[ryzawy]

I think this is a common misbelief. It has been proven again and again that this is not related to MMR - you will have pricks in every "tier". I can only vouch for the 3.5k range, but friends of mine in 4k-5k say the same thing. There are also a lot of threads on reddit which show that it's not exclusive to "the trenches".

My girlfriend is around 1k and her games are mostly friendly, which is interesting to say the least.

I think there is a point (after a certain amount of matches/playtime) where people start to believe they know everything about the game and start telling people how to behave and how to play, because they just "know it better". This is where it gets ugly.

[sametmax]

I don't know. When I watch games of 4k on youtube, people seems more civil honestly. But maybe there is just a filter effect.

What's annoying is that I don't think you can pinpoint a factor that triggers rudeness. Yes, you have the typical insult following a failure to play up to the standard of some of the players. But you also have people just being uneducated: playing music with auto mic on, gaming like they are alone, feeding because they didn't get mid, trashing the enemy team... It's like being in high school all over again.

It's are