LOL: The 10 most used insults in League of Legends and a lesson on toxicity

Video games, especially those with a digital ecosystem, have been the object of academic study for decades. The most special case is the corrupt blood of World of Warcraft, one that has been used in front of pandemics such as Covid-19 that we are still suffering. But the reality is that League of Legends and one of their star particularities as it is toxicity, is serving to create research articles.

This is the case of the work presented by Serkan Begun, Joni Saline, Suing Jung, Bernard J. Jansen and Peter McWhirter, researchers at Universities of Massachusetts and Tasting. This paper has a couple of years old, as it dates from April 2019, but it is totally valid in its conclusions: The most used insults in League of Legends.

Methodology

This is interesting, because for work data from the West Europe and North Europe servers have been used, but only of items in which there was someone in the MENA. The objective is to see what insults are used in the games with players from Arab regions, but by not existing one own server in that region, data from the closest places are used. For our text, this is totally irrelevant, since the real bias per region is seen in a Paper section based on forums.

The data was provided by the Riot Games itself, and for the study a total of 60,000 random items were selected in which there was at least one MENA player. The filtered insults were selected manually when reading the 200-game chats, based on automating the search for these terms in the final study of that huge amount of games. It is important to review that it has not been discriminated against between normal items, flex, ranked or even the played map.

Preliminary results

Before beginning conclusions with all that big data, the study stopped to look at some properties of toxicity in League of Legends. For this, they used the 200 items of this previous work, and sought toxic segments, resulting in a total of 1058, more than five per game. But the fascinating thing is that already a conclusion is taken with the number of toxic players on departure: 1,685.

This exemplifies what all more or less we know about our experience, as well as Riot Games has also said on occasion. It is always a thing of someone who begins to be toxic, and then someone follows him in the verbal abuse of him. But Most players stay margin. In addition to this, a classification of insults was made to give with four main categories: non-toxic use of these words, by the game, on mechanical and personal ability.

The main study

Beyond the curiosity of the most used insults, which is interesting and can be reviewed in the superior text, the most relevant is the division by type of insult and about who is used. Thanks to the previous specification, the study yields the following data: both in EU and JUNE, The vast majority of insults are directed against the team itself who perform them.

In JUNE 30.43% of total insults are insults based on the skill of colleagues, and 49.11% are aimed at allies and are framed in personal insults. For EU, our server, the data changes a little up to 35.28% and 37.5%, respectively.

The result of the study is obvious: Riot Games must isolate and eliminate that small number of players that create the avalanche of toxicity that we believe in League of Legends.

You can review the PDF of the study here.