The Lack of Connection- Overwatch's Toxicity and what's behind it

General Discussion
1

Heyo, another one of these today. Going to take a bit of a different route this time.

Instead of looking at a really flawed hero, I want to identify one of Overwatch’s problems as a game altogether.

When Overwatch released, marketed as a class based shooter with MOBA aspects, a lot of people from the League of Legends community who were tired with the game travelled here as to get a new and fresh experience, and there were even people saying that League was being killed off by Overwatch. (safe to say, that didn’t really happen).

The main reason behind the migration was one of the things that League has dealt with since Day One: incessant toxicity. The game even today has a problem this, with every kind of condescending, throwing, and flaming player you can think of. About 40-50% of my matches in league involve people on the same team flaming each other, someone throwing, or people on opposite teams throwing insults and getting tilted. It can be funny, but more often than not, it gets tiring and angering.

Today, Overwatch failed to come through on the promise of less toxicity. I mean, it’s to be expected, considering it’s an online team based game and this problem has also affected other team based games like the aforementioned League and CS: GO. But what should have been a main selling point quickly became a main quitting point. I’m not going as far as to say it’s as bad as League, which is still absolutely awful when people get angry, but it’s bad. It can be a reason to shut down for the night when you get a particularly bad game. People scream racial slurs, frequently ask others to kill themselves, throw, shift blame, flame each other in team and match chat, call other players bad on both teams, and so on.

Why is the game like this? And how can it not be like this?

The game is like this because people fail to connect.

In a game with so many playstyles and so many different levels of personalization, it becomes more and more difficult to connect with others, the same problem happens with League. Certain characters are seen as frusturatingly OP that can be seen as balanced by others, some characters are seen as throw picks by some that others see as completely usable. When you fail to find others that agree with you on this subject, you start insulting each others opinion.

A good example of this is, let’s say you’re in a ranked game. The other team has been whipping you with Brigitte and the DPS fail to get picks because one person is playing Sym.
[Team Chat] Zarya: Can we pls get different DPS?
[Team Chat] Genji: sym ur so bad ur throwing
[Team Chat] Sym: says the Genji running into a Brig
[Team Chat] Sym: I have gold elims
[Team Chat] Zarya: IT DOESNT MATTER! WE’RE NOT WINNING ONE OF YOU SWITCH
[Team Chat] Genji: ur bubbles are trash i would be getting picks otherwise
[Match Chat] Genji: wow such balance 4gitte
[Match Chat] Brigitte: you’re just bad lmao brig is fine right now
[Match Chat] Brigitte: maybe don’t play genji into Brig?
[Team Chat] Zarya: HE’S LITERALLY TELLING YOU TO SWITCH IM TRYING TO BUBBLE
[Match Chat] Genji: maybe don’t be a ******
[Team Chat] Mercy: Can we stop arguing please???
[Team Chat] Genji: shut the **** up merci mayn!
[Team Chat] Zarya: holy **** this Genji
[Match Chat] Genji: my team is retarded
[Match Chat] EpicGamer07 (Genji) left the match

And this isn’t even really an exaggeration of reality. Out of my toxic matches, almost every interaction occurs as something along the lines of this. The Sym is abused for playing a troll pick, the low skill cap heroes are being abused for playing low skill cap heroes, there’s one person focused on creating as much discord as possible, and the person just trying to get the team to work together is almost completely ignored.

A lot of tensions towards certain roles or heroes have to do with assumptions. No one likes getting rolled, and if someone is getting rolled, the team needs a scapegoat in order to feel like there is a solution to the problem. Enemy team isn’t dying? Blame the DPS. Pushes are ineffective? Blame the tanks. Your team is dying too quickly? Blame the supports. There’s no real way to tell what is going wrong and it makes things awry quickly. You ask the role that isn’t working to switch, and if they don’t, it makes the people accusing them tilt, if they do, it makes the person switching tilt because they feel like they were forced into their role.

LFG had been a great feature for awhile in order to reduce miscommunication and flaming and to actually win games. However, it only got worse because when people queue with LFG, they’re expecting a win, yet they are most likely going to be up against another LFG six stack. One of the LFG stacks has to lose, the one that loses is going to get even more angry because of their failed expectations. Over time, I stopped playing LFG and I only solo queue nowadays.

Which brings me to a proposed answer to the question: How can the game not be like this?
The game’s toxicity is built on a lack of perspectives and connections. Each individual player has their own gripes and groans with their games and the overall game itself. So what we need is a way to be brought together as players and unite rather than attack each other over our differences, as corny as that sounds. The obvious answer to this:

A guild/clan system would be a complete game changer that aids in providing communities of people with the same opinions about the game and the same interests when it comes to the game. It would aid in the popularity of the League, which has expanded to over 20 teams now, in the popularity of the game itself, and the overall awareness and interest in the game itself.

