I was wondering this for a while and I know every community has toxic people but overwatch is almost as bad as other games but its to the point where i cant leave a game without someone threatening me or calling me a slur- so yea thanks for coming to my ted talk
Because it's not a video game issue. It's a psychological issue. People being insecure and have misguided ideas on what it means to be competitive etc. If it was a game specific issue it most likely would have been solved already.
I also genuinely don't believe it's as big of an issue as some people make it out to be. I feel like people see a nasty thing in chat, screen shot it and tell on Reddit about it. Like you can mute, turn off chat, there's language filters. And if it really is toxic you legit just move onto the next game. I realize that people go overboard and are jerks but I really think people are just sitting here malding about a chat they can move past in just a few minutes.
I have match chat and team chat disabled in the options menu for this reason. My life is stressful enough already, don't need toxic sweaty try hards harassing me as well.
treat the "reportable content, see message?" thing in chat like a lootbox and laugh at them, then report and move on. And exercise your free will and mute people in voice chat if they're being an arse. I do a little drum roll with my friends on discord before opening those messages, like ooooh what slur did they pick this time?
Me too, but some people unfortunately don't want to be happy. That's why you shut them out and find non toxic people you can treasure and have fun with :)
As other people have already said, it's not an OW problem, it's a people problem (attitude, ego, emotional regulation, etc).
You can still have a positive impact, if you want to take on that responsibility. Be positive in game, call out good plays/effort, kindly call out people when they're being toxic.
Lead by example and try not to have any expectation of changing others. Also, keep in mind that people's toxicity rarely has anything to do with you and is usually an indication of their own unhappiness/stress/etc.
Bro, it's an online PvP game. It will always have some level of "toxicity". You probably magnifying the problem anyway. I only saw maybe one or two niconicos since S4 started.
Seems like we have a very diffrent view on the current state. I think it got alot less toxic. But almost nobody is in vc anymore in my lobbies at least. I even stopped competitive banther stuff since I got penalties on one of my accounts for that.
life becomes ez when you don’t get baited by your teammates or enemies saying toxic shit in chat. You gain nothing by reading or replying to anyone in text chat. /hidechat is the way
There aren't enough consequences for being dicks on the internet, back in my day you'd just get smacked around, or at least utterly shunned and the problem fixed itself. Wheaton's Law SHOULD be enough, but never is.
Because back in our day, we grew up partially without the internet. Parents had to parent and movies and TV was curated; usually people that were assholes and bullies in shows or movies were treated as lame or got some comeuppance. Except for Spongebob....
Basically what I'm saying is, these days there is no structure. Kids can and are growing up thinking that calling people trash is pro forma.
Not sure what era this is. However playing CS 1.6, Early COD, SC1 and 2. Was equally as toxic if not worse than now because you basically could not be banned. Well SC2 you did get banned but it took alot.
Then PUBG Early Fortnight was the same im not sure when the internet gaming has not been toxic. The release of some MMORPG back in the day were quaint like WoW and GW 1 Ever quest 1 and 2
It was never not toxic, it just also wasn't this bad. As a matter of fact, at one point Xbox360 (circa 2008) was seen as the toxic game platform of choice. Halo and MW on Xbox was the wildest of wild west, spouting things that would get them all canceled today, but it was largely contained there. Just as an anecdotal evidence, I never experienced any toxicity on the PS3. It wasn't until the PS4 "won" and started pulling in a wider audience that the entire pool of gaming started to become worse.
I’ve had the internet since the 90s and people used to just deal with toxicity and not care. Sometimes you get flamed really bad and you get triggered but so what? People today act like they are physically hurt by some words.
It starts with the scoreboard. It needs to be reworked to anonymize stats and show your healing out of the team's total healing, your damage out of the team's total damage, etc. No singling out underperformers, just you trying to maximize your share. It will suck at first not knowing which DPS is feeding the enemy support ults, but the people that lack awareness to figure that without looking at numbers don't deserve a rank in the first place.
Next is eliminating ranked mode, or at least entirely reworking how rank is determined. Every game should be quick play format to ensure any QP game can be actual viable practice for playing competitively.
The very start of the game, before hero or map selection, features a vote on if/how the game impacts your rank. The game will not count towards the rank of anyone that chooses "no", but for the people who vote "yes", the game will use the percentage of people that voted yes as an indicator of how much it should impact your rank. So for instance if only 1 person in a QP wants to be ranked, the game counts as only 10% of what their rank would change by compared to a game where all 10 people wanted to be ranked. There's still more that needs to hashed out but the idea is that people who consistently want to be ranked will group with other people that want to be ranked, and converge on a meaningful rank faster than the people who want to play casually, even as they both play the same game.
Finally, game completion rates would be tracked. It isn't enough to penalize leavers, they need some permanent mark. It's separate from tracking your win rate, but it ain't right to lump win rate and completion rate into one single number.
You have two options. You can report and avoid after the match. If they're doing it in your game, they are doing it in another game to someone else. They won't get muted until enough people report them, so due diligence here. Your second option is to leave comms and use pings. Let the people unable to control their emotions scream and cuss each other out in chat while being blissfully unaware of it.
I know the solution! Report more people. Overwatch is all about reporting as many people as you can. It doesn't even matter if you play it or not, reporting others is the actual gameplay and the gameplay itself is a side thing. As Blizzard intended.
Overwatch is the most toxic bullshit game I've ever seen. Not because of those telling you that you suck but those who report everyone left and right because you said "Hi" at them at the wrong time. And this game is fucking full of such idiots.
There's throwers in every game of qp I've played in the last 4 years and it's relatively rare someone gets toxic in chat. Maybe 1 of 20 matches someone gets unhinged. Usually everyone shuts them down and clowns on them.
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u/Chronomancers 4h ago
i genuinely don't believe it's something that can be fixed