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I want an ethic around team-based multiplayer games.

Games like League of Legends, Overwatch, DotA, etc. are amazing in terms of their strategic depth, variety, and power fantasy. However, the culture around them consistently gets to a narrow-minded, unfun state. What's needed is something like the ideal of "sportsmanship" in real-life sports.

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What you could do is try sign on to pickup services, or if you have a team of friends perhaps sign onto leagues. I normally just solo queue ranked games in Dota and sportsmanship is... lacking, as you say.

Sometimes, though, some people in our scene (South Africa dota players) will start up the FACEIT pickup hub and we'll have ~100 somewhat active people playing in a more serious league that lasts a couple months before things peter out. I much prefer that over typical ranked dota, even if things still sometimes get messy.

a lot of that is a function of the matchmaking system. Your MMR (matchmaking rating) goes up or down only based on win/loss, not any characteristics of how you played that game. If you do phenomenally well but your teammates are terrible and your team loses, you lose the same amount of rank they do. The idea that the culture of a game is influenced by the rules of the game is explored in Nick Yee’s book “The Proteus Paradox”.

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