The most toxic communities I know of are the Genshin community, Payday 2, FFXIV and source games communities in general.
LoL
maybe ten years ago, but it’s a lot better now. still there’s toxicity but nowhere near as bad
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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'.Ingenius.
My guy
“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
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.
100%!
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.
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.
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.
Heroes of Newerth was the most toxic community I’ve ever been apart of. Nothing comes even close. It was rotten from top to bottom and made me quit a game I otherwise loved to play. I’m talking “The CEO frequently calls people slurs in all chat” level of bad.
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
Technically not my own experience, but my partner plays Dead By Daylight and the community there seems absolutely terrible. I ask them why they play it at this point and they don’t even know.
Yeah, the DBD community is pretty bad.
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.
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.
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
