Hello Valorant community,

I'm here again with a final request for respondents for my survey on the influence of matchmaking on negative behavior. In order to be qualified you have to have played at least 3 matches in the last 3 days. If you are interested, you can find the link here:
https://ugent.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b3LmMRWtmdYQFBc
(Sometimes the link won't load properly, if that happens you can try incognito mode or wait a couple of minutes before trying again.)

Basically I'm looking for a connection between matchmaking over/underestimation and 5 related concepts that form a pipeline which ends in toxic behavior.

These 5 concepts are measured in the survey:

• Player identity (Individual vs Team oriented)
• Intensity of anger
• Emotion regulation
• Level of tilt
• Intensity of toxic behavior

In order to link these concepts to each other and matchmaking, I'm using the results of this survey in conjunction with datascraping of the 5 most recent (max 3 days ago) matches before completing the survey. I ask for your player id in the survey because I use this to look up those recent matches. This won't be used for any other purposes than scraping the data, your specific answers will not be shared with anyone.

I'll be scraping the following data from your recent games:

• Your KDA (Matchmaking performance)
• The KDA of your teammates (Matchmaking performance)
• The KDA of your enemies (Matchmaking performance)
• The agent you played (Player identity: Meta adherence)

Thank you for your interest and I look forward to sharing the results on this subreddit!

If you want more information on my thesis, feel free to read a summary here:

My thesis is about how matchmaking can influence toxic behavior in competitive games. Matchmaking puts players together based on skill and latency. Both characteristics are also moderated by the matching time. However, this coordination does not always go smoothly. Misalignment of the matchmaking algorithm can lead to various emotive factors (Own Performance, Performance of Teammates, Player Identity and Game design).

These emotive factors induce negative emotions that require emotion regulation to limit or prevent. Though not all negative emotions discourage players from playing. Some negative emotions motivate a player to keep playing. When a player experiences negative emotions their performance drops accordingly. The matchmaking system often needs some time to adjust to this situation and this can lead to more emotive factors when that player is now performing below their presumed skill level or the matchmaking system adjusts too fast and the player is now matched with teammates that perform below their skill level. This can again cause emotive factors and send players down a spiral of misalignment and negative emotions.

These negative emotions stack up and chip away at the capacity a player has to keep regulating their emotions. When that regulation eventually fails, players can lose control of their negative emotions and experience  “tilt”.  When a player tilts they have lost control over their emotions which can eventually lead to toxic behavior.

These emotive factors, motivating negative emotions and emotion regulation that can ultimately lead to tilting and toxic behavior form a “Toxic pipeline”: Each step in the pipeline can ensure that toxic behavior is prevented or promoted. My thesis aims to investigate the toxic pipeline and establish links between matchmaking, emotive factors, emotion regulation, tilting and toxic behavior.