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.
That’s what happens if you design a game in a way that makes it worse to have a bad player in your team than no player at all.
I think you’re on to something here. I play all kinds of games with friends, and DOTA was the only one where I’d actively get shit on for my lack of skill. And that’s from real life friends too.
League was the poster child for toxic communities a decade or so ago when I played. It must have gotten better (it certainly couldn’t have gotten worse!) if this isn’t the top comment by a mile.
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
maybe ten years ago, but it’s a lot better now. still there’s toxicity but nowhere near as bad
Can confirm- playing that game, if you don’t have enough friends online to make a full team- is painful… Very painful.
Don’t play this game solo. Don’t play it with strangers. You will have a bad time.
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They clamped down so much that I get a 3 day chat ban for saying “sex”
Its cleaned up chat a lot but the people quitting as soon as the game goes down hill are still there
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.
Basically just don’t prog endgame content on pf and you avoid most issues. And don’t crash an ERP den and be shocked to see whatever goes on in there.
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I’ve played with some rude individuals on FFXIV, like those annoyed that new players haven’t memorised low-level dungeons and are unable to speedrun them. By and large I’d agree, though. I joined after playing SWTOR for years and could immediately tell the difference.
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.
It’s common enough that I remember it too. Now you get kicked for teamkilling more than once, but groups can just alternate teamkills to avoid this.
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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.
I play both Rocket League and Apex with chat off. Can’t be bothered to entertain these little shitheads tenper tantrum
People do that stuff in casual, too, which just blows my mind.
I turned off “all non tactical chats” or whatever the setting is called, and that helped a lot.
I played CSGO for a decade l or more. Got into rocket league and found the community far worse in rocket league. Counterstrike is like a chatroom with guns. Rocket league is wanna be pro level play and blaming teammates when you can’t make the play you wanted to.
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.
Every game community has some rotten apples but RL has by far the highest percentage of 'em in any game I’ve played. I get the urge to play RL a few times per year, but it only takes a few games (be it casual or competitive) to put me off again.
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.
Dark Souls
Anything FromSoftware really. Any question is answered with a variation of “git gud”. Not to mention the elitism.
The only appropriate response to that is
git: 'gud' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.My guy
Ingenius.
“I think DS is pretty ok”
“Git gud dude! DS is amazing!”
tbh I’ve always found the community to be very helpful when I’ve needed a hand with anything
And I play offline because all online play did was waste my time with trolls
Ah, sadness…
But behold, cramped area!
100%!
Idk, the community on Reddit/online is pretty friendly and active. In PVP and co-op it’s typically pretty great the first week after launch and about 2-3 years after launch.
You can’t really get around the fact that self imposed challenge is a huge part of how the core fans enjoy the game and I think it’s difficult for newcomers to know when hardcore fans are speaking to them vs their own compatriots.
Sekiro fans are hugely supportive of newcomers though, probably because it’s a relatively less played game. The community around Elden Ring suffered from its own success I think.
Most MOBAs are pretty notoriously bad, though Heroes of Newerth was definitely the worst one of those i had played.
Anecdotally, my personal worst experience was with FFXIV, which was probably exacerbated by how much praise that community gets otherwise. The Novice Network system they have is a mess, new players are put into a channel with a bunch of “mentors” that don’t really want to help anyone, at least on the server I was on. They either wanted a global chat channel for their own use, or just wanted the cosmetic rewards mentors had on offer. I remember one actively trying to get new players to quit if he found out they had come from WoW. The channel is entirely self-moderated, and mentors would kick people out just for fun. It’s an AWFUL first impression for newer players.
One thing WoW definitely does better with their Guide channel is giving literally no tangible rewards to guides, if somebody is opting into being a Guide it is only because they want to help new players, they get nothing else for it.
As a FFXIV player, your experience or understanding of the game sounds like an outlier… I’ve played for 2+ years, it’s the most positive, welcoming and lively community I’ve ever come across!
Totally agree. I’ve been in some dailies where we keep wiping over and over due to new player and usually everyone is super understanding and gives pointers and help. I’ve rarely had a toxic pug in FFXIV. One one of the reasons each expansion brings me back.
Agree. I’ve been playing the game for the last year and am now almost at the end of the MSQ and I’ve basically encountered zero toxic people and plenty of people that went out of their way to be helpful. If anything, a few BLM players were trying a bit too much to help pointing out issues with my BLM rotation, which isn’t helpful when you’re still below LVL 50 and getting new spells every other level. Haven’t seen anything like that since switching to RDM, so it may just be a BLM thing.
