There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I’d rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so … annoying.
As an example, I once dared to suggest that a game developer implement a mode to prevent crouched status from rendering on death cams so that players that are bothered by t-bagging could avoid it (after a match where a friend rage quit because someone just kept head shotting him – possibly with cheats – and then t-bagging). This post got tons of hate, and like -50 upvotes on reddit because of course someone should be forced to watch someone t-bag them.
Another example on a official game forum… I made a forum post suggesting Bungie use Mastodon (or really just something else being my intent)… The response I got was some positivity but mostly just “lol nobody uses that sweetie” and other patronizing comments.
Meanwhile studios themselves often seem to be filled with developers that understand this stuff is a problem, and the lack of sportsmanship (or generally civilized attitudes) does push away players. It just doesn’t make sense to me that no studio is saying “get lost” to these elements or implementing anti-toxicity features. I just want to play games with nice normal people, is that really so much to ask?
I hate to say it but many people play multiplayer games because it gives them the ability to be complete removed 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
Anonymity + Audience = Assholes.
Yep. Penny arcade did a great comic on this almost 20 years ago.
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
Which was:
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Normal Person - Consequences + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Which is a perfect explanation for Twitter both before and after EM took over.
Anyway, her suggestion looked like this:
Normal Person - Consequences + Audience = Total Fuckwad
which adjusts Anonymity toward its functional result. For some reason, and I don’t know why, the notion of subtraction, of negation, is much more optimistic that our construction because it implies that you can add something and change it. The underlying assertion is that we can fix this with technology, which, again, you know, engineers. Our conversations tend to be interesting.
Very cool when it’s put like that.
That’s… depressing but I could easily see it…
Still, I find it hard to believe that’s the majority. I remember days when it wasn’t as bad as it’s gotten. Like is it so many people that it would truly hurt profits that much vs what it could bring (there was a point where my friends and I almost entirely stopped playing online games because these people were just making it an annoying experience instead of a fun one; I can’t imagine I’m in the only group of friends that experienced that/had folks that had to take a break).
I’d really love it if someone who works for one of these bigger studios (even anonymously) said why seemingly no time is spent on really trying to just expel toxic players like would be done in real life (in the various examples you gave).
Edit: My true pipedream would be that there’s some next level person (senior dev, staff software engineer, product owner) at one of these studios lurking that goes “you know what you have a point” and actually does something about this 😅
It is not the majority but:
1: The angry removed drive away the players that just want to have fun, so they can soon dominate a space and turn a game toxic is a short time.
2: People remember the bad interactions. It you play ten games in a session and only one is filled with toxic arseholes…Guess which game you will remember the next day.
3: Once the toxic shitheads find a game that is allowing their behaviour to continue and not dropping the ban hammer on them, they will keep coming back and invite their toxic mates to join the fun.
I’m not sure I even regard this as a developer studios responsibility.
What has the game to do with how it’s players behave? Your teebagging example is great for this: You seek a technical solution for a behavioural problem of the player base? That’s a bit too far.
I’m pretty sure I know the players you describe. I’ve played against them, I’ve played with them and talked to them. I’ve let them get to me and ragequit. They are clearly removed and bullies. Not much you can do about them.
Change what is in your control: Play in a good state of mind where this stuff does not get to you (not when you’re tired after work). Turn off voice comms. Don’t let it get to you. Worst thing you can do to a troll is ignore them.
Not much you can do about them.
Most of the games have ignore/mute. I’ve learned to automatically block anyone at the first sign of mild toxicity, so I don’t have to see the rest and have it ruin my experience. I’m never going to see the people again anyway, so there’s no reason to give them the benefit of a doubt, and by blocking them early I can play in peace and still have fun.
That’s probably the best way to do it.
I’m not sure I even regard this as a developer studios responsibility.
I mean, they’re the ones running the servers and ultimately providing admittance. There always going to be “bad people” unless owners of establishments actually exclude them (or as I’ve suggested – since this is an imaginary world – just take away their ability to be a jerk in said world).
Change what is in your control: Play in a good state of mind where this stuff does not get to you (not when you’re tired after work). Turn off voice comms. Don’t let it get to you. Worst thing you can do to a troll is ignore them.
Definitely good advice. Part of it is genuinely just friends too though. Like this isn’t “my friend”, this is my friend (though that’s not to say I enjoy this crap either)… and sometimes it’s hard to gage their mental state, or even though they’re in a bad mood, I’d really like to do something more challenging … and of course they get t-bagged or abused on comms … and then everybody is having a bad time.
I wish I had access to these game’s source code… then the whole thing would be in my control ☺️
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.
I think that’s a very interesting question! I don’t have a good answer. In real life, this onus is on coaches, organizers, etc… so it’s always seemed like something that moderators should just need to actually do.
What bothers me about this with video games is that I know as a programmer, programmers are capable of just shutting people down when they do obviously disrespectful things like t-bagging, and in games that have explicit taunts… they’re perfectly capable of just giving players an option to disable taunts… but they don’t.
It’s kind of like chat filters, we don’t have to sanitize it for everybody, but there should be an option.
if youre really interested in the idea of gaminfying good sportsmanship, I think the Deep Rock Galactic community would be the best place to start. it’s not devoid of toxicity, but it has arguably the least amount of it out of any other online game. I think the devs mentioned they think a lot of it has to do with things like having a solute/celebrate button (hence why all DRG fans will communicate via yelling “ROCK AND STONE!”), although being a co-op non-vs game helps I’m sure.
