I remember playing Malzahar support before it was meta, because that was the only character I could play well in League of Legends.

Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.

And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.

But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.

I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.

First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat /ignore all

Voila - silence and no flaming.

Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.

Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.

It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.

I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.