Toxicity is baked into the core design of this game and has only gotten worse with each change the developers make. If I want to play Zen and the other support wants to play Mercy, our tank is going to flame us, rightfully so. And if both the DPS are bad, there is no control I have over whether I win or lose. If only 33% of games are in my control, all others will feel like a waste of time, and yet the game will punish you for those things outside of your control.
As a hero shooter, people will gravitate towards their favourite characters, and because this game is role queue, it incenses one-tricking. And yet, counter-swapping is still an issue for all roles, and the hero balance is abysmal. As a tank, you are forced to play on hard mode unless you play the meta tanks, on DPS you either do zero damage or abuse the massive burst damage to get any value, and on support you just do heal and do damage, with very narrow amounts of skill expression or varied gameplay between the characters.
Queue times are so long in this game, and the matchmaking is trash, so games can go no for 15+ minutes and yet be over from the character select screen because your tank chose the worst character and the enemy tank is playing their counter, and losing in competitive makes climbing the ranks even more of a grind as your MMR is set more in stone. And god forbid you actually get a win streak, because you will go from playing against trash-tier players to suddenly being put against really good players as the game suddenly thinks you are smurfing. It’s next to impossible to break the habits you gain from playing for so long in low ranks, and since the game is so grind, you can essentially become hard-stuck if you don’t commit hundreds of games to ranking up and overcoming the terrible matchmaking.
Individual agency is also just at an all time low outside of the tank role. Characters are so unevenly balanced and perks make it worse, counter swapping is still a thing, the aim requirements for hitscan is so easy, and tank diffs mean that your entire team gets spawn camped. It feel frustrating to lose because a lot of the time it doesn’t reflect your actual skill. Your teammate can play Widowmaker and just delete the enemy team with a Mercy pocket, and there really is nothing they can do. Or, without a competent tank, the enemy tank will never die and will kill anyone faster than people die in COD.
Not to mention you are required to cooperate with a bunch of anonymous randoms in a competitive game, which drives toxicity in other games, too. I don’t flame people in this game but I do get angry when I play because the game itself is unrewarding and toxic. I’ve found a really good way to win games is to spawn camp the weakest enemy player and then trash talk them in chat. The enemy team will implode and you will win and climb ranks.
