The most toxic communities I know of are the Genshin community, Payday 2, FFXIV and source games communities in general.
LoL
100%. I stopped playing a decade ago, but when I played I was always amazed at the behaviour it brought out in people. I would watch people who I considered friends IRL turn into abusive jerks when I played with them. It’s this weird prisoner’s dillemma of a game where the psychology of the game appears to encourage ganging up on the weakest player.
Reporting players for in-game behaviour rarely did anything.
And there was no reporting mechanism at all if they decided to continue harassing you through DMs after the game was over - all you could do was block them.
I agree. But I want to give them some credit. I report people for being toxic or for afking. Recently the client tells me almost after every game that someone in my previous game was punished after my report.
Now, I can never easily validate this. But if its true it seems riot is taking a much more active role with automated punishment.
League of Legends is pretty fun. Just “mute all” every game and it’s a lot more tolerable. Don’t let the people that tilt after one or two deaths get to you. Recent comeback changes make the game playable until your nexus explodes
I’m convinced that some of the toxicity is tuned to your own contributions. I’m almost 40 and I still play League 8-10 hours a week.
Almost all of that is tipsy ARAM games, and considering I got my toxicity out years ago I find that, given I’m always positive and having a fun time, I solely run into others that are positive and having a fun time.
People might underestimate how much self sorting that game does based on behavior in their algorithms.
Man FFXIV is no ray of sunshine but I can’t imagine it’s anyway near as bad as literally any competitive game. I’ve never been called a slur in FFXIV before and it feels like it happens once a session for things like Dota, LoL, Overwatch, Siege, etc.
Yeah, I kind of disagree with FFXIV. My whole experience there last year was entirely pleasant.
Second this, you’ll get a couple sweatlords every now and then especially if you’re running end game content but the first 100 or more hours of gameplay are absolutely pleasant. I only interacted with the reddit group outside of game but those guys were also nice.
Rainbow Six Siege is up there — there’s six dimensions of assholery in the game by my count.
- Tom Clancy games tend to attract right-wing assholes because they’re Tom Clancy
- competitive FPS
- one-shot one-kill gameplay
- friendly fire on by default
- character picks
- you need to play to a specific meta
Not sure if this still happens, but for groups of 4 that used to want to play together, there was no way to lock the team or kick from lobby. So what would happen is you’d get match-maked in as the 5th player, and as soon as the game started, your team would kill you. This would happen about 25% of the time with random matchmaking.
I ended up quitting R6 Siege because of the toxicity and constant slurs on voice chat. It’s a shame because it was otherwise my favourite competitive FPS.
Easily Rocket League. It’s always been toxic but it’s been much worse since becoming free to play.
- Rage quitting
- Malicious compliance (AFK, accidental own-goals)
- Team mates playing for the opposing team entire games
- Passive aggressive quick chats
- Overtly aggressive free-form chats (being chastised over every tiny mistake)
The game’s competitive ranking systems makes it so each win and loss matters, and people often take their vitriol out on their own team before looking inwards.
I turned the chat off a long time ago. Instantly made the game better. I don’t need a kid to show off his NSFW vocabulary.
lol, I love rocket league and I can’t deny this, but there is also a thing called confirmation bias as I don’t play other games to verify.(Fighting game for example can be pretty toxic as well.)
Yesterday, I have a casual 2s match where the opponent are really good, they have maybe gc2~3 mechanics(judge from their touches, consistency and boost controls, way better than my usual C3-GC1 encounters) and just trying to get clip shots on me and another random. We were originally doing fine, BUT, for some reason, after they scored the 2nd goal with some flip reset stuff. My random team mate starts to trying to “show off” with ceiling shots and his own flip reset thing. Like I don’t mind if you can actually pull that off. But he mess up or simply not mechanic enough with that which leaves me defending 2 of them with comm, it’s impossible for me to work against 2 GC let along 2 GC2-3. Somewhere after we lost 4-1 and he had a good shot from my blocking a pass, it’s literally just catch and drive up to score cause the opponents are still “falling” from they mid-air prejump stuff. No, he has to score a flip reset so he push to mid boost and then did his setup. You know how fast they can be so by the time he is off wall the opponents are back and one in goal on on wall. Then me just watching him doing his stupid flip reset attempt.
And then he missed the ball, I let out a long “urrrhhhh” sigh in VC don’t know if he hears it or just too shameful, he throws the FF after my sigh and I gladly accepted it. I usually don’t even FF if there is a toxic play on my side cause I like keep them around so they don’t ruin other people’s game, if they quite they eat the ban for 5 mins, so take one for the team I can manage. But I can’t just keep up 1v2 in that situation. And to me that play style is more frustrating than dealing with toxic players.
Im just going to say FFXIV in my experience has a very friendly community, one of the nicest ive seen, so i dont fully understand where that comes from.
For me it would probably be Garry’s Mod, as its full of so many edgy teens who constantly say the n word.
I think the FFXIV thing can be very YMMV.
I’ve had super helpful roulettes and really terrible roulettes. When I was raiding, I found various people who were either super toxic or super helpful in DF.
I’ve never played a game that was so all over the place with community as FFXIV.
