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?
if youre really interested in the idea of gaminfying good sportsmanship, I think the Deep Rock Galactic community would be the best place to start. it’s not devoid of toxicity, but it has arguably the least amount of it out of any other online game. I think the devs mentioned they think a lot of it has to do with things like having a solute/celebrate button (hence why all DRG fans will communicate via yelling “ROCK AND STONE!”), although being a co-op non-vs game helps I’m sure.
I’ve generally been pretty happy with the Hunt Showdown community (part of what I think helps there is stopping to t-bag someone can easily result in you getting shot and losing a match, part of it is the dead person can’t see you t-bag, part of it is it’s an older crowd).
I also mostly stick to PvE destiny (i.e. avoid the PvP portion)… I’m largely fine, it’s just when I forget and go into one of these areas I tried to forget about I’m like “why is this still a problem? 🙃”