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?
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