An Example of Filipino Trash Talk in League of Legends

Photo from Riot Inc.

League of Legends (LoL) is an extremely popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game played on the PC by several thousands of players in the Philippines. Personally, I have been playing this game for almost 8 to 9 years of my life, ever since I was in Grade School. The game involves 10 players each game, with 5 players per team. The goal of each team is to farm up, gather resources, and play together to destroy the opposing team’s base. Whichever team is first to accomplish this goal is deemed the winner of the match.

Despite how simple the goal may appear to be, the overall pace of the game is very slow. Champions, or the characters that players choose to use as their character for one game, need a lot of time to get strong enough to push for the win without dying to the opponents. Because of this, a typical game of League of Legends tends to last around 25–30 minutes depending on the circumstances.

The game is undeniably very addicting, especially if you think you are good at it. However, due to the addictiveness of the game, mixed in with the long game times and the ever-inflating egos of the average LoL player, tensions are usually very high. This is especially true when playing Ranked games, which are the games that allow players to place their name on the leaderboards to prove how good they are compared to everyone else.

Higher tension almost always leads to shorter tempers, and with short temper comes toxicity. Logic is thrown completely out of the window when players start to argue with each other. To make it easier for me to explain, here is an example of a game I recently played, where two players on the enemy team got into a heated argument. For context, what is shown below is the team chat, where players can talk to each other by typing, and the timestamp shown per message is the current time elapsed since the game started. This game was played in around Diamond 4 elo in Season 10, and I was able to view the enemy chat because I played against a streamer, who uploaded a replay of his point of view of the game.

The Chat

The argument begins with “THE BAMBOOZLER”, playing as Hecarim, getting mad at “Ube Flan RY4”, playing as Samira, for complaining about dying, even though he had nothing to do with the play. Hecarim throws a quick Ad Hominem “peenoise” line to add fuel to the fire.

Samira, instead of moving on, proceeds to attack him by saying he is trash at every role in the game, citing a previous game where they also played together, wherein he allegedly also played poorly. Hecarim responds by pretending not to remember the player in an effort to make them seem irrelevant.

Samira continues to type instead of playing the game, mentioning how the opposing Rek’Sai player was doing a way better job than Hecarim is.

After a few minutes, another player accuses Hecarim of having a small brain (not seen in the screenshot), and Hecarim decides to continue typing.

“Cutie Pao”, the Malzahar player, gets in on the action and joins in insulting the Hecarim player who has somehow managed to antagonize himself even further.

Towards the end of the game, the goal has somehow devolved from playing LoL to seeing how fast they can type. Hecarim decided that his next best move was to mention that he finished Med School to finally win the meaningless argument. Little did he know that this does not do anything at all to the situation.

Overall, common sense and basic decency does not apply at all when talking to annoyed people playing League. People here will say whatever they can just to get a last word in until the game finally ends. Though not meant to be representative of every League game, this is a typical example of how real people vent out to strangers online when the game they play is not going the way they want it to go.

It’s funny to think that this game continues to go strong almost a quarter of the way into 2021. Nevertheless, a game is only as popular as its player-base demands it to be. Hopefully, as time passes, players will learn to do less of ‘League of Chat’ and more of ‘League of Legends’.