The most toxic communities I know of are the Genshin community, Payday 2, FFXIV and source games communities in general.
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.
Yeah, I kind of disagree with FFXIV. My whole experience there last year was entirely pleasant.
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.
LoL
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.
That’s what happens if you design a game in a way that makes it worse to have a bad player in your team than no player at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pokemon. If you like pokemon, then it is your fault that pokemon sucks now. Even if you agree with them that it sucks, if you don’t agree with them exactly what sucks about it and how we got to the point that it sucks, which games started sucking, then you’re a fucking moron and should be banned from the community.
I know most fandoms hate the media that they are allegedly fans of, but I haven’t seen a community hate the media (and each other) as much as pokemon fans.
Rust
Was looking for this lol.
I bought a Rust ages ago, back when the development basically had it turning into a new game every year. Maybe I just got lucky back then, but never had a toxic interaction.
Cut to last year, when a group of guild members went to Rust so I redownloaded it after 5 years. Most of us only lasted a few hours and we tried half a dozen servers lol.
Yes, it’s crazy to me that people would think another game is more toxic because in rust most servers (I’m talking main/ official servers) are really popular for at least half a week being Thursday wipes and Monday, if you build next to toxic you deal with them that whole wipe and then monthly servers same thing. It’s not one match and done with them I’m talking days and hours of just straight toxic gameplay.
Those people just have not had the misfortune of playing Rust.
Told someone I played rust and they asked if I was racist or suicidal because those are apparently the qualifiers.
It really does bring the worst out of humanity, but at the same time I’ve met and known people for years who were my neighbors or even rivals
Same people I game with today I meet on rust. Only a couple of us still play as we are all older now and have real jobs but great friends.
For some reason all fighting game communities seem to be split down the middle between friendly, chill people who want to help you learn and complete, uncompromising psychopaths
Haven’t played in a while but Warcraft all day unless you’re on an established RP server.
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
It’s been years since I ever played CoD but my experience was that it is basically a racial abuse simulator with an FPS in it.
Nowhere near as bad, but I was shocked how intensely elitist and gatekeeperish Hollow Knight’s community can be. I’d already finished the game when I found the sub on Reddit but damn they are mean to beginners!
Cyberpunk, easily. Everyone loves to hate it for some reason, and shit all over everyone that dares to enjoy it.
