I find myself playing less and less frequently, and when I play its 1-2 real games and a couple co-ops or ARAMs and I've been wondering why long sprees of play seem less fun and I've come to a bit of a conclusion as to why that is.



Winning is less fun than losing is frustrating.



Winning carries a certain amount of fun to it and it fosters a positive attitude on your team (thereby improving your primary interaction with players).



Losing carries a quantity of frustration about equal to the rush of winning, but your interaction with other players gets increasingly toxic as the game goes on. People want to find somebody to blame, and the instant a shred of blame is placed on somebody it seems to flip their troll switch into overdrive.



The interaction between the players detracts heavily from what fun could be salvaged from the losing game. I've been in losing games where the game remained fun until the end, but these are with the rare minority of players that remain civil and keep trying until the end, or simply surrender with a 'gg' and start commenting on the game and what caused the loss after the game instead of letting it spoil things while still playing.



A good example would be my last game. I was 3/1/2 at the end of the lane phase, buying wards, and ganking consistently. I was doing rather well and having fun, and we had several more kills than the enemy team, but our kill gold was focused on Jungle Rammus (myself) and Nidalee while theirs were on Vayne and Rumble (most of the enemy kills being on our Taric, who was 0/6/3 at the end of the lane phase). Our Taric got mad when told to play more cautiously and started stacking Zeals and running into the enemy team 1v5 while raging at us for not coming to help him when he 'engaged'. He then started spamming the chat and harassing people and left the game. He came back later and played normally for a short while until we lost a team fight... then sold all his items and bought all 5 types of boots and danced at our nexus.





I win more games than I lose by a factor of about 20%, but I still feel like I get more negative emotion than positive emotion from the game. No exaggeration at all, at least half of my losing games are that toxic and mean (usually a lot of harassment and not quite so much intentional disruption). My winning games and close games are usually fun and people are supportive through mistakes and don't rage when things go badly. The losing games that aren't toxic can be fun in their own right, but they are rare.



Generally in a losing game I get to enjoy the challenge of the small game of the lane phase, and usually don't give up more than one kill in that phase in the case that I'm doing poorly. This amounts to about 15 minutes of usually enjoyable gameplay (or at least gameplay where you are in control of your circumstances) per game, and then games diverge.



Case 1: The game goes well and you win, your team is generally civil for the whole game and it is fun for you. 20-40 minutes of great fun.



Case 2: Close game. The game is fun and challenging for the entire duration, people get frustrated with each other at times but people enjoy themselves on both sides. There will be some minor blame game in the after game lobby, but nothing extremely horrible. 10-15 minutes of good play, followed by 30 minutes of intense, engaging play with alternating highs and lows.



Case 3: Ideal loss. You get outplayed, but nobody is especially responsible or blame doesn't become an issue due to a quick surrender or victory. People might talk bad after the game, but generally its a bit of venting. You get 10-15 minutes of good gameplay followed by 5-15 minutes of somewhat frustrating play. Move on to the next game.



Case 4: Toxic loss. Either somebody is trolling or somebody is losing early while others feel themselves to be doing well. Person doing neutral or doing well blames a person doing badly and calls the game a loss early or a player leaves or starts feeding because it seems like a lost cause. Somebody gets their troll switch flipped (either somebody doing well is mad at somebody doing poorly or somebody doing poorly gets mad because of blame) and somebody leaves or starts trolling/feeding/raging/harassing/spamming etc. You get very little good play, often even less than the 10-15 minutes in most games and you get an outrageous amount of antifun, frustration, and anger. You spend more time typing than playing and the only person having fun is the ***** who gets off on making you mad, assuming you don't ignore him in time. This game type is disturbingly common because more than 1 in 10 people on the internet are trolls or *******s, and there are 10 people in a game.



TL;DR: Losing sucks more than winning is awesome because of people. People suck.