I was playing League of Legends one day (big surprise), and I was in a game with a teammate of marginal talent, repeatedly dying. Eventually they blamed their performance (or lack thereof) on the royal lag, which is obviously the reason why anyone has a bad game, because everyone is extremely talented at League of Legends and the only thing that can suppress their immense talent would be uncontrollable ISP maladies.
Anyway, my natural response to someone whining about lag was to basically tell them to stop playing, because let’s face it, it’s not fair to their current and their future teammates to repeatedly enter games with their true talents inhibited by connectivity issues, and not necessarily said to (entirely) antagonize them. But naturally, since 95% of LoL’s player base are functioning deadbeats, they naturally took it personally and decided to spend the rest of the game antagonizing me as best as they could, which is to say pathetically and completely ineffectively.
Among their onslaught of weak insults was making fun of my LoL “rank,” which is a Silver II. Which is basically saying I’m among the 9th from the bottom tier of the supposed 25 tiers of rankings there are in the ranked mode. Honestly, I probably don’t even belong in Silver II, probably lower, since I was pretty putrid in most of my provisional ranked games, but the fact of the matter is that I won enough games to place Silver II, and not end up in Bronze, the more or less, five lowest tiers of ranked mode.
However, despite the fact that he was a Gold ranked player, I was still handily the vastly superior player compared to them in this particular match in terms of KDA (kills/deaths/assists), but that didn’t stop them from taking all of their (often) respawn time plus actual game time to make sure they could look up my account for fuel to try to attempt to rank shame me. Needless to say, we lost the match, no thanks in part to their inability to get over their fixation with me, and all the details encompassing my ranking.
I will be the first to admit that I’m far from simply an adequate-skilled player, in spite of how much I play and how much I talk about League of Legends. It’s an ever-moving game, and for those not simply gifted with immense video game talent like me, it’s also a game that really needs a lot of practice and time to keep up with the rapidly changing metas and styles, much less grow as players.
Rank shaming is about one of the most common and frequently used forms of harassment that League players go with when they feel like trying to antagonize other players. Short of hacking or excessively researching other players by their handles (AKA tryharding) and hoping to find corresponding uses in other outlets, players’ ranks are really the only thing trolls really have to use to antagonize other players with. At least the ones completely lacking in antagonistic creativity, which basically is the 90% of League’s player base.
Utilizing rank shaming is almost more detrimental to the person trying to use it; to me, it just makes them look like the bigger tryhard, especially if they’re becoming so fixated with the pursuit of rank shaming that they actually use their own time to look up the players they wish to flame, in order to rank shame. Then, it’s not really clever or slanderous as much as it’s well, sad. Frankly, I’d rather just make assumptions that the other players are fat nerds, call them as such, and then be on my merry way. It’s like 3/5 times, it’s probably true.
Needless to say, not only does rank shaming not work on me, it just makes me feel kind of sad, that there are so many people out there that are not only poor(er than me) at LoL, but have absolutely zero ability to hurl a good insult, or say something witty in game. Calling people bronze or silver is about as useless and dated as saying someone is an outdated jab, like calling a person “gnarly” or something Michelangelo would have called the Shredder in the classic TMNT cartoon. Maybe I’m hoping for too much expectations from a game that has so many retards in its ranks like LoL, but I’ll be the first to admit that I often give praise, or at least click “honor” for those who actually demonstrate some clever wit in-game. Wit, is something worthy of praise, regardless of the skill of the player.
