The whys of toxicity and how to fix it

General Discussion
1

I’ve finally realized why there is so much toxicity in this game.

A lot of people are apparently playing a completely different game than they thought they were, something made very clear in these forums. They think they’re playing a first person shooter, when they are in fact playing a hero shooter.

Quoting from Wikipedia; “Hero shooters strongly encourage teamwork between players on a team, guiding players to select effective combinations of hero characters and coordinate the use of hero abilities during a match.”

And Overwatch is a game that takes it one step further, making hero switching a foundational part of the game.

If you think you’re playing a first person shooter, and that the different heroes are basically no more than different “skins” on the same foundation, you want to be able to pick the “skin” you think look the coolest, and not be at a disadvantage against any other heroes. When you realize that some of the heroes are wiping the floor with you, you obviously think it’s imbalanced. As they’re supposed to be equal, right? And that you’re getting punished for having the skin you like the best? And then you get angry, as the developers obviously fail to balance the game and you can’t play the character you want to because of that. You feel cheated out of those $40.

And you see all these other players, who suck, as the difference between you and them is basically cosmetic, so they should be doing the same things you are doing, with the same results. And since they’re not, but instead doing sh1t that looks totally alien to you, in every single game, they are obviously doing it wrong.

And you lose match after match, due to the imbalance and the other players that suck. And it gets more and more frustrating as you play match after match, always getting killed by Tracer, or Brigitte, or any of the other “imba” heroes, while your team mates keep doing the wrong thing all the time. So of course you get resentful, and start venting that frustration.

But you know what? You’re 100% mistaken regarding what game you’ve bought, and are playing. You think you bought an FPS, when you bought a 3-D MOBA. The differences aren’t meant to be cosmetic, and some heroes are meant to annihilate some other heroes. All heroes are meant to have a fairly unique playstyle. And you are meant to switch heroes, dynamically adapting your team composition to whatever the opponent is fielding.

If I wanted to play a new platformer that looked awesome, I bought it, and it turned out to be Diablo, I wouldn’t insist that Blizzard changed the game to be what I wanted it to be. I would either see if I could learn the game and enjoy it, or I would stop playing it. It would have been my mistake, buying the wrong game, not the other players, and not Blizzard’s.

So, finally, my proposed solution; education.

Educate the players on how the game is supposed to be played. If someone playing Tracer dies repeatedly to for example Brigitte, show a hint on the screen; “You seem to have problems with Brigitte. She’s made to be very strong against Tracer, so it makes sense. Overwatch is a game where hero switching is mandatory for success, so I suggest trying a hero that is strong against Brigitte, like Junkrat or Pharah.”

If Rein is constantly dying far away from his team; “It seems you are dying away from your team a lot. Overwatch is a game where playing as a team is critical, and Reinhardt is made to work within arms length of his support and damage dealers. Make sure you don’t leave them behind.”

Honestly, it should not be necessary, but this would let people know that “no, Hero X is not broken, it’s by design to force a switch” and also that they are actually making mistakes themselves, and it’s not everybody else that suck. And also that “This is Overwatch, you can play it or not, but it’s not changing.”

The code required for this would likely fit like a glove with any new POTG-design, and might be a first step in the development of one. So here’s to hoping.

5 Likes
2

Stop getting so butthurt over ‘toxicity’, it’s a game, don’t take it seriously, report and move on.

6 Likes
3

What about educating yourself first? You request to be taken seriously and you post wikipedia as a resource worth considering.

What’s the difference between a hero shooter (which does not exist as a genre to begin with) and a common fps? It’s just a transition from changing weapons and equipment through a buying system to changing through different heroes. It’s not rocket science…

What’s the difference between pharahs weapon and a common RPG? What’s the difference between Soldiers weapon with a common m4? McCree’s with a Desert Eagle? Junkrat’s with a grenade launcher? Widow and a common sniper? Armor packs and Cevlar?

If you seek desperately for more differences, you may come with the concept of ultimates. Quake and Unreal had secret utilities which resemble ultimates.

But they are not ultimates, aren’t they? The mere fact that a game has to be unique, doesn’t mean that it belongs to a different genre.

According to your definition of a genre, then DotA and LoL should be single map IBMOBAs (item based moba) and HoTs multimap TBMOBA (talent based). These distinctions are crucial between hots and dota, lol to the core game play. Why your hero shooter is a genre and hots is not a genre of its own?

You write like you can understand what’s going on, while you have no experience regarding FPS. The cooperation needed to play overwatch decently is minimal in comparison with other fps.

1 Like
4

And there aren’t tactical shooters, gallery shooters or any other types of shooters using a first person perspective either, amirite? And a moba is a top-down shooter, as you see it from above right?

You are the perfect illustration of why this education is needed :joy:

2 Likes
5

I doubt that this is the reason for toxicity.