I don’t think other players can see your rdm bar, so they have no way to judge what your next move should be, since there is really no rotation, it’s more of a reactionary class depending in what procs.
Rust
Told someone I played rust and they asked if I was racist or suicidal because those are apparently the qualifiers.
It really does bring the worst out of humanity, but at the same time I’ve met and known people for years who were my neighbors or even rivals
Same people I game with today I meet on rust. Only a couple of us still play as we are all older now and have real jobs but great friends.
The game or the programming language?
The game.
Was looking for this lol.
I bought a Rust ages ago, back when the development basically had it turning into a new game every year. Maybe I just got lucky back then, but never had a toxic interaction.
Cut to last year, when a group of guild members went to Rust so I redownloaded it after 5 years. Most of us only lasted a few hours and we tried half a dozen servers lol.
Yes, it’s crazy to me that people would think another game is more toxic because in rust most servers (I’m talking main/officiall servers) are really popular for at least half a week being Thursday wipes and Monday, if you build next to toxic you deal with them that whole wipe and then monthly servers same thing. It’s not one match and done with them I’m talking days and hours of just straight toxic gameplay.
Those people just have not had the misfortune of playing Rust.
Yes, I say all that with love though I have some of my best gaming memories on rust.
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Dota 2.
This one rages!
Easily. One of the most well known guides for noobs used to literally be called “Welcome to Dota, You Suck” to poke fun at how bad it is.
Genshin community,
I get that communities for popular games can be a bit hit or miss, but communities for single player games are pretty chill. Competitive team games like the Source games you mentioned, League of Legends etc. are on a whole different level of toxic. They can’t even be compared.
For something like Genshin the real problem is content creators. Much of the so called toxicity has little to nothing to do with the game itself and is more an issue with huge cults of personality clashing with each other. I think every popular game is going to fall victim to this going forward and you just have to learn to ignore it.
Yeah cults of personality + ipad kids on social media tend to be the large problem with genshin imo
Bro what did ff 14 do to you? who pissed in your chereos there? starcraft the elitism, the rage there is nothing that will ever come close to the levels of salt that that community produced
I can tell no one here has played Mordhau lol. It’s basically wall to wall neo Nazis spamming racial slurs. I got regular death threats, like almost every match. Destiny? Little league bullshit.
Tbh the genshin community isn’t necessarily toxic, genshin is so large that it’s genuinely difficult to pin down an entire genshin community. There’s the twitter genshin community, the tiktok community, different content creator’s communities, etc. It’s not a monolith just because the game is so gargantuan. The social media communities tend to be horrible but like, i watch a small genshin tiktok-er and theorycrafter and his discord and related communities around that have been genuinely lovely and actively elevated my experience with the game. I think it’s important to look at how, past a certain point, specific communities dont really exist? and that’s not just a genshin thing that goes for anything, different communities sort of splinter off and it’s hard to hold the whole thing to task ig
In any case, FFXIV is a weird pull because in my time playing GW2 I have many friends that have gone to ffxiv and come over to guild wars from it and almost always I hear nothing but good things about the broader community. It might have a bit of a toxic positivity vibe to it at times but I think the broader community seems to be pretty good? But uh. Valorant’s gotten pretty bad. I love the game and the people I’ve met through my time with the game, and the community was quite good around the beta but it’s just at a point where it’s just. fueled by ego and weird horny tiktokers, it’s not a great time lol
Eve Online where, as long as you’re not telling your victim to use real world money to buy things before you scam them, anything goes.
I always thought that part was interesting. I personally never had a downright toxic interaction in Eve Online and I used to multibox 7 accounts.
The thing about EVE is that caveat emptor is the social contract, and as long as you don’t get your dander up about being pirates or scammed, the “bad guys” are more than willing to help you learn to avoid the next trap. I was once part of an “anti-piracy” roaming fleet that got bored with the quiet night, and ended up jumping a newbie who was hanging out where they shouldn’t have been, tackling his ship, and proceeding to ransom it back to him for the princely sum of 1 ISK while we laughed our heads off in Teamspeak. Then we sent him on his way with a few hundred thousand ISK extra, some pointers on highsec versus lowsec, and the valuable lesson that there were always sharks on the prowl for easy prey.
