May just be me, but wow has become a magnet for toxic people. The game used to be fun, and it’s more of a nostalgia play now with a literal dead story line, still enjoyable though. But the people it is attracting now are unbearable I don’t want to play a mmo with such toxic people, why has the game world become a place where people go to tear other people down and be so toxic?
7 Likes
Nothing compared to the toxicity you would find in shooter games like Overwatch , Wow is pretty tame compared to those games.
3 Likes
Gamers became unapologetically toxic around the same time that matchmaking services started showing up. Since you could easily just find another group of people to play with/berate there was little reason in the minds of some individuals to actually make an effort to be even civil, much less decent or, hell, pleasant. Add modern society’s almost glorification of stupidity and the need to be the focal point in any situation, regardless of how you achieve that goal or if said situation even needs a focal point, and it’s a recipe for disaster to allow some people to flit through groups of randoms while desperately seeking their next 20 seconds of “infamy”.
Bite-sized matches, like those in random dungeons, squad shooters, MOBAs, etc, simply exacerbate things. There’s a much shorter time frame in which to do the events of the aforementioned, which too many take as a challenge to ensure they do as much harm as possible before it’s over. It’s like an arms race to the bottom just in case someone else takes centre stage, and there’s unfortunately no end in sight.
Go back 20 years (possibly a little more) and you basically had to know everyone and organise ahead of time for any kind of multiplayer experience. If one person annoyed the rest too much they either wouldn’t be invited or someone would reach over and smack them across the back of the head, depending upon the frequency and/or severity. You either had to remain on good terms or you simply missed out.
As an extension of the above, since it is likely to come up, by having to have a pre-formed grouping you were also less likely to run into people you were going to clash with. Not every altercation comes from people going out of their way to cause one - sometimes two (or more) people just don’t get along. Though I consider this to be the minority of toxic instances these days, even if I don’t necessarily have any proof to back that up.
8 Likes
Here is the most psychological honest answer you will get
Because here they are anonymous so there are minimal consequences for their actions. You cant show up at some ones doors who acts like a jerk to you in game to call him out on it. You know? There is almost no real consequences for him/her to face for their actions. Also here they act as bad as they and treat others poorly because there is next to no one to police them. People have realized online they can be their “real nasty selves” they never show to the real world. Also they tend to take out their own frustrations from things in their life out on people online because again they get to remain anonymous.
PS> As a side note you probably don’t understand this “toxic” behavior because deep down you are a good person. Most people are not
12 Likes
It’s not so much that gamers are more toxic now than they were years ago, it is that the consequences for toxic behavior have been significantly lessened.
Folks have always acted toxic in any situation where there are no consequences for it. I can remember message board arguments from 20 years ago or more where people were every bit as toxic as anything seen today. And going farther back in time, even before computers existed, you still see that pattern where people will be terrible to each other in any situation where there are no consequences for it. It’s one reason why there are so many atrocities in wars. But I digress.
Getting back to WoW, back in the days when your server community and your personal reputation meant something, you needed to be at least somewhat nice to folks, because if you weren’t, eventually you’d be somewhat ostracized and thus it was hard to participate in multi-player content. That is no longer true in the game. Now, if you are in a PuG, you are free to be as toxic as you want because the others in the group are essentially NPCs that you will never see again.
That’s why the perceived toxicity is higher now.
4 Likes
There might be 2 reasons.
One is that, in the old days, only the middle class and above had computers.
Two is that, games like WoW explicitly encourage PFU or elitist behaviors. In the old days, WoW was more of a role-playing game, and players were in it to explore and socialize. Nowadays, only a handful of RP realms maintained that old vibe. The rest of realms have been infested by mean people.
2 Likes
It’s the competitive mindset that’s the real nastiness magnet. It’s no coincidence that the most toxic playerbases are those of the most intensely competitive games.
The problem is that few games with competitive elements implement adequate countermeasures to quell the nastiness, so it runs rampant. If people started reliably getting hardware/billing address banned for egregious offenses they’d tone it down.
2 Likes
Oh it was toxic before matchmaking became the norm. Playing the original Starcraft on the old Battle.net client was pretty bad and if I remember correctly there was no matchmaking, you would just browse a list of games to join like in WoW’s manual group finder and hope you didn’t get into a trap 2v2 game that’s actually a 1v3 against you because someone wanted to boost their win ratio.
