Nah, this ain’t generational, man. I’ve heard people that were maybe 12 at best flip out and I’ve heard people that sound in their 40s flip out. Its just a normal thing in games like this. Every multiplayer game I’ve ever played has Toxicity. That’s what happens when you put a bunch of strangers in a room and force them to try and get along. Its going to happen regardless of their age.
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I think it is due to how Overwatch is designed. I was thinking about TF2 the other day and most games I would play would be 10v10 or 12v12. In Overwatch, since you have half that, each person is much more important to a team’s success. You can’t really carry in Overwatch either because of the MMR or whatever they use and the way heroes work. It is a much more frustrating experience. I also still hate that there is no casual mode to play. Competitive is competitive. Quickplay is used as practice for competitive and then arcade has loot box rewards for winning. It’s just frustrating. Naturally people are going to get pissed off and act poorly. This game generates it. Then you have the balancing problems and map design. There are so many factors that make this game infuriating. I play this this game and I can lose like 10 matches in a row and most of the time it feels completely out of my control. I guess the looking for group thing helps a bit, but I rarely find myself having fun while playing this game. I don’t think the “toxicity” will go away until they do some serious work on the actual gameplay and design.
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Maybe the Syrian should have traded the phone for money to spend on food. Why are they using twitter while starving?
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I mean to you, sure.
But thinking your values are equal to everyone elses and thinking that because something is irrelevant to you it’s irrelevant to everyone is nothing but pure arrogance.
I personally don’t care about football, of any code, whether it be Soccer, Gridiron, Rugby or any other variation. I can go into pretty much any large forum and find me a hugbox if I wanted to say “hey, sportsball amirite?”
That doesn’t change the fact that to a huge number of people, Football is very important to them.
I think this generation isn’t inherently more toxic, i think it’s inherently weaker than previous generations. We’re devolving mentally as a species. We’re going through a phase where previously considered banter and jokes, are now considered toxic.
People assume the worst out of each other. And the younger generations seem to become progressively more incapable of being on the receiving end on anything that isn’t 100% positive.
It’s not that everyone around you is actually becoming toxic, it’s the way you perceive the world.
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When you see Bastion and Sym is “meta”, then your duo go this strat versus a goat, then the 3 stacks in your teams say you’re reported and start playing 3 dps and flaming everyone after one push.
There is, I believe, a significant difference in online behavior between generations. I think the casual attitude towards written insults is something that is somewhat rare in people over 40, though people over 40 have their own ways of expressing frustration etc. This is just speculative though…
One thing I can say for certain though. Over the 16 years I’ve been teaching at the university I’ve seen significant changes. There is a significant difference in attitude in the last 5 years compares to all the years before. Students seem way more self-centered, which makes educating students a lot more difficult even though we, as teachers, try to adapt and continuously improve our teaching methods.
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See my quote above. People have been perceiving a moral and intellectual decline for literally milennia, and yet humanity continues to advance. There’s reason for optimism, even if it doesn’t always seem like it in these trying times. 
I agree that there’s an expectation now that people should always be able to be happy, and that all feedback should always be positive, but I don’t think calling out bad behaviour is a sign that we’ve all grown more sensitive - it’s a sign that we’ve grown stronger as people, braver, bolder, safer to speak our minds. I think that should be celebrated, not feared.
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We don’t see people as they are, we see them as we are.
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I think that its because kids will grow up playing games where toxicity is normal and reciprocate that bc theyre kids and dont really know any better and when theyre older and still being toxic the kids of the next generation will mimic that and it just seems to grow and grow.
There has also been a societal growth in viewing violent slurs and sexism and other reprehensible things as being Not Ok, so things that were fine back in the day are seen more as toxic now a days. if u say this generation is “too senstive” i’m going to assume that you’re upset that someone called u out for saying something racist or homophobic or something lol
Anonymity.
And also when you coddle something too much it turns into a jerk.
I said this in another topic but I definitely think the “era” of trolling came about because the people who were always trolls and have always gotten enjoyment from enraging others finally broke through that barrier to use the net: shame. It used to be not cool to be a gamer or heavy internet user. Now it’s just a thing. Everyone uses the internet, lots of people game so now the societal dregs have equal representation online AND anonymity and detachment to fire their insults from.
The jerks have always been there, but they’ve found somewhere to truly “shine”.
It’s not generational. Every generation is toxic.
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Online gaming has always been toxic because it was overrun by tryhard, bigoted dudebros in the 90s who became the public face of gaming culture and subsequently a lucrative demographic, which in turn meant game companies weren’t and still aren’t keen to reel the locker room bullcrap in.
Now gaming is actually a serious commodity, developers and publishers have begun to remember that minorities still play games too, and their ability to speak up about how trash gaming culture is due to social media, as well as larger questions posed about the role of social media in society, means toxicity is becoming highlighted more and more as the garbage it is.
It also means those original tryhard, bigoted dudebros are going to feel victimized and attacked and seek to defend their crap culture under the guise of “free speech” and “that’s how it always is” and “this is what the real world is like;” crappy appeals to tradition to stave off the act of self-reflection and betterment of one’s self.
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oh god was it ever
we live in an era where everyone has numerous avenues to broadcast their opinions and beliefs, no matter how stupid or outlandish, to the world and I think it’s definitely had negative consequences
kind of like how no one was an anti-vaxxer before the internet existed, and no one believed the Earth is flat
or if they did, they lacked the means to broadcast it to anyone and everyone, so they just kind of kept it to themselves and the idea never gained widespread credibility.
anyway I’m rambling so I’ll shut up now
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Them liking football doesn’t affect anyone else. It doesn’t cost me anything to let someone else like football.
It does, however, cause problems when people get up in arms about their “right to not be offended” and create unnecessary conflict because someone inadvertently said one of their 1,532 potential trigger words over the course of a normal conversation.
Doubt it, online games have always been toxic as all hell thanks to the anonymity of it. It’s just that it used to be limited to mmos and console games with voice chat but now that its the age of PC and we have multiple forms of chat (and even phones and social media), it just seems worse.
It’s a refusal-to-even-try-to-reform-the-most-notoriously-toxic-community-in-the-world thing.
Sure toxicity is everywhere, but it’s worse in blizzard games for a reason.
Actually, Overwatch seems to be an outlier among Blizz games. WoW’s community is pretty alright these days, Diablo’s players don’t talk to one another, and Starcraft’s players… exist. At least, so I’m told. Cannot confirm.
I dunno the first thing about HotS though so maybe there’s some toxicity there.
The act of trolling has changed but being a jerk has been human nature since the dawn of time