UPDATE (May 8th 2020): Riot Games has put out an update on game-ruining behaviour and changes it plans on making following Voyboy’s comments.
Original article (May 5th 2020): British former League of Legends streamer Ali ‘Gross Gore’ Larsen has backed the views of American streamer Joedat ‘Voyboy’ Esfahani on toxicity in the game.
Voyboy said it’s been getting progressively worse and that he’s had ‘the worst experience’ of his ten years playing League of Legends in the last five months.
The high elo player and former pro gamer posted a video about seeing more griefers in the game, either intentionally feeding the enemy team, ghosting his games, stream sniping, AFKing, trying to manipulate lobbies to get on his team and throw the game, or just playing troll champion builds.
Voyboy said: “The reason I’m talking about it is because it’s a representation of how the general playerbase perceives and treats ranked solo queue in League of Legends.
“It’s been happening so consistently over the last five months. People are doing this in games and there are no punishments. There’s no point in reporting people [in game]. No one is scared of getting in trouble or getting banned, because Riot Games has made it clear through their actions or lack of vocalisation on these points, they don’t really care.
“I truly believe we’re at a critical mass now. Unless you say a bad word that automatically gets detected, you’re not going to get in trouble. But enough is enough. Back in my day, people had respect for League. Riot, please help us.”
He urged the playerbase to be vocal, to urge Riot to take action, whether it’s Riot reworking the punishment system, putting out new guidelines, introducing new ways of detecting trolls or taking them out of solo queue.
“I have a genius idea that will fix the whole thing: player moderators. Like in RuneScape. Why don’t Riot make some of their players – like moi – player moderators? Make me a player mod and I will sort them all out bruv!”
Gross Gore
Gross Gore reacted to Voyboy’s video and largely agreed with him, but added that the EU West server is worse than NA.
He stopped playing League last year due to toxic behaviour in the playerbase. Back in 2017 Gross Gore switched to the NA server for a while due to toxicity and has said he doesn’t find playing LoL fun anymore.
Gross Gore also revealed a ‘genius idea’ that he said would fix toxic behaviour for good.
In a response video to Voyboy’s rant, he said: “EU West is 10 times worse than NA. It’s why I don’t play the game.
“I have a genius idea that will fix the whole thing: player moderators. Like in RuneScape.
“Why don’t Riot make some of their players – like moi – player moderators? These players are smart [and they know how to play the system]. Make me a player mod and I will sort them all out bruv!”
Experienced UK scene player Bart ‘Bartiono’ Wessels also wrote an interesting thread on the topic here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
