Thursday, February 23, 2012

League of Legends: Tryndamere Hatred

There are a couple things which unfortunately seem to be true in general of people who play online games: they hate to lose and they refuse to take personal responsibility for a loss. Illusory superiority strikes again! Most people are going to think they're better than average at the game. They think they should be winning (as an example) 75% of their games but they actually only win 50% since the matchmaking system does a decent job. How do they account for the 25% of games where they feel they 'should' have won but actually lost? They lash out at the other players! Someone else on their team must have played terribly. They're a feeder, or a 'noob', or they picked the wrong champion. They bought the wrong items. They didn't put enough wards down. Eventually if your rating gets low enough you end up in 'Elo Hell' and actually get paired up with teammates who routinely quit the game.

I've taken the brunt of my fair share of these attacks. I have bad games from time to time and can make an easy target for vitriol. Especially when I play Warwick and build the manamune item which no one seems to believe is a reasonable choice. If we lose and I have manamune I'll get yelled at. Interestingly if we win and I have manamune the other team will use it as fodder for their attacks against each other. How could you lose to manamune Warwick?!?

Recently I've started playing the Tryndamere champion. I've been slotted into the solo top role on my fledgling ranked team so I've been trying to diversify my options for solo top heroes. In the IEM event I watched a few weeks ago Tryndamere was sometimes banned and completely dominated one game and I already owned him so why not give him another shot? I read some guides on how to play him, picked one that matched my tendencies (do everything possible to try to secure a kill when you're level 2 and they're level 1 with the goal of snowballing) and have been doing reasonable with it. I win some, I lose some. I kill people a lot. I forget to turn on my ultimate and die. (It prevents him from dying for 5 seconds which could give you enough time to kill them, or run away, or some combination of the two.)

One thing I wasn't prepared for was how much hatred was going to get flung my way. Apparently people have a very low opinion on the skill needed to play Tryndamere perfectly. If I die a couple times early my teammates will inevitably start insulting me. 'How are you dying with Tryndamere?' 'What kind of noob gets 5 deaths on Trynd?' What really surprised me was what would happen when I did well. The other team would start with the insults, as expected... Only they wouldn't be insulting the person I was killing. No, they'd be insulting me! 'Noob has to play Trynd to win.' 'Play a champ that takes skill.' 'Stop being such a tryhard Tryn!'

To be fair, Tryndamere is one of the champions with the best scaling in the game. A fully equipped Tryndamere does a scary amount of damage and can pretty much ignore defensive items what with his ultimate preventing him from dying and all. He can be dealt with by smart opponents (get multiple copies of the exhaust summoner spell, for example) but against your average mediocre team? Pretty much unstoppable late game if he has a lot of items. Getting to that point isn't trivial, but the average player who whines about things isn't going to notice the ways to keep him down early. They're just going to see the end result of a farmed Tyndamere and cry about it.

I've decided I don't actually care about people yelling at me if I'm doing well or poorly. I'm going to keep playing the way I want to play (while sometimes stepping back to see if I could be doing something better) and if people have a problem with it they can rant as much as they want. I was just surprised to get insulted for doing well.

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