Most toxic gaming communities you have come across.

Just curious on what were the most toxic gaming communities you guys have come across, experiences you had with it, and if you gave up playing a game that you liked it because of it. I haven't played League of Legends, or Overwatch, so I can't say anything about these games, but, all I hear about them is nasty things, especially Overwatch, now if I had to pick the most toxic gaming community I have come across it would be probably GTA V Online. Which is yours?

PS: Also, (I think this has been mentioned here before) Doom has an excellent community overall, which is ironic in my opinion due to the nature of the game.

Dark Souls.

Most all of them, honestly.

16 minutes ago, AndrewB said:

I would be surprised if someone could show me a single gaming community that wasn't dominated by anime-fetished teens and tweens with unjustifiably high self esteem despite having almost nothing of value to offer to society or themselves.

oh look there's the seed of one right here

cough cough...^sonic...cough cough..oh sorry i had something in my throat,THE SONIC FANDOM

I don't play MOBA's, I hear those are the worse, Overwatch is going to take number one for me with call of duty as a very close second. I'm not sure, it's really close though.

Go Fish

DOTA when it was still a mod (I havent really touched the current DOTA)

Left 4 Dead 2

Just now, Killer5 said:

Left 4 Dead 2

Any particular reason(s) why?

Half-Life.

@rdwpa

Looking at the forums and only really seeing posts of people complaining how they are constantly kicked from games. Then seeing a bunch of people come into the thread calling the OP a scrub. These forum posts still exist today.

I tried to get into vs at release. One of two things always happens in a vs game:

1. My team is winning by quite a bit towards the midpoint of the campaign. The other team quits followed by insults.

2. My team is losing. My team quits followed by insults.

My friends and I also played vs together. We would stomp the other team. The other team quits. So we never really were able to have fun playing vs because completing a game meant finishing it with only 1 or 2 people on the other team.

In campaign you have griefers. People come in and just kill everyone on your team after making some colorful remark, then leave. You also get people baiting other people into games just to grief them (I have a video on my youtube channel of people trying this against me :P).

There are some other fun things that can happen in campaign (like the older people screaming at you for not following their plan). For some reason this was always exclusive to older people in my experience. No idea why. They quit if you don't do what they say (because honestly campaign even on realism expert isn't fucking rocket science).

I can go on and on..

10 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

Any particular reason(s) why?

There are a shit load of assholes that will try and vote kick you for no reason, or if you don't have enough hours on the game. The new Rainbow six Siege kinda has the same problem.

Mann vs Machine for TF2 is just as bad as L4D2, especially expert. If you don't or can't do exactly what the self-appointed leader tells you, you're kicked or everyone leaves, and you can't rejoin for a few hours. No deviation from the approved methods is tolerated. If you choose the wrong class for the map, or sniper for any map, you get kicked almost immediately. If you're not using the correct weapon, you get kicked out. If you're the scout and you miss even a single dollar, which disqualifies you from the bonus at the end of the map, you get kicked out, even if it wasn't your fault. If something goes wrong, not matter how trivial, everyone abandons the map and they pick a scapegoat to kick out...usually the player they are the least familiar with. And finally, if you're new to expert, you'll get kicked out, no matter how familiar you are with the map and its strategies, just because you are new.

I'm not part of many gaming communities. I'd say Team Fortress 2 trading. I have to be the sheriff there or I did. It became better when CS:GO had boxes and the market flooded over there. I assume they'll flood over to PUBG now that it has boxes. Fresh markets mean more money.

Any gaming community to care more about the publisher and or developer more than the game seems toxic.

4 minutes ago, Ichor said:

Mann vs Machine for TF2 is just as bad as L4D2, especially expert.

As someone who has done MVM for like 6 years and maybe 5 years expert, the majority of people on Mann vs Machine expert are nice. I could list a few select names who are toxic players, but they end up being black balled for being dicks, condemned to play with the pub and the other hated players. Some have grown out of their phase of trying to literally make people cry. The experts I know try to teach new players what to do and we'll get them through. We usually force them to be Heavy as its just the easiest beginner class. If they're dead weight and don't listen and start costing us victories we do cut them. We've gone through an entire expert tour with a heavy who said he had only started playing TF2 2 days earlier and had only played pyro because it was cool.

Plenty of them have moved on to Payday 2. I still do Wave 666 because its the only TF2 MVM "challenge" that remains for me. Dropping into a pub match knowing 90% of the time everyone will be garbage and then over a year or so I've learned I need to be by far the best. If I'm a support class, then I'm wasting my talent. I need to out damage everyone... because they sure can't. Fridays seem better to get qualified players and there are a few stray good players here and there.

With that said... I never call anyone garbage or insult anyone during the game, nor kick anyone. I'm there for the challenge, knowing 99% of the time we will lose since its wave 666.

13 minutes ago, geo said:

 

As someone who has done MVM for like 6 years and maybe 5 years expert, the majority of people on Mann vs Machine expert are nice. I could list a few select names who are toxic players, but they end up being black balled for being dicks, condemned to play with the pub and the other hated players. Some have grown out of their phase of trying to literally make people cry. The experts I know try to teach new players what to do and we'll get them through. We usually force them to be Heavy as its just the easiest beginner class. If they're dead weight and don't listen and start costing us victories we do cut them. We've gone through an entire expert tour with a heavy who said he had only started playing TF2 2 days earlier and had only played pyro because it was cool.

 

Plenty of them have moved on to Payday 2. I still do Wave 666 because its the only TF2 MVM "challenge" that remains for me. Dropping into a pub match knowing 90% of the time everyone will be garbage and then over a year or so I've learned I need to be by far the best. If I'm a support class, then I'm wasting my talent. I need to out damage everyone... because they sure can't. Fridays seem better to get qualified players and there are a few stray good players here and there.

