My Online Collaborating experience in League of Legend and toxicity about gaming (1000 words blog)

 Collaborating is very important in almost everything in our daily life now, we can seldom  achieve success by only one person, we now trying to get in groups to get on purpose. Not only in business, but also in gaming too.
                                        
               Image  by Margaret Hillary(teamwork)

 I am a 5 years League of Legend player , i started to play it since season 3 and now it is the end of season5, in the game my highest ranking is Diamond one which is the second highest rank in the game , only 0.3% of the gamer in the game can achieve that. I get my account to Diamond 1 both in solo rank and team rank, in Season 3,4,5 and 6, team rank must be a constant team which include at least 5 members, i and my high school friend make up this team. So if we want to get higher ranks, we need good skills and better team collaboration. We are in different university after finish high school, so all of the things about the team need to be finished online, so this is definitely online collaborating.
     According to Tuckman’s 5 stages of group development, there are 5 stages which are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Although our team is about gaming, but it fit the 5 stages perfectly. So its about our team’s ranking experience in the past two years.For the forming stages, our group is consisted by 5 different roles, they are top liner, mid liner, jungler, adc and support. Top liner is responsible to tank damage for the team. He need to stand in front of the team , try to start the team fight, provide control for the team and take most damage. Mid liner need to do damage during the team fight ,he should try to find chance to kill enemy mid or adc in the team fight. Jungler usually pick a champion with some control skills and have some damage so when he try to gank a line , he can help teammates to get the kills. Adc means attack damage carry. He is responsible to do damage in team fight from long range. The difference from mid, mid champion usually do magical damage and adc do physical damage.Support is responsible for peer for adc and mid, he usually have lack of damage but have a lot of control skills. He also need to control the view sight. So i take the mid line and my friends take the rest and our support is a girl. So in forming stage we divide our work and know roles for each one.

                                    
                                           Image by Wenhao Wang(my acc at season )

In Storming stage, of course every group will have a lot of difficulties when we start our team ranking, because we just make this team, so we lost a lot of games because of our bad cooperation. Our individual skills were all okay but everyone have different game style, although we are in skype but when the opportunity come we sometimes still make some mistake. For example, our girl support’s game style is conservatism, she prefer farming than fighting,but adc is much more aggressive, he prefer attacking than just farming, so when them match up together in bot line, they always get defeat. So in the first several weeks our team have almost no progress on our ranking. Everyone in the group feels very upset, some of the members even think we can’t make it. They feel fear of failure. The girl want to quit because she said she feels no hope.As the mid liner of the team as well as the captain of the team, i decided to make a group discussion on skype on a weekend after we finished school. We take about one hour to discuss about tactics. For example, adc and support tried to use play in the same style, just farm and wait for jungler come to help. We retried for about one week, our win rate start to climb and our ranking start to climb, so for the next 2 weeks, we climb from gold to plat 3 with 73% win rate, our confidence came back.
   So for the norming stage, after we passed the run-in period, we discussed again in skype and picked up a time to play every day, we decide to play from 10 o’clock to next day’s 3 o’clock every day because the rhythm is very important for this game and if we want to step forward we need to get together and fight everyday. We were all in freshman year so we have plenty of time at that time, our cooperation became better and better, and the misunderstand between adc and support had already solved, the atmosphere in the group is perfect , although i am still the captain of the team but actually anyone in the team are willing to share their thoughts while we fight together.Our ranking reached diamond division after one and a half month, and everyone in the group feels happy while playing with teammates.

               

                             Image by Wenhao Wang(after norming stage we start to win)

After we played in diamond division for another one and a half month, we finally reached our goal-diamond one.We get to diamond with a win-rate of 61% and we can cooperate very well during the game, we feel proud of been a member in our team and when we start a team rank game, we always have a high morale,we don’t have any problems in our group and we also consolidate our friendship during that gaming trip.
  After season 5 finished and season 6 started, the team rank mode is canceled by riot company they start a new mode called flex rank, it means the number of player in ranking game is not limited , so our team had to dissolve because the game mode had been canceled but we still got our season reward , a diamond border. Just like i said before, our friendship also increase a lot during those time and the girl become my girlfriend XD.
  That was really a amazing experience online collaborating in my life, i still miss those moments now and they all become my best friends.

                                     
                                               Image by Jodi Sorensen(online-collaboration)

During the game experience in League of Legends ,when playing normal or solo rank,there will be different teammates randomly selected in team, some of them are good but some of them are terrible, and when teammates are all terrible during a whole day, players are becoming toxicity inescapability because their psychology is becoming worse and worse after losing.In the article “Can a video game company tame toxic behaviour”, Maher talks introduce the toxicity behavior happened in League of legends and also introduce that Roit company spend a lot of time and money , make rules to reduce the number of the toxicity in the game. In the article it said the most situation of toxic gaming is negative attitude , verbal abuse , offensive language and helping enemy teams. Roit sure made a lot of rules to reduce those situation. 

                              

         Image by lol.mmosite.com(afk and verbal abuse)

For example when a player get reported by others because of those reasons, his account will get warning in the first three times, and after first three times of warning, his account will be banned for one day, one week and a month. This rules was make by roit just from last year, and it sure have a positive effect, when i am playing the game, i can feel the toxicity behavior is reducing. Although the toxic behavior is reducing, but it still exist, there will be always a part of the player having toxicity behavior when they are in bad mood and when their psychology crashed, the game company can only try their est to reduce the toxicity behavior but they can’t tame it because there unskilled behavior always exist in the game. So the solution of reducing toxicity gaming is controlled by the player themselves. 

                               

          Image by Caleb Mclemore(gaming toxicity)

Players should have stronger team spirit, League of Legend is a team athletics game, if player’s attitudes is just treated it as an individual game when they are playing rank , they better play normal mode instead of playing rank because this is derelict of duty to the other four players in the team. When sometimes i think about verbal abuse in the game, i am considering why the player verbal abuse other players, the reason is he want to win, if a teammate continue doing very bad during the game, this will cause the team lose the game and his behavior will definitly make his teammates mad, but if his teammates blame him, the verbal abuse will make the situation worse because this will increase the negative attitude in everyone’s mind, usually this means surrounded at 20 minute. But if the teammates keep encourage him, then probably team spirit will make every thing work and can also avoid toxicity behaviour in game. As a result, game company can’t tame the toxicity behaviour but they can try to get more reward to those player who have great team spirit to make the team better, that will probably reduce the toxicity gaming behaviour.
                                   

      This scene is a show of bad team collaboration in lol

RNG is my favourite LOL team,this scene shows how important team collboration is in team fight, not only the game, but also everything in our life.