I’ve generally been pretty happy with the Hunt Showdown community (part of what I think helps there is stopping to t-bag someone can easily result in you getting shot and losing a match, part of it is the dead person can’t see you t-bag, part of it is it’s an older crowd).
I also mostly stick to PvE destiny (i.e. avoid the PvP portion)… I’m largely fine, it’s just when I forget and go into one of these areas I tried to forget about I’m like “why is this still a problem? 🙃”
Taunting animations and t-bagging are pretty mild and I’ve always considered them in the realm of playful trash talk in the vein of things like “you’re going down, bro!” If they’re also talking massive shit while doing it, that’s a different story.
I think it’s a bit more disrespectful than “you’re going down, bro!” But typically when I’m thinking of this, I’m thinking of situations where the person has like a 10-0 KDR vs the person and is either clearly just way better or cheating and t-bags after every kill. It’s completely classless at that point.
Like, if it’s a fairly even match and occasional … sure it’s not worse, but when it’s mixed with outright domination (or as you said talking massive shit) it’s more than that.
In either case… it’s just so unnecessary.
It’s not impossible, it’s just not profitable. In most online games cosmetics are quite important. And you can easily make it that the only way to get them is by having a high community score or whatever you wanna call it. And even make it so that if your score drops, you lose access to them. There will still be assholes using the default model, sure, but I’m pretty sure most people will be going out of their way to be nice if there’s something in it for them. And after a while of forcing yourself to do something it becomes habit. And that may be a way to teach players to be nice. Dunno, just a thought
You can still profit and coax people into behaving better at the same time. Most stuff you pay for; but have some exclusive things for getting enough good sport points. And to keep up their good behaviour, they will lose points for bad behavior and can have those items taken away from them if they fall below the points needed to have them in the first place.
Or hell; even lose your paid for items. Like taking away a child’s toy if they misbehave. This is basically what a ban is anyway.
My only issue with this is that the only current and reliable way to get these points on your record would be to take the word of other players making reports. You could always get enough friends to circle jerk each other for good guy points, the same way you can bully players now with bad behavior reports.
Nah, players won’t accept the latter, as for the former, yeah, except most games I’ve played don’t give cool cosmetics for “free” like that. Cause if the free ones are just as cool as the paid ones, fewer people will pay, and they don’t like that. The most sought after ones are always the store ones or the 1% content ones
But yeah, I’d love it if a game actually did that
It’s the question.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how you’d design a racing sim that rewards and gamifies clean racing but the basic answer is that you’d have to set it in world so different from our autoracing history and technology that you’d lose 75% of your player base who are mostly interested in real cars (the same way FIFA games appeal to people who want the real players, and don’t actually care about the game design of football).
On PS5 there’s platform native ‘Accolades’ where you can rate the people you’ve played with, but Bruce I never play the kinds of games that they’re designed for I have no idea if they’re used or how they even work. The point being though even Sony were trying to approach this topic at an OS/ecosystem level.
One obvious solution is to do what competitive sports do: hire a referee. I could imagine hardcore players paying a little extra per match to hire a referee and essentially guarantee fair play. Some players might want to make a little extra cash while still being involved in a game they enjoy.
Might be a tough proposition though, since it would be hard to scale to large online communities. Maybe with good enough tools, refs could manage multiple matches at a time.
The cheaper solution that some games already do is allow players to report toxic behavior and then a moderator will play back the logs and see if the report is legitimate.
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 removed 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
It’s a direct consequence of matchmaking (and in League of Legends specifically also of terrible game design). If you were to play with the same, smaller set of people every time this behavior wouldn’t happen as often because people would simply start telling you you’re a dick. In matchmaking there are no consequences as the chance you’ll ever play the same opponent again before they forgot about you is minimal.
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.
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.
That’s crazy! I can’t understand why someone would spend all that time on a game they’ve barely played.
Like, I can get regularly giving constructive criticism/trying to bring light to an issue … but to just comment stuff like that is so annoying.
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.
Yeah that’s very fair; I definitely miss when I could run my own servers for big games and just axe anyone who didn’t behave
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.
This is why it has become customary for online gamers to have fucked your mother last night.
I got a laugh out of this one, thank you 😂
Man, if I could play League of Legends with decent human beings consistently, I would be so happy.
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 removed 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
Yeah, this is basically what I’ve done. Hunt I’ve been pretty happy with. Destiny is the one that triggered this post, and the one that keeps catching me off guard.
I mostly play PvE stuff with friends and feel at peace with the game and how Bungie presents themselves … then I get total culture shock when I engage outside of my friends group.
Appreciate you looking out for my mental health though 😅
I also recommend Deep Rock Galactic, that community is mostly amazing. And you can usually spot the assholes just by the way they name their server.
Also, another amazing community that I wholy recommend giving a try - Neverwinter Nights EE. The largest RP servers are so much fun, and the people there are really amazing to interact with, assuming you respect and play by the rules.
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.
Deep Rock has an amazing community mainly because the devs take it into consideration with the entire design of the game. It is possible.
Journey had one of the best multiplayer experiences. The way they made it was absolutely amazing.
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.Well if nothing else… I appreciate your comradery. 🫡
A big point could be that those toxic removed 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.
