Game Development

I hate to say it but many people play multiplayer games because it gives them the ability to be complete cunts to others with zero possibility of any real repercussions.

That is the draw.

Behaviours that would get you thrown out of a public space or banned from a group d&d session or punched in the face can be repeated again and again in online gaming.

The same people that like to troll spaces like this are the same people who only play multiplayer games to grief others.

It is an often repeated quote, to the point it has become trite but it is true:

Some people just want to watch the world burn

For a while now, I've been asking one simple question with a way I think could help reduce, if not eliminate, toxicity from players:

How do you gamify good sportsmanship?

If you can actually gamify and incentivize good sportsmanship in a tangible, meaningful way, it could do a lot to help with the crap commonly seen/heard in video game chats and forums.

Meh. Restarted a rant three times now.

I'll leave it at this.

Online sportsmanship is dead. There's zero consequence for being a direct cunt online. And reporting systems rarely report back if any action is taken against a player you reported.

Doing a mythic+3 in WoW? Get kicked over your spec because it's not the best one, even though the two friends you're bringing cleared all +15s.

Lost a clutch game? "Ggez" from the enemy team

Ruining it for the other team is part of the game and I think that's horrible.

I'd there's no "society"/community to give consequences to your actions, there's no incentive to get them to stop

You're playing competitive games with primarily teenagers and young adults. They are always gonna be toxic and very few companies are willing to dedicate a ton of resources towards content moderation. There are big games that do, like Overwatch, so if it's a problem for you then you should either only play those games, or play games that don't attract the young toxic crowds as much.

And honestly asking for a feature to hide your delicate eyes from teabagging in an FPS is a bit much.

Matchmaking systems basically make players anonymous. There's basically no incentive not to be an ass, because after a match players may never see each other again, or if they do they won't recognise each other.

While toxicity has always been an issue, it was less of a problem when multiplayer was more community-driven. I remember playing TF2 in local servers, and the thing that kept the worst toxicity in check was that people recognised each other. Regulars gained reputation with other regulars, which held value. And if someone was particularly toxic, they'd get banned.

I found game communities on reeedit to be fairly annoying for similar reasons. Even for games where the community at large is fairly positive, there was a lot of random downvoting of topics and comments for no reason but bitterness or disapproval. A sizable and vocal minority seemed to come to the subs just to complain about the game, like "game is dead!" or "this update sucks!" or "they're going to close the servers, nobody plays!". There was one person who started really annoying me with their constant doom and bitterness in every single thread every day - like, we LIKE this game, stop trying to make us feel bad about it - so I googled their name. Like, do they play other games? Stream on Twitch? I found their public Steam profile with the same distinctive name as the reddit account. According to the achievements they hadn't even played the game they complained about every day long enough to get the most basic achievments (reach level 20...). I pointed that out on the sub and someone told me I was "STALKING". Yeah, one google search and looking at a public Steam profile... that's stalking.

The simple answer is that community moderation takes a human labor force, the cost of which is substantial and conflicts with the profit motive of the companies involved. There's just no financial incentive to clean things up beyond a threshold that would result in lawsuits or reputational damage. Because this kind of "toxic" behavior is becoming more normalized, and typically doesn't rise to a liability, you're not going to see most companies address it. This is why it has become customary for online gamers to have fucked your mother last night.

Maybe try a different game? Some communities are just way more toxic than others.
Battle bits is a good example of what a mostly non toxic community is like.
Bf2042 isn't toxic because you can no longer communicate with the other team, so no one even talks in chat at all. Squad and Arma are filled with mature gamers and practically no toxicity.

Or you can just mute everyone at the start like I do in Apex. They never use the mic for communication, only to bitch and moan after they die doing something stupid. So it's no loss. Or you can get friends, hook up on discord or similar and ignore everyone else

Man, if I could play League of Legends with decent human beings consistently, I would be so happy.

Please.. Please just let it be toxic. I get that it can get pretty bad but I'm exhausted of having to police my language to the utmost degree because a dev thinks "night" is a racial slur because of the first three letters. The systems suck, it makes normal communication a chore, and the few wholesome moments often get ruined by it. Censorship in games and online to avoid toxicity is becoming a stranglehold and I can't take it.

A while back I decided to stop playing competitive/pvp focused games due to the stress it would cause me. One of the biggest things I've noticed is just how much less toxicity there is.

like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty

Which is extremely unfortunate. WoW forum threads could be a cesspool in a matter of seconds.

Anyway, as others pointed out, the main problem is competition. The more competitive a game is, the more invested some people get. The more invested you get, the more likely you are to rage at losses and behave like a monkey against a losing opponent. Hell, you don't even need to be a player to feel invested, just look at people that worship their sports team.

For online games, companies just shrug and point to their automations for trying to control toxicity (Riot Games probably being the "best" in the area), because it's much easier to automate than to come up with a solution.

My main recommendation is to avoid super competitive games. If you want to play those, then you're probably better off trying to find small groups of colleagues for that. In ye olde days of games coming with the server-side executable, these groups were called clans. Quake, Unreal and Jedi Outcast had lots of them.

Serious competitive multiplayer games have this problem IMO because they foster a us v them competitive mindset and take no steps to dissuade players taking it to seriously. Players act like crabs in a proverbial MMR bucket.

For a long time I asked myself the same question. Never found a very satisfying answer. In the meantime I stopped playing Dota 2 (which often has griefers) and Battlefield (which often has cheaters) so I'm not so troubled by this issue anymore.
I think devs just don't care and leave dealing with these kinda folks up to the players just because it's the status quo and nobody pushes them to do anything about it.

That why I usually try to avoid matchmaking as much as possible, and stick to a smaller communities within the game.

For example, when I was spending some time few years ago in the WoW roleplay community, which was one of the most fun I ever had with that game, I've found out that if I do pugs with people from within it, be it just picking up people on the main realm's Discord or from one of the RP guilds I've met, I've never had issues with toxicity. Even if I eventually stopped RPing, I still have a friendlist full of people I know I can pug with without problems, or I can just hop onto the Discord again and pick up a pug there. Also - I've never had as much fun progressing through raids as when it was with a group full of hardcore RPers from our RP guild, who we've managed to convince to give raiding a try, even though they mostly just use WoW as a platform for playing DnD. Most of them weren't really good, it was slow and painful progress, but we still had a lot of fun.

And I have the same experience with Sea of Thieves, where I found a smaller local Discord server that used to host game nights, and it was also a nice experience. Sure, I had to make the effort to get to know the people, instead of relying on anonymous matchmaking - but that's what multiplayer should be about. And still, in general, even if I play with random people I don't know from within the smaller community, it's generally a lot better experience - because assholes and toxic people generally don't last long there.

And if I do play a MP game with random people, I just mute people at the first sign of toxicity, and just add them to my ignore list.

Why are gaming communities for multiplayer games so often filled with toxicity? Why aren't game developers doing more to stop this?

Have you read Lord of the Flies?

A big point could be that those toxic cunts are the players that are the most engaged with the game and maybe spend the most money. Nobody needs to pay for skins more than one time in League, except for people with smurfs for example.

Deep Rock has an amazing community mainly because the devs take it into consideration with the entire design of the game. It is possible.