I'm disillusioned with Riot's approach to player psychology, and I can't choose to forget the things I've learned about how player feedback in the game works.

It was all poisoned in the beginning when "unskilled player" and "refusing to communicate" were implemented as report categories. Digging deeper reveals that these reports are basically shredded instead of giving any feedback to the reported player. The problems with this approach are numerous. Experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment give us evidence that just by giving people symbolic power over others, you encourage inhumane behaviors. Combine this with requiring zero effort or instructions in order to file reports, and you have a system that can only hide it's inaccuracy with an overwhelming false negative rate. The report categories have been tweaked, but the damage to the culture of the game is already done and the majority of the players doing the reporting don't even read the web pages or forums that give instructions on how to use the report feature.

Frankly, League of Legends in part is a training tool to teach people that the sociopathic abuse of strangers is a safe and effective way to get what you want. Usually when I ruin a game, the victims seem to believe I will get the account banned. This indicates to me that the community largely isn't aware of how player feedback works and that the only thing motivating "toxic" individuals to behave themselves is blind fear of something they don't understand.

The psychology of the game is deeply flawed in other ways too. For example, the community was very conflicted about pick order/draft order in draft mode while heavily proselytizing teamwork and communication. The truth is that human psychology does not support expecting consistent friendliness with hundreds of strangers in situations that create tension. Consider how vehicle traffic minimizes communication while heavily depending on automated signals and right of way. This method results in far better coordination between drivers than if the system depended on drivers going through social rituals to determine when people should give way for each other. The hubris of Riot attempting to minimize toxicity while ignoring every real-world model of what happens when you repeatedly put human beings in stressful situations with dehumanized strangers is appalling.

It's difficult to condense the motivation of a behavior that was developed over hundreds of hours and going on its seventh year. I'm not confessing to the kind of griefing that looks like a 0/20 mobility boots rammus, but rather the crushing reality that in any given game, it's easy to invisibly ruin the experience of players that still feel protected by the illusion that griefing isn't encouraged.