Why are players more likely to quit games on the Korean League of Legends server?
League of Legends, despite being one game, has been divided into different regions. The reason for this is to distribute a huge number of players on other servers and reduce ping.
However, doing so has resulted in the playing styles in America, Europe, and Korea being very different from each other. Likewise, the behavior of the players. The reason for this was explained by one of the employees of the players academy from Seoul – the capital of South Korea.
Toxicity and leaving games in Korea
Korea is famous for playing at a high level and introducing new tactics to the League, which inspire players from all regions. However, this server also has its downsides. Among other things, there is a huge problem of toxicity and players frequently leaving the matches.
This phenomenon is well known, but no one has been able to explain where it comes from. This task was undertaken by an academy employee from Seoul and reported on the case on Reddit. Spidertotem claims that the young age of the players is one of the reasons.
In Korea, the player base is really really young on average. In NA, PC players tend to be older, with younger gamers playing COD, Valorant, Apex, Fortnite, or Minecraft, and older players are more into MOBAs. In Korea, league is the game of choice for most ages, meaning even high elo players are around 15-18.
There are also obligations. Not only school but also extra-curricular.
School in Korea usually lasts from 8AM-3pm, but then students go to after school academies for another 4-5 hours, sometimes more. After 12 hours of sitting in a classroom, the kids will go home and start grinding soloqueue around 7-8pm. After they’ve been bored out of their skull for 12 hours, they have absolutely zero patience and zero desire to grind through a slow, boring macro game. They want to smash lane, collect some montage clips to send to a pro academy, and taunt the enemy in the victory screen. If they lose lane, they have zero faith anyone else will carry so they just want to end. Playing from behind is boring, and they’ve been bored to death all day.
Therefore, players simply do not want to play and count on the fact that they may manage to win a given match or lose several dozen precious minutes, and during this time they could play another match.
So it’s created a culture where on week nights, they’ve got 3-4 games they can get in before their mom comes in and tells them to get off the PC. On weekends, they’ll grind for 12-14 hours. My students would play from 3pm-3am, get up at 6 for school, and do it all again. They’re looking for easy wins. NA has a chess mentality: playing for Elo, grind it out for an hour. Korea has a poker mentality: bad hand? Fold and redraw.
This is why Koreans are so mechanically good. They don’t play by focusing on the macro, but on the mechanics. They treat league not as a strategy game, but as a fighting game. If the fight fails, they see no point in repeating it. In addition, the stress of school duties and the long time spent studying lead to toxic behavior.