First and foremost, I want to preface that this is solely my experience, and I hope that i’m in the minority on this one. So please don’t think that i am saying the classic “wow this game is so toxic, everyone sucks, arrrggggg!”. I am simply explaining my experience with OW1 and OW2 toxicity. Also, this is my first post, so apologies if it’s sloppy (I don’t have much time rn).
Before I dive into this topic that I’m sure not many people probably care about (perhaps I’m too emotional?), I want to outline what I consider “toxicity”. I am mainly referring to verbal/text insults during matches, both qp and comp. For example, racial and homophobic slurs, telling people to ‘kill themselves’, “uninstall”, they are “garbage”, etc., and passive aggressive statements where they are implying that you are “dog s**t”, such as “wHaT wAs ThAt uLt?!” after you die while ulting when they had no understanding of the context in the moment of your death. I want to make it clear that i do not consider people telling me to switch heroes or telling me that I’ve done nothing as a hero is “toxic”. I will admit, I’m not that good at the game, so if someone says I haven’t done anything, they’re probably right. And, in all honesty, telling someone that they haven’t done anything can sort of be a fact, so I won’t consider it (although I do understand the frustration when someone says you haven’t done anything when in reality you have).
There is one more brief preface I want to include about my play time on these games. To be clear, I understand that I do not have a massive amount of hours on OW1 and 2, but I want you to keep in mind that I have also had an account on the xbox one for 2 years and ps4 for about another 2 before I went to pc to the current date. So, id like to say that I have a solid amount of experience to talk about this topic. I know that console and pc toxicity may differ, which it does tbh, but the point is that I have pretty thick skin from years of toxicity across three platforms, so I don’t want to seem like I’m overreacting to OW2’s toxicity, seeing how I don’t have an enormous amount of hours on the game.
Alright, now I want to explain my experiences with OW1 and OW2 toxicity:
With OW1, there was a ton of toxicity. I remember first playing on the xbox one. There were toxic people about once every 5 games, which I think is actually pretty good for a multiplayer game. But once doomfist was released (which ended up becoming my favorite hero to date), there was a lot of racial slurs being thrown around. I remember, since doom was pretty tough to play on release and a lot of people weren’t doing much with him in lower ranks (like gold and plat), every third game I picked doom, right at the beginning of the match one of my teammates would call me the n word. This went on for about half a year until I climbed to high diamond and low masters, where it seemed a lot more civilized. As for the ps4, it was a lot better due to a massive lack of racial slurs. Honestly it was a lot tamer, maybe like one toxic guy every 7 or 8 games. Wasn’t too bad in my experience, but that changed when I went to pc. Pc was brutal at first for me, it wasnt racial slur-brutal, but there were lots of people telling me to kill myself, uninstall, etc… And this wasn’t even in comp! In comp, gold and plat to be specific, about once every 5 games someone would just turn on the entire team and call everyone garbage, and I mean everyone. Now, I know what some people might say, “well, perhaps you weren’t actually doing good and it looked like you were throwing”. To this I respond by saying if I was bad enough to be told to kill myself, then why was I in that rank to begin with??? But, in the case of me being in the wrong rank, I would lose sr pretty quickly so I would drop to where I belong, and the toxicity would simmer down. Overall, OW1 wasn’t that bad, I never felt directly attacked all the time, and when I was, it wasn’t that bad because I knew it wouldn’t happen for another 5-8 games or so.
With OW2, holy crap my experience has been a nightmare. Every two games there has been a toxic teammate. Many times they aren’t toxic to me but to other teammates. There are so many people that say, “you guys are bad, so I give up” and they literally just run into the enemy team for the next two minutes to deliberately feed. There are people who gang up on the tank and collectively call them trash until they dc from the match. And the cherry on top, once every 10 games I get a guy who friend requests me to tell me to “get a noose” or less-creatively tell me to kill myself. This player base, in my experience, has been a total disaster. It’s literal chaos. So, I decided to do some research. When these players friended me to tell me to off myself, I decided to ask them why they were mad, what they wanted me to do, and how often this happens. Every time I ask these questions, they have no idea what to say. They just call me trash without actually identifying why. It’s like they’re so mad that they can’t even explain themselves. Honestly in my experience with OW1, the toxicity mid-game usually died down and then people actually started playing together again. I remember tons of moments where people on my team were arguing, and by the end of the game they were praising each other for the crazy comeback they pulled off. But in OW2, no one fixes the issues mid match, in-fact, some people don’t vent frustration at all so they just build up hate and then take the hate out of the match by friending you to continue the toxicity.
