How to deal with bad teammates?

What can I do if I have a teammate who will not listen to advice or instructions from the team, continuously runs into large numbers of enemies alone and dies, and disrupts their teammates strategies?

Oh have I not been there. Back when I tried to play League of Legends, "do not overextend" is all everybody kept yelling me. And yet I kept getting killed over and over again. My average game was 0 kills, 1 assist and 20 deaths, and then I just gave up entirely on the game.

Honestly...

  1. The "MOBA" genre is not for everybody. I'd rather take a death for the team rather than focus on PvP combat, but that's not how the genre works.
  2. PvP combat can be extremely frustrating of its own. Even when you try to "cheese things up" and use all your powers at once on the same enemy, a skilled player can easily see what's coming for him, dodge that one barrage and then demolish you entirely with his own. Then you're left to stare at a cryptic "Death recap" thing that really just throws names and numbers at you.
  3. The "not overextending" thing is pretty counter-intuitive and hard for new players. How much should you extend anyway? Why should you keep off from your only source of gold and experience when you're lagging behind in both? How can you possibly keep an eye on the minimap and the chat and your surroundings at all tim— damn, my last minion died and the tower killed me. Oh well.
  4. The more you lag behind, the more you die, the more you need that experience, the more desperately you go after it... and you end up feeding. It's a spiral of suck that's hard to get out of mentally.

So, all I can really tell you as a person that eventually accepted not having any hope for success in LoL: we're not necessarily feeding, we're not necessarily trolling, we're not necessarily enjoying this. Sometimes we're trying our hardest to try and like this game everybody's crazed about and yet things just don't click, and then you get annoyed and frustrated about it and perhaps even start getting rude about it towards people honestly trying to help you out. And then you quit entirely. Like I have.

It's not really your fault and I don't know if it's really our fault either. If you're approaching the game with the entirely wrong mindset, perhaps the fault lies in the game itself? I don't have an answer honestly.

If this player is a friend of yours, you might want to go about this and try to help him change his playing style entirely from what he's used to do. If he isn't, just block him or something. He's probably already having a pretty miserable time without your help. :)


There really isn't much you can do, being rude back just makes you just as bad as them in attitude. All you can do is ask them to stick to a teammate instead of going out alone.

If they are new to the game, all you can do is give them time to get better. If they are being rude or purposely feeding or have gone afk report them, thats all you can do really.