It’s just the anti-social nature of online gaming, and it’s even worse for competitive games. Couch multiplayer is not toxic because you (presumably) know the person you’re playing with. In online matchmaking you usually don’t.
Because games don’t have age restrictions.
1 Like
Age is barely even a factor in whether a player will engage in toxic behaviour or not. If anything the older players get the more likely they are to be calculating (thus damaging) in their efforts, rather than just deliberately incompetent and/or spouting off insults. Not that being older precludes people from being incompetent and vocal.
When I was a kid I was always told, “…It’s how you play the game.” Having respect for your team, but most importantly - the competition - was a big deal. It easy to be respectful when you’re winning. It takes a lot more character to be respectful when you’ve lost.
People should be shamed from time to time for their behaviors and lack of civility. Note: I’m not saying they should be censored. If anything their tantrums and a-hole nature should be amplified for all of their peers to see. Would you want your friends, mother/father, children, nieces/nephews, etc to see how you’re behaving? Would you be proud of it? If not, then don’t do it online. The people here are just as real, and they deserve the same respect.
2 Likes
Practice makes perfect 
Unfortunately, the actions Blizzard and Bobby Kotick haven’t gone unnoticed by most gamers. What you’re seeing now is the result of most “nice” players switching to a different MMO without a history of sexual misconduct.
2 Likes
Something I’d add to this is there’s a dehumanizing aspect to the anonymity.
For example:
Game 1: Hunter a breaks my CC, I die because of him. I send him a tell asking him to be more aware and you know, not do that. I don’t learn his name because I’ll never see him again
Game 2: Hunter b breaks my CC, I die because of him. I send him a tell to watch it. Again I don’t know, nor care about his name, I’ll likely never see him again.
Game 3+: Repeat until breaking point (x)… I still don’t learn any of their names, because there’s no point… They just “that pug hunter”, a weird amalgamation of all of the various terrible pug hunters
Game X: Hunter X breaks my CC, I die because he’s yet another moron in a long line of replaceable morons. WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEARN YOU USELESS PIECE OF HUMAN GARBAGE HUNTER, I’ve already told you (x-1) times! *followed by being temp banned or squelched.
This doesn’t just apply to hunters, or pug BGs, it’s dungeon finder, its raid finder, it’s LFG, it’s trade chat. The overwhelming majority of the people you encounter in game are exceedingly replaceable, entirely forgettable, and have morphed into some amalgamation of “some random pug” in your head. They aren’t one person you’ve grouped with, they’re EVERY person you’ve grouped with. And you’ve already taught them 1000x how not to suck, and here they are sucking yet again. The game turns into a sisyphean hellscape of misery, trying to beat the same lesson into the “same” player over and over again until the pot boils over and Toxicity inevitably ensues. You don’t care about the other person because they’re replaceable, you don’t care about your reputation because you don’t have one… the humanity gets devalued to the point where only the performance matters… and you’ll see addons like gearscore, raider.io, and warcraft logs getting the invites, because the only thing that anyone cares about is how good you can do the job
2 Likes
I think the fact that most games have communities that expect very specific play styles is a good explanation. I mean, how many times have you been kicked out of a raid randomly for standing a nanometer to the left of optimality or some crap.
1 Like
Its not just gamers that are toxic. Its a combination of things,.
- Most people are so soft and sensitive that everything is now toxic
- People are becoming more self centered and without self control now. The powers that be have removed all accountability and boundaries.
- People are just bad now.
2 Likes
No, it’s not just gamers, anywhere on Social Media you’ll find toxic people. I’ve always found that when you put a mask on someone, or in this case an anonymous screen name, they find themselves free to speak in ways they never would when face-to-face in the real world. Sometimes that can actually be a good thing, myself for instance, offline I have certain issues that make it difficult for me to communicate with others, but here I’m Captain of the Debate Team, I’m the bastard child of Barack Obama and Ric Flair. For others though a mask gives them the opportunity to take out their frustrations and aggravations and basically be the punk they can’t be in real life, they get to say things that would get them throat-punched if they said it to anyones face. It’s amazing what some people will say when they think there’s no real-world consequences.
3 Likes
This cow gets get.
2 Likes
All you have to do is lower your expectations. It gets a lot easier to get through the day after that.
Anonymity brings out the worst in everyone.