I have friends that blow off steam when they come home form work, they do not however engage in toxic behavior towards others.
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Totally agree with this post, and disagree with many of the other posts in this topic.
In fact the other comments sound purposeful, as if someone’s trying to set a narrative.
Game design drives toxicity, and competitive gameplay drives toxicity more than cooperative gameplay.
Also, you could have the same number of toxic players in the past and present, but less player population today than in the past. So you would see more toxicity today, just by averaging out the chance of encountering another toxic player in a smaller population pool, especially so if the game design was modified later on to bring in a more toxic type of player in the later days.
If one game of the same genre has a lot more toxicity than the other games the same genre, then that’s saying something about the customer population of the individual games.
Edit: Forgot to mention, algorithms drive engagement via conflict, and that’s another real reason why we’re seeing a lot more toxicity in humanity’s social sphere these days. And these days you’re not even sure of your arguing with another human being or AI.
Well, I never personally asked for an auto-queue for dungeons, it was just added one day at the end of WotLK lol.
I feel like PuGs were better when they formed organically.
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maybe we should have elite servers for people that just can’t mellow…
a sort of " devil’s island" for the truly self acknowledged supreme players.
That’s what I’m saying, when you had to get to know those around you on your server and organically form a group, then travel to the instance portal it built comradely, and gave time for human connection.
And content like dungeons used to be a lot more difficult so people used to have to coordinate cc, mana usage, etc.
Casuals demanded a way to trivialize the dungeon experience and made it way too convenient. Alas it is where it is.
in the 90’s the internet was a very different place. it had not been taken over yet by sociopathic normies. in the 2000’s it started to trend more that way. now in 2024 the most outspoken people are all usually just socipathic energy vampires that get off on creating hate or anger, as they perceive it anyway.
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Things like min/maxing have existed since the early days of tabletop, but I do feel like in multiplayer games these days the attitude that everybody needs to be optimal is a lot more prevalent than it was 20-30 years ago.
The general arguing and bickering I feel was always there though, just with even more people making everything about politics and the current culture war.
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In 20 years , the only change has been in WHAT people can be jerks about. Before when you only had normal dungeons, 40 man raids or pvp… That’s it. Now we have more people participating in more content and this naturally there will be more overall engagement and jerkiness.
Random dungeons and raid finders also contribute to this.
But throughout the years the safest way to dodge all of that is to form communities whether they’re guilds or just people on your friends list.
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This.
Min-maxing has always been there, become more noticeable and easier to do because there’s so many sources of information out there now. Back in the day there was thotbot and in game communication/inspects, but now there’s wowhead, icyveins, skillcapped, drustvar, checkpvp, raider io, etc. And everything is hand fed to you in game now too, all mechanics and features/secrets are spoiled and experienced and leaked through PTR and data drops. Everything has gotten WAY TOO CONVIENIENT.
WoW hasnt been designed around “no life losers” at any point.
If anything. Early WoW was.
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Current WoW is like day care, it literally spoon feeds grown adults’ participation trophies nonstop.
Old WoW was nonstop grinding, leveling was harder, dungeons were harder, raids were less complex, but the mobs hit harder, and the trash packs had meaning for being there.
WoW nowadays is like riding an escalator to the top of the content peak with minimal effort. The only time the game is difficult is Heroic Raids+, Mythic 10s+, and Rated PvP 2.1k+. But that is where the actual community is at.
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The algorithm is effective.
I suspect the perception of greater negativity is that folks who would prefer to be constructive and positive have been effectively silenced by the harshness that comes back in response. As a result the percent of comments that are negative has increased as it is no longer a clash of opinions but a war of “truth.” This is not limited to the WoW community and is found in public discourse in general.
There has been a decades-long steady devolution as the political process that has become less rooted in ideas and policies and more akin to all the bitterness of a civil war. We no longer just disagree, we increasingly hate the other side. The thoughtful middle ground is now a place of scorched earth as we pick our news feeds that reinforce our prejudices and reject all other perspectives.
We are becoming incapable of listening to others and thoughtfully considering their ideas but rather are locking and loading at the first trigger response. It is disappointing how quickly discussions between individuals descends into personal attacks, often in the first round of responses.
disagreements between people has always and will always exist, yes. but how the disagreement is approached has changed significantly.
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Toxicity-wise, they are, objectively so.
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I disagree with most here.
Grinding easy content is the highest example of a participation trophy.
“You got something good. Not because it was challenging, but because you showed up and did the tedious work”
Leveling was longer, not harder.
Dungeons were easier in every way possible.
Raids were easier.
“The only time the game is currently difficult is if you ignore all the difficult stuff” is not the take you think it is.
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It did. Just best to admit to it, and then argue about why.
Best to substantiate it. At best, M+ exacerbated, which is in the rest of the quote you left out.
There can be no discussion when there is nothing to discuss. (Most of the meat was provided by me between Tuwen and I.)
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Wrath was bad with how freaking picky people were with armor scores or whatever it was called back then
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I remember in Wrath people would hang out at training dummies, spamming their dps meters into /say so others could see it. Or insult others with lower dps…that are practicing at the training dummies.
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