Master Yourself, Master The Enemy

The League of Legends community is often criticized for the overabundance of players whose attitudes and behaviours ruin the game for everyone else. Players who can not handle the responsibility of being sportsmanlike in a competitive environment will ruin the morale of their allies, verbally abuse their own teammates or sabotage the game intentionally. These players ruin the experience for the other 9 people in the game, and I was one of them.

Admitting to myself that my attitude was a problem was hard. I had a penchant for negative behaviour, giving up early, and admonishing my teammates for mistakes that I thought they shouldn't be making. I was obsessed with trying to control my teammates, and when things got beyond what I thought was my ability to carry us to victory, I gave up and tried to bring the morale of my team down so they would surrender with me. I was wrong a lot of the time, and often I mistook a personal weakness-- not knowing how to play from behind-- for a completely hopeless situation.

While I never wished cancer or suicide on my teammates, I would call them idiots or abandon them in lane when they misplayed. Whatever mistakes my teammates made, my reactions to them undoubtedly made it worse. I was then upset and confused when they wouldn't take my advice later in the game. I never stopped to think about how my actions were affecting my teammates, and then when they reacted to my criticisms and negativity I wrote them off as soloqueue idiots that I was mysteriously plagued with.

When I got tired of fighting with my team every game, I would play bot games. It was perfect. I could carry it single handedly, it was an assured win, and I could play whatever I wanted. I queued up for an Intermediate bot game and picked Lee Sin. I played him mid because that's what the cool kids did, but I got matched up against Fiddlesticks, a particularly annoying bot to play against because, with his instant reaction time and access to hard cc, it was difficult to trade with him evenly in the early parts of the game. I gave first blood to him and was upset. But in this instance I had no one to direct my anger at. Jungler? We didn't have one. There was a player duo laning top with his friend who was new to League. I couldn't expect any help. I just got outplayed by AI, and that's all there was. I just had to either swallow it or let it fester.

"Master yourself, master the enemy."

For the longest time, I had a particular understanding of this quote. I thought it talked about strategy, that understanding your own habits and weaknesses and patterns can give you an insight into the enemy, and for awhile I followed this advice as I understood it (good advice, by the way, but irrelevant to the moral of this story). But there, in my state of aimless rage having died to artificial intelligence, I realized what Lee Sin was trying to teach me every 5th or 6th time I commanded him to move: Self-control is as crucial as skill, because you will always be the biggest impediment to your own success.

This realization led to a reevaluation of my behaviour from the past several months, and I now understood that the loss streaks, the arguments, and the frustration. I was letting the responsibility for whatever situation I was in slide off me like ice off a hot frying pan and dumping it all on my teammates, and that was an unfair burden to impose upon four internet strangers.

So what did I do? Well I still didn't trust myself to not argue with my teammates right off the bat. So, I muted everyone on both teams at 1:55, and I played jungle. Muting both of my teams removed the opportunity for my to react to my teams comments, and Jungling allowed me to be a remote, vaguely positive influence on my team's success. I farmed, ganked and gave buffs to the teammates that deserved them. I also didn't say a SINGLE word throughout the game, except when I was donating buffs or saying "ggwp". I won a lot more games. I had a lot fewer arguments. I haven't had a losing streak since then except if you consider the 10 games I lost when I tried to learn Rengar.

I am not cured. I still get frustrated with my teammates. But I make more of an effort to reign it in, and to not take the game as seriously as I used to. Victory is still my prime motivation, but I am also conscious of the feelings of my teammates, and try a little harder to foster camaraderie rather than being fiercely independant to the point of being antisocial. Not only realizing, but accepting than my behaviour and actions control the direction of every one of my games more than the 9 other random summoners I'm in a game with has yielded positive results, and I would advise any player who has struggled with personal toxicity to try what I have done: just mute everyone and shut up for 10 games, and you will see results.