The worst part of my experience with toxicity in OW2 seems to be mainly because of the new report system which records voice chat. I noticed that, on the bright side, there hasn’t been any racial or homophobic slurs in either text or voice chat. But now there are so many passive aggressive people that imply that they think you’re garbage but don’t actually say it to avoid vocal or text evidence of their toxicity. For example, I was playing reaper on oasis. I spotted a bap and ashe on point and noticed that dva moved off point, so I saw an opening for my ult. I jump in and ult, but ashe managed to knock herself away (which, I’ll admit was my fault for not making sure she had the ability on cooldown) and the bap (who already used immo) was getting shredded. But dva boosted over and just barely saved him with dm. Now I know I shouldn’t be ulting while dva is alive, but she was being hard focused by the REST OF MY TEAM. Literally the only people alive on the enemy team were the three mentioned. So I assumed that she would have been melted but I guess I was wrong for assuming that a hog, soldier, moira, and ana would melt a dva with no heals or at least cause her to use a full meter of dm. So, after it was blocked my teammate said “what was that ult!?” and then called me “braindead”. I know the second claim was a direct insult, but the first is passive aggressive, where they don’t just get to the meat of their opinion, which is that I am “garbage”. This type of toxicity is the worst to deal with because it doesn’t seem to be banable. It’s the same thing with text chat as well unfortunately.
Now, I know that someone might say that perhaps I am being over dramatic and that they’re not implying that I am “garbage” and they are instead just frustrated overall. But to that I say that why didn’t they just communicate with me that they needed help with the dva or communicated their frustration to begin with?. It’s like they only use comms for being jerks instead of actually giving call outs or addressing problems in the team. I know that I should have targeted dva, I get it, It was a bad play on my part, but to be so ignorant to the situation and simply call me “braindead”? My OW2 experience has been a trainwreck.
Another thing I wanted to mention is the rank system. Being stuck in a high rank I shouldn’t be in is horrible. I am not a good dps, as I am in mid gold. So I’m trying to climb. I enter gold 1 and every match feels very hard to win/get any value out of my mains (Cassidy, reaper, soldier, hanzo) whenever theyre is a phara, genji, tracer, or sojourn on the enemy team. I feel like I can keep up in gold 1 as long as those heros aren’t on the enemy team (side note: it’s weird bc I can deal with people who play those heroes in lower ranks, but I don’t know what to do against gold 1 or above players). So, I figured that maybe I will derank back to where I belong… AFTER LOSING 20 GAMES against those heroes. For nearly 20 matches now, almost consecutively, I’ve been called “dog s**t”, told to kill myself, and told to uninstall. With the old system, I could drop (not deliberately of course) the rank after a couple games, but the system now forces me to endure 20 games of toxicity until I drop to the rank I can actually get value in. I feel like I have two choices: either play in my respective rank where I eventually rank up, and then lose 20 games where I’m called “trash” in each one, or make sure I don’t win 7 games in my respective rank (which is throwing, and I refuse to do that). I know that after winning 7 matches, the system would keep me in the same rank, but like I said before, I think I am gold 1 when there aren’t those specific heroes on the enemy team, but once there are I lose all ability to do anything. I even try swapping to heroes that seem like they have a better chance, like mei or sym for genji, but I still get bodied.
Overall, my experience with OW2 toxicity has been horrible. I’m not saying it was ever all sunshine and rainbows, but it definitely wasn’t this bad. I hope that maybe I’m just unlucky and most of you haven’t had this experience. Maybe I’m not understanding something, but I am really puzzled as to why I have faced this amount of toxicity. Maybe because it’s a free game so more people play it so more toxicity perhaps, but it seems strange to me. Maybe I’m just bad and I deserve to be told to kill myself/told that im trash? I don’t know, but I’ve been playing the same way as dps for a while in OW1 and I rarely received toxicity for the rare occasions where I heavily mess up, usually just frustration like people saying “oh my God…” or “wow/welp”.
I’m interested in what everyone thinks about this. And yes, I am fully expecting people to respond with “you’re trash” and “you deserve to be told those things”, etc. After all, it isn’t far from anything I’ve seen/heard in OW2.
Or go the easy route and just ignore them.