Taking revenge in kind does not work, it only leads to a chain of people who feel entitled to snowball the problem, because when you respond, you're helping ruin the game for eight people because of one. People who cannot keep the peace when someone trolls are are part of the toxicity, as well as victims thereof.
The proper way to deal with it in LOL report and move on, not making the game worse for the eight people who had nothing to do with it.
There's nothing to "defend" yourself from: they're words, you're not being "attacked" that's ridiculous hyperbole.
> People who cannot keep the peace when someone trolls are are part of the toxicity
Nowhere did I say to go up in arms and start a mob war, either. Being silent and "just ignoring it" is not the same as keeping the peace. I agree with your notion that feeding trolls is also bad, but because people are humans and not machines I have to disagree that they are part of the toxicity. They are a symptom of it; a side-effect. Curing that symptom is all that Riot really wanted to do in the early days, which is why I quickly abandoned the community.
I really do not think my original point was properly conveyed so let me clarify further:
There is someone being negative. That is the fundamental problem that needs to get solved[0]. As I mentioned before, Riot's stand has always been to "just ignore it" or "don't be a symptom". So:
> The proper way to deal with it in LOL report and move on
Is really Riot's sentiment from 2010: "Just ignore it". "Don't feed the troll". "Don't become a symptom of the toxicity". These statements are equivalent to saying: "Players are expected to have the mental and emotional fortitude of a machine". Tough shit if a guy instalocks Ez and calls mid, and tough shit if a teammate purposely feeds kills. Under the "Just ignore it" doctrine, there is no recourse during the negative experience. Sure, after ruining the experience the negative person could be reported. But its no surprise there are people that would rather not have to put up with the bad experience in the first place.
> not making the game worse for the eight people who had nothing to do with it.
That right there is what is wrong fundamentally. The implication is that the game is already bad because of one negative player. See [0] above.
So when I originally replied to the comment:
> It doesn't matter who started it, you just have to not bite.
I was not talking about revenge in the sense you were describing it. League has a huge community and therefore huge peer pressure. Bite back by leveraging that peer pressure for good: getting people to encourage each other to try new characters when they queue for a week straight with the same character, or encourage when making good cooperative plays, or not letting people instalock multiple games in a row, or being able to boot people back into queue if being obnoxious in champ select, or having mods review game chat while games are going on, or creating a culture of support by giving probationary people pink names and making it cool to encourage them when they display positive behavior. There are a ton of ideas like this, and they were there in 2010. But fundamentally, Riot seems OK with that first negative player. That low bar is why I do not play.
> There's nothing to "defend" yourself from: they're words, you're not being "attacked" that's ridiculous hyperbole.
No, it is not ridiculous hyperbole because that is not what I am saying. Please, quit the attempts of putting up a strawman argument.
But since you (trollishly?) went there, it is clear that the power of words may be lost for you. For other people, words can be emotionally charged. It is unreasonable to ask others to also trivialize their emotions (See the theme of my posts?). If I am a tank and I see a teammate say: "Our tank is a fucking gringo cracker nigger faggot slut bitch for feeding their carry", that carries some emotionally charged weight to it.
If you take anything away from my post it is this:
That first negative player is the root of the problem. Players are humans: they will sometimes feed back as a symptom. Leverage the players' humanity for good to fix the root problem instead of trying to turn them into emotion-less robots fixing the symptom.
Well, you go back to champ select as a source of team friction and they are fixing that.
You don't find people using racial epithets any more, either, so about the worst of the chat text nowadays is someone complaining that you fed. They ban for slurs and swear words really fast, even automatically, and so most ragers don't get to chat, though they can play while chat banned. There are smart pings for communication and those are honestly more than enough.
That said, I personally, when I was an admin of a completely different online game, have been called every single insult, swear word, and racial epithet (I learned most of them from said trolls). I did not lose my cool or even rage at them, I keep the idiot talking to me (and away from the public chat) until a higher one could come on to ban them. It's better when they suffer from their own rage rather than you :)
But if someone is doing something that gets you banned (or in trouble) when someone else does something that upsets you, well, I can't agree with that just being a "symptom" because then there would be no "disease" in the first place. Everyone has to take responsibility for themselves because nobody else can.
And on that note, I do apologize, because I think my tone sounds worse than I intended in a few places and I don't mean to blame you for any specific problems. I'm just explaining that keeping chat peaceful requires that people do not feed trolls and those who start trolling because of another troll also require punishment, generally chat bans. And there's only one person with control (and thus, responsibility) for one's emotions: the person themselves. Learning self control takes practice, though.
The proper way to deal with it in LOL report and move on, not making the game worse for the eight people who had nothing to do with it.
There's nothing to "defend" yourself from: they're words, you're not being "attacked" that's ridiculous hyperbole.