Let’s say that a guild/clan system isn’t realistic, that the developers have to focus on other things and can’t get it done. Another option that would help provide perspectives, recently suggested in former pro player and active streamer Seagull’s video, is a scoreboard for the game so that we know who is getting countered, who is not performing as well, who on the other team is the biggest problem, and who is the strongest performer on the team (without the easily lied about medal system).

A final thing that helps with connectivity is to make public profiles the default. THIS IS NOT SAYING THAT WE SHOULD REMOVE PRIVATE PROFILES, I understand that some people are insecure or feel attacked over their career stats and need private profiles. But right now, private profiles are the default, meaning everyone who has the social change patch will have a private profile unless they actively change it. Most players don’t even know how to change it even if they wanted to, so too many people have private profiles. If a team wants to compete, they should have public profiles as to know what heroes someone is best on so they can make the ideal team comp for everyone, and people should have public profiles when they begin the game so that they aren’t unaware about hiding their stats.

Maybe there are other ways to change the game that I didn’t list here, maybe toxicity is unavoidable in Overwatch. But I know that the game is less fun for those that have to experience toxic players and we should make every effort we can to reduce toxicity as to not ruin players’ experiences.

Thank you.

1 Like
2

oh boy, that’s a lot of text. i’ll bookmark this for later.

True, but Overwatch has elements from a lot of different types of games. Hell, for all I know, street fighter fans hoped on because they made Doomfist. another reason why Overwatch was crazy popular at launch is because it’s a Blizzard game. Blizzard has a lot of fans, and I’m sure that the majority of them were willing to try a fps if it was made by Blizzard

That’s a pretty accurate reflection of how I feel about toxicity in this game as well

It’s in it’s very nature. It’s a team game, and a decently competitive one at that. If you lose, there’s a decent chance that it’s not your fault, so rather than just being a bit ticked, you’re being a bit ticked at a specific person, which gets them a bit ticked, and then it becomes a virus.

Not what I would call the main reason, but that’s one of the bigger ones.

anyways, i’m sure it wouldn’t be too productive if i just wrote a wall of text rewording what you wrote, so i’ll skip to your proposed solution.

I’m not sure how much that would help. The damage has been done, and even if you’re in a guild, that won’t help you if you’re in a match with randoms.

Good but maybe not mid match. This could be something in the replay system that they’re working on. I feel like if this was something that you could check mid match, players would use it as a tool for toxicity rather than a tool against it.

It’s been a while since private profiles were added. I think that if you want your profile to be public, you’d have it set as that by now, and vise versa.

so yea, that’s my two cents on the matter. thanks for making this op

1 Like
3

Love the post! I was one of the proponents to private profiles. Players are passionate about the game, so much so. That private profiles provide “safe space” to an individual.

If a person feels uncomfortable, which many did. They didn’t even play the game anymore. Because the other team knew their top hero picks, countered and it made for toxic problems. . This issue not only was present for the enemy team. But instead it rolled over onto the same team as well. Players reported their team mates, if they were NOT playing their “main hero picks”. Which brought fourth the “smurff account”.Players had to purchase multiple accounts, so they could become good at certain characters, to avoid people harrasing and bothering them over their hero picks.

Toxicity has always been in this game, but since December 2017, when they decided to use the new match making system to place new accounts into non premade groups. the Toxicity level rose significantly.

It’s plenty fair, because in War. We dont know the enemy soldier’s stat. We know it’s an individual and they are an enemy. :slight_smile:

1 Like
4

Yeah, placing accounts into non premade groups has been pretty bad because the new account will always get flamed, whether it’s because they are a new player and they aren’t comfortable with the game yet, or whether they’re a smurf and they deal with the negative opinions towards smurfing.

5

This is actually one of the reasons why. You don’t get a more awful player base than the league community. It’s one of the most hostile, repulsives communities on the internet to date, and I would say it’s worse than reddit and 4chan. When I have played it lately, I just turn off chat. I have yet to have a single game, where someone wasn’t blaming someone else for their shortcomings.

6

Yeah, I didn’t actually think about this. In my mind, the non toxic players were the only ones that left. I guess the migration just ended up being a transfer of toxicity.

7

My god, you nailed it.I Can’t think of a more accurate description than this. Kudos

1 Like
8

Rules for thee, but not for me.

Do you think it is okay to just label everyone who disagrees with your values as toxic?

Some people do need to curb the way they interact with others. This is true in every medium us humans occupy. Why is it we need you as the moral arbiter of how everyone should behave?

9

I can confirm that at GM on EU, there is like literally 0 toxicity.

The last time someone was toxic was like a week ago when a Torb onetrick spammed in chat, “st fu” and tbf that’s barely even toxic.