The dating app Tinder added the game League of Legends to its list of Passions and it has caused users to joke that this will hurt their chances of finding a match rather than help. Passions are topics that Tinder users can choose to express what they are passionate about to potential matches. Tinder's Passion list includes a variety of interests from baseball and photography to vegan cooking and vinyasa.
League of Legends is infamous for having an extremely toxic community, to the point that it drives away potential players who'd rather not to be associated with it. While there is a chance that players will come across toxic players with any online game, League of Legends has garnered a reputation for having this problem more than any others. This is largely due to Riot Games not taking the proper actions to punish toxic players. As a result, players who play League on a daily basis are constantly exposed to griefing, racist and sexist comments, harassment, and angry players that will attempt to lose the game on purpose just because of teammates' mistakes. This only names a few of the community's problems, which becomes even more astounding considering League of Legends first came out in 2009. It's been over a decade, and the issues only continue to worsen over time.
When keeping all of that in mind, it's no surprise that Tinder users like CarapuceNA are straight-up laughing at the idea of putting League of Legends on their Passions list. Twitter is already full of jokes about how adding League to their list functions just like "women repellent" according to geraltsbf. But it's no joke, several Tinder users like NathanEdmonds have already reported an immediate drop in matches after adding League to their Passions list. With "Bitcoin" and "NFTs" also on the Passions list, some Tinder users are using these topics to spot red flags rather than find a match, as alfredo_patrol suggests.
While League of Legends itself has the allure of an impressive roster of colorful characters and highly addictive gameplay, the toxic community is a major reason many gamers avoid the game. Still, League of Legends is one of the most played PC games in the world. Although developer Riot Games has taken steps to curtail toxicity, to the gaming community at large it is not enough, to the point that a potential date admitting to playing League of Legends is seen as an avoid-at-all-cost red flag.
Pretty characters and the game itself aren't enough to entice many potential players into being associated with League of Legends' infamously problematic community. While it does make sense that even Tinder has taken notice of how large the LoL community is, even the users that really do play it may be keeping that hobby off their Passion list. It might just help them from missing out on a date.
Sources: CarapuceNA/Twitter, NathanEdmonds/Twitter, geraltsbf/Twitter, alfredo_patrol/Twitter