you don’t ban Kayn (sorry everyone) I am going to tell you a story about a player so oddly toxic that I have never forgotten them.

A few years ago, probably around season 4 or 5, I was playing support. I had hopped into a ranked game and gotten paired up with an Ezreal. He seemed pretty normal and picked his champ without any kind of hate or malice. I grabbed Thresh and jumped into the game.

Once we began to lane, he starts walking into the enemy team and pressing S to stop. They kill him. When he returns to lane, he immediately does the same thing. When everyone on our team inevitably asked if he was lagging or if he was OK, he gave the strangest answer I have ever seen.

He said to us “Sorry guys, I am intent feeding this game. It happened to me last game and I need to pay it forward so other people know what it is like.”

This is not a joke or an exaggeration. That is exactly what he said and I will never forget it. What was so interesting about this particular fellow was that he seemed genuinely bummed out. To him, he was doing this not because he wanted to but because he felt as though he needed to do it. It had to happen, he had to show us what someone else had done to him.

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We obviously reported him when the game was over, but honest to god I am not mad at this kid. Instead, I just feel really sad for him. This is a story for another day but I have had a player zero in on me before and make me feel like garbage. I never went into the next game and ruined it for new allies, but still, it upset me for most of the day. Someone broke this poor Ezreal, and then he probably broke someone else in our game.

Looking back, I think this is kind of just amazing. Austen and I laugh about it pretty frequently because it is just so bizarre. But at the same time, it bums me out. So, because I am feeling cliche, this story does in fact have a moral to it, one that we should all consider more than we currently do.

The way that you treat your allies and your enemies in game can actually bear consequences past that particular interaction. If you treat those in game with you kindly, you may brighten their mood for the rest of the day. If you treat them like trash, they may go ruin a game for someone else. Toxicity breeds more toxicity, and the wheels turn and turn.

Does this happen every time? No, of course not. I have played thousands of hours of League of Legends and this particular situation has happened to me only a handful of times. But still, consider that the person you want to yell at for being bad might be having a really hard week.

Not every teammate is fun to play with, and more often than not you probably just want to ignore everyone and play the game. But if you decide to type in chat or if you are thinking of typing in chat, be kinda above all else.

And hey, if you are jumping into people’s fun time and ruining games on purpose just to be a jerk: plz uninstall.