Think about any other game that makes you toxic, salty, or upset: League of Legends, CS:GO, Streetfighter, Super Smash Bros, Tetris, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Chess, Monopoly, etc.

Now there are some ridiculous ones but they have one thing in common: Defeat

In general, you try to reach a goal. Reaching said goal will satisfy you. However, if you fall or start distancing from the goal, many people will feel defeated and frustrated.

That frustration usually leads to despair, confusion, and rage and depending on the game, the expression of the frustration is different:

  • Board/Card games: table flip
  • Singleplayer/FFA games: broken gamepads
  • Mario Party/Local multiplayer games: broken bones
  • Overwatch/LoL/Team based Games: blaming and scapegoat searching

People also search for reasons why they lost and this a crucial part.
The usual excuses in FFA/Singleplayer games are either the game is flawed or the other players are cheating.

However, excuses in team-based games like LoL and Overwatch are more personal:
We lost because our Team played worse.
Therefore, our team played worse because someone on our team messed up.
Therefore, it is player X fault and they should be ashamed.

Especially in team-based games, cusses, insults, and harassments are aimed mostly at one or 2 specific players because the toxic one believes that the defeat is their fault.

However, and it’s a huge “however”, the reason for toxicity is not because of the game mode. The true culprit for toxic gameplay is the general mentality in any video game:

the desperation for success and the fear of defeat

Players get so desperate to win that any defeat will have a negative impact on them, which usually leads to frustration, blaming and overall toxicity.

I’ve noticed that all my “salty” friends fear defeat and only one Friend and I are pretty chill and not considered salty or toxic and I noticed why: We have a completely different mentality when playing.

The mentality of our friends are:

" We have to win! Losing is fatal! "

But my friend’s my mentality is:

" I want to win but I don’t mind defeat, as long as I gave my best "

Due to that mentality, we never got toxic and were always able to stay positive.

Tl;Dr.
Toxicity isn’t due to a specific game genre but rather due to the mentality of players. Being desperate to win and fearing defeat will lead to frustration and toxicity when success isn’t on your side.

By changing your mentality and eliminating the fear of defeat, there is nothing that will frustrate you and you can stay positive without getting upset.

After all, It’s just a game and we just want to have fun.

Good luck and have fun on your next rounds ^^

:dragon:

1 Like
6

I’m not claiming there wouldn’t be any toxicity if people knew what game they were playing, I’m saying that the level of toxicity in Overwatch is orders of magnitude higher than in any other game I’ve played. And that a lot of it appears to come from the misguided perception that you should be able to play whatever hero you want without negative consequences and that any negative consequences are due to imbalance. All the ignorant rants about “no-skill aimlock heroes” or “skilless buttonmashing” very clearly shows that people think they are playing a type of game that they’re not, and getting frustrated that it doesn’t behave as the game they think it is.

7

I already reckoned that you are aware of toxicity in other games. It should be obvious anyways.

However, knowing that, we could look at similarities and find out the root of the problem, which in my opinion is the general mentality in video games.

In Overwatch, having the mentality of “I can play whatever I want without any consequences” is, of course, flawed it leads you to think that the game is unfair. The feeling of unfairness then leads to toxicity because “that unfairness is the reason why we lost”.

Maybe that mentality is the reason for the “illusion of imbalance” but not for general toxicity.

Changing said mentality in overwatch might help but not that much. It just eliminates the idea of imbalance, the feeling that something is unfair. However, it doesn’t eliminate the process of scapegoating. People will keep looking for someone to blame on their defeat.

Only if you stop fearing defeat, you truly are able to play without toxicity inside you.

8

That’s part of my suggestion; reinforce the team aspect.

9

Maybe the upcoming endorsement system will advocate for better teamplay. It might even solve the issue with toxicity alltogether.

No, that would be too hopeful. All it might does is basicall rewarding good teamplay and punishing bad teamplay/toxicity.

Welp, we just have to wait and see.

10

The thing is that if you get an endorsement for good teamplay, but don’t actually know what for, it’s not really helping :slight_smile: You may even believe that you got it for something else than what your mates actually gave it for. Not to mention that there are so many players that seem to be unsure about what it means that they’re quite likely to endorse someones team-skills without having the faintest idea what it is. “Oh this guy was awesome! Let’s give him all the votes!”

So I honestly think an “AI teacher” is needed for many players, to teach the game after the tutorial “teaches” the basic mechanics. I think a large number of people will actually be severely helped by learning the fundamentals, but the biggest win is that it would make the ones who think they’re playing an FPS aware of the fact that they’re not, so they can either adapt and learn, or quit the game instead of hoping for “fixes.”

1 Like
11

I agree that many don’t realise that game mechanics and displaying the actual state of the game on the screen are two very different things. Many very different games can be visualised from a “first-person” perspective.

