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.
I have only been around the reddit halo community (maybe others are worse) and to be honest I don’t think it was that bad. A lot of the complaints were/are valid. For sure not the worst
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.
What I think is weird about folks hatin on the Genshin Community is it’s essentially a single player game. There is no community really outside of social media. I would say social media is the problem.
This! I've always had super friendly interactions with Genshin co-op, even when searching through the co-op tab rather than looking online (aside from one kid I had to kick because I was not going to buy them a welkin lol). The only time I've come across problematic behavior is through social media. It's also very popular so of course on twitter and reddit there is going to be a large loud volume of immature people, but that's most games. In game people are usually good.
even around the game people are good provided you aren’t broadly exposed to it via tiktok/twitter/reddit/twitch. Some of the smaller genshin discords have been really helpful and sweet and full of good people. But honestly I think there’s just a critical mass where communities like that kinda blow up so that’s not a genshin problem so much as that’s a “so many people in one place at one time” kind of problem lol
It tells me they are used to cuddly friendly fandoms. They've definitely never played real toxic games like Mordhau or anything Paradox has made. There are games that are legit >50% neonazis and avowed racists.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
Destiny has to at least be an honorable mention. Not trying to be a Bungie apologist, but the amount of content people get for $100/year is pretty outstanding, and the community acts like all they get is a ten hour campaign or something.
I'm in agreement with you, however I'm going to also add that the creep to a "pay-to-win" game has pretty much been crossed. Not to forget that Bungie decided to drip feed expansion content laced throughout seasonal content this year...that has not been received well.
Destiny players are a salty bunch, but I have to say the current level of furor towards Bungie is pretty legitimate right now. They do overreact; I just feel that this in this current state of the game there is justification behind it.
@Madison_rogue@Milk_SDF_Possum@brandon what’s pay to win right now? I’ve been playing a long time, and I do buy the seasonal content through the deluxe version or whatever, but I don’t feel like I’m being given an advantage. I don’t buy anything with Silver - is there anything I’m missing out on?
You can now buy to max out your seasonal level at the beginning of the season for $100.00, so you can immediately gain the XP boosts and other stat bonuses. It costs 100 silver per level, and it's available day one of the season, not halfway through or at the beginning of the seasonal content drought as it has been in the past.
As someone who played hundreds and thousands of hours of Destiny, it still weirds me out to hear people call “Destiny 2” Destiny. They are very different games.
Destiny 2 is predatorily-monetized garbage. Destiny (the game it was at the time of its untimely murder by money-grubbing assholes, not the game at launch) is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Destiny went through the same phase as well. Remember how well The Dark Below was received? Granted, Bungie turned it around with The Taken King, and subsequently Rise of Iron, but the seeds of monetization were sown with Destiny.
In Destiny 2 they just double downed on the microtransaction and monetization creep, which has only grown worse since they left Activision. All of those that thought the monetization was an Activision thing were pretty much wrong...when FTP came along it made sense that monetization was necessary, however the creep over the past few years has been abysmal.
I play, but it always seems to be to diminishing returns. It's not really fun or rewarding any longer; Bungie can't decide who to cater to (casuals or hard-core gamers). They've pretty much abandoned new PvP content (no new crucible maps for two years and counting, no new Gambit maps with only four available for play). I paid for this year's content and admittedly, I'm just thinking about sitting it out entirely and just be done with the game.
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.
Back in the day, Undertale. Many made YouTubers and livestreamers have less fun by spoiling the pacifist, genocide and neutral routes and letting everyone only go the pacifist way. If they didn’t then the fans would get all angry. Outside of playing the videogame was also another can of worms.
Don’t know if Deltarune, also made by the creator, has the same problem since I’ve only ever played the game myself and never seeked out the community.
FFXIV for sure. Endgame players who have tryed this game understand how much is toxic be actually part of challenges. All the time FFXIV is advertise as happy place with happy community but no one talks about the toxicity of making groups for raids. I don’t regret to have quit and I don’t looking to returning as well.
What changed? I quit maybe 2-3 years ago, but at the time it was one of the most helpful and friendly communities out there. Maybe not in the hardcore-endgame-bubble, but the feedback from saplings was always positive.
I quit 1year ago after 5y of dealing with it. Helpeful in random content, sure, daily and stuff. But if we talking about extreme, savages, ultimate, then the toxicity spill like diarrhea. Friendly community ends as soon you step in a serious fights, and becomes a game you want to play only with close friends because of this.
I mean id understand endgame players but 90% of the people you will see in game are nice people who are just playing the game, like ive learned so much about xiv just from talking to other players.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only time I can see FFXIV being toxic is if you’re doing savage content in party finder. You might occasionally run into a jerk in duty roulette or pvp but my experience since I started playing a few years ago has been mostly good.
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
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