 

With that said... I never call anyone garbage or insult anyone during the game, nor kick anyone. I'm there for the challenge, knowing 99% of the time we will lose since its wave 666.

I guess I was playing in a time before they "grew out of their phase", which was back around 2012-2013. Back then, the bulk of the servers were as I described, and I soon decided to not even bother. Of course, I stopped playing TF2 altogether a couple of years later because I was bored of it and I wanted to move on to something else, but I was never able to complete a single expert campaign. I think I completed one map before it all fell apart, but that's about it.

League of Legends.

I've acquaintances who have several permabanned accounts for toxic behavior which sometimes carries over outside the game.

Doomworld lol

In my observations of many shitholes I wouldn't say Sonic because they're like some malformed human centipede of ass kissing tightly knit creeps so I'd personally say NeoGAF...

Oh... wait...

In some ways the Garry's Mod community (FacePunch) comes across as overly negative, but I could be wrong.

.

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned IGN. I find that IGN's review scores are often highly inflated, but the community will become downright hostile when they're in disagreement with a review. Not too long ago they gave Uncharted 4 a score of 9.0 and people were livid that the score wasn't higher. The responses to that particular review are depressing to look at. 

How do we define toxic? In my mind, toxic communities are ones that are filled with vapid thought. Nothing of substance to say, no conversations to be had, etc. By that definition, I would go with Call of Duty being the "winner" of the most toxic. Hands down. In my experience, the entirety of that game is filled with nothing but children throwing around insults, along with obnoxious adults who think they rule the world. Because they can shoot more people than you. I would have less of a problem with that sort of mentality if it wasn't so constantly condescending. The cut-throat attitude everyone shared robbed some sense of fun in the game for me. It's all filled with people who only care about winning, and nothing else. As if losing is somehow the end of the world.

I remember back when I was seriously into Call of Duty, I got to a point of boredom where I'd run around with weird/stupid guns just to see how many kills I could get. Which was actually way more fun. Sometimes I would come out on top in Free-For-All with a bad gun, and everyone would be absolutely furious. Shit talking me like "you're so autistic, you don't even know what the good guns are" etc. It was really hilarious to mess with people in this way, because of how seriously they took themselves. They honestly couldn't see the humor of doing something new and interesting that (heaven forbid) might mean you had a disadvantage! The horror! Surely that can't be fun? Also, their ego shattered to pieces by the thought of losing to someone who doesn't know the best way to play.

It's narrow minded, repetitive and sterile. And yet despite all of that, it can be a lot of fun too. Not a game I would ever play for the community aspect, personally (I never truly made any friends there at all). But nonetheless, it's a nice and quick means to vent frustration. Quick to load and play, quick to jump into, etc.

It isn't all bad.

Luckily I can say I have not interacted with any truly bad gaming communities. The only two game-related forums I post on are this and BeamNG, both of which tend to stay pretty civilized. (Although Beam occasionally gets a troll stuck in there, or some kid who has no idea what he's doing)

I guess I'll just say Minecraft then. Cliche, I know, but oh well.

LoL: 4 out of 5 matches you play, you shall meet one of the worst kinds of people in the world.

Minecraft: The Singleplayer community is actually nice, but the Multiplayer, you will be afraid of 14yo kids.

CoD: A mix between Minecraft and LoL, but not that strong.

GTA V Online: I started to hate humanity when I played GTA Online.

DOTA 2: Like LoL, but in russian.

CSGO: Like LoL and DOTA, but while shooting people.

Dark Souls: They are like vegans or something like that.

League of Legends without a doubt, especially the brazillian server. There was this one time in a ranked game i helped a teamate in his lane when 'he didnt ask for it', he got so upset because he wanted to be the lone wolf carrying the game solo that whenever i got close to him in the game he would just stop whatever he was doing (like, fighting the enemy team... ) and start walking away from me. Just one exemple though, players with attitudes like this are so common it's disgusting.

Interesting responses I am seeing here, I personally think myself that the community of a game is a very important part of it, and if the community isn't well seen, the game might suffer from it. One example is Tribes Ascend, fantastic online shooter with an incredibly horrible community, because of no more investments, no admins and just tons of hackers in there, Tribes Ascend just stopped receveing updates and completely faded out to oblivion...

4 minutes ago, Anidrex_1009 said:

 

 

GTA V Online: I started to hate humanity when I played GTA Online.

 

Yup, been there.

24 minutes ago, Ajora said:

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned IGN. I find that IGN's review scores are often highly inflated, but the community will become downright hostile when they're in disagreement with a review. Not too long ago they gave Uncharted 4 a score of 9.0 and people were livid that the score wasn't higher. The responses to that particular review are depressing to look at. 

I totally agree with this. Some people place far too much value on the number score a game is given. And when their favorite game (that they cherish oh so dearly) gets a number even slightly lower than what they have in mind, they go crazy. I can understand some of the frustration though, considering games like Call of Duty often always get high scores, while some overlooked and undervalued titles with less attention (that can be quite good too) still end up with a lower score. In this way it feels unjust, skewed, and biased. Still though, I've always thought that the best way to judge a game is to look at some bare bones YouTube gameplay and decide for yourself. No commentary, just gameplay. If it looks interesting, pick it up and give it a try. Fretting endlessly about a number review score won't do anyone any good at the end of the day. Especially considering opinions vary so much. But to some people, the rest of the world must feel the same way about a game as they do. Or else! Feel the wrath!

I think Yahtzee said it best with "I don't believe in review scores because I don't believe that complex opinions can be represented numerically."