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?
I think that’s a very interesting question! I don’t have a good answer. In real life, this onus is on coaches, organizers, etc… so it’s always seemed like something that moderators should just need to actually do.
What bothers me about this with video games is that I know as a programmer, programmers are capable of just shutting people down when they do obviously disrespectful things like t-bagging, and in games that have explicit taunts… they’re perfectly capable of just giving players an option to disable taunts… but they don’t.
It’s kind of like chat filters, we don’t have to sanitize it for everybody, but there should be an option.
Taunting animations and t-bagging are pretty mild and I’ve always considered them in the realm of playful trash talk in the vein of things like “you’re going down, bro!” If they’re also talking massive shit while doing it, that’s a different story.
I think it’s a bit more disrespectful than “you’re going down, bro!” But typically when I’m thinking of this, I’m thinking of situations where the person has like a 10-0 KDR vs the person and is either clearly just way better or cheating and t-bags after every kill. It’s completely classless at that point.
Like, if it’s a fairly even match and occasional … sure it’s not worse, but when it’s mixed with outright domination (or as you said talking massive shit) it’s more than that.
In either case… it’s just so unnecessary.
In your personal judgment and opinion.
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? 🙃”
Programmers of AAA titles are subject to the decision of managers.
But more to your point: player upvoting/downvoting would maybe help solve this issue. The assholes will still be in the game rooms, but then you can avoid them. Like when you see a lemmy comment with -10, you just skip it.