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 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.