From a gameplay mechanics perspective OW is very different from Quake, CS, and many other “first person” games. In my opinion heavily team based games (high level dependency on other players) and casual players are a bad combination. I would be curious how much an “AI teacher” could help with the situation. Perhaps not selling the game to the wrong audience could help more but that isn’t good business… :joy:

12

If anything if noticed is high elo has less toxicity and trust each other more then low elo, you can play around mess around they’ll still trust each other its just banter in high elo, at low elo full on toxic at times not even funny, omg you are a smurf go back to your own rank, lol as if i can play Ana at masters in current state of game with my skill level, 2 years ago i might have been able to due lack of knowledge around Ana, now tho.

Really the choice to start flexing or just one tricking becomes so easy, no one ever complains, but honestly i blame the lack of role queue and out of date ranking system for the problems, if there was any way to do ranks per hero and being able to decide what to play before going into a game, then that would solve many problems, the least they could do is role queue with role based sr system, that Reinhardt player that wants to pickup dps won’t have to play dps in gm anymore and can start straight in gold or whatever he’s skill level is as dps.

Thats pretty much how you can reduce a lot of toxicity, just try and improve on things that are outdated, requires a lot of brain storming and thinking to come with systems that are best solution to problems, they are probably very happy with the amount of feedback they get.

13

The in-game hero switch makes it very difficult to separate hero MMRs but it can’t be removed due to the rock-paper-scissors nature of the game. Removing in-game switch would either make a lot of heros superfluous or there would be a need for pre-made hero compositions. (Removal of a lot of creativity from the game.)

Even if they put in a game mode into Arcade with pre-made compositions without hero switch with per-hero MMR, that game mode would be very different from the current one and wouldn’t teach players how to play those heros in a lot of weird situations that might arise in the current competitive with hero switch. Though it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea to try it.

14

ive found something whilst ive been playing, and it might be a coincidence… however hear me out

whenever i get a match, on those very rare occasions where there is no widow, hanzo, tracer or genji on either side of the game and i know it only happens once in thousands of matches

but… when this happens, there is not an ounce of toxicity from anyone on my team and not a peep from the enemy…

so… my thoughts are that these “high skillcap heros” as they are called, seem to cause a lot of frustration which leads to toxicity…

solution?.. i dont know… either delete these heros, or smash them with the nerf hammer untill they stop breathing

make it so that “yes you can play them… but you’re going to need to perform your ass off to get anything out of them”… rather than just… nano blade w+m1+shift LOL Reckt, or Ryuguwagatagiwakuspam, or Zippity Do Dead… or Back to spawn HS express

idk… just my thoughts

16

No matter which heros you have on those two teams, one team is very likely to lose (draw matches are rare) and in that case there is a chance that the losing/defeated team has a neurotic/toxic player who starts whining and attacking his/her team mates. Report and ignore, silencing and banning are the only things that work against those people.

17

i know there are your every day psychotic knob end in matches, but as i say… whenever the rare occasion i get a match without the “high skill cap” quartet its always a pleasant and fun game… win or loose… that cant be coincidence

18

Hey, I’m the kind of person who gets really, REALLY salty because all I’ve ever aimed for is winning. I just wanna say I just want to get less saltier in games as it ruins the fun of others and also mine!
I’ve gotten suspension for 7 days and during these 7 days, I played my friends account. And since it wasn’t my account, I knew not to be salty and (I actually don’t feel the need to must win). Thus, I was less saltier than I was in my actual account.

In conclusion, I just wanna say this really cleared my mind on how to be less toxic/salty etc.

And to all the people I’ve been salty to, I sincerely apologize for it. T_T

3 Likes
19

There seems to be two kinds of OW players.
Those who think the problem is toxicity, and those who think the problem is trolling. These are mutually exclusive. Toxic players (who tend to be competitive) are toxic because they think their teammates are throwing and trolling. Those who are anti-toxic tend to play for fun and think that there is no problem with trolling at all, its just normal gameplay. The fact that blizzard has always tried to mix these two kinds of players into same team and pretend there is nothing wrong is the root of the problem.

You can’t put casuals and competitive people into same team and expect everything to go smoothly. Yet this is exactly what blizz has tried, and continues to do.

If blizzard ONLY punishes toxicity, the problems are never going to go away. In fact, their idea that “Anyone can play anything and its ok” only fuels the toxicity because it increases the amount of players who are viewed as throwers.

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Elaborate, please. How exactly are they putting those players together?

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There is not (comparing to other games). Prople who only play overwatch say that.

(holy shiuet that text is long im not reading the rest of this.)

Ye, except: being toxic = flamning = throwing.
If by “toxic players” you refer to people that use profanty and sh1t talk the enemy team then thats anotehr story, because thats not toxic behavior.