What's the most toxic game community you know of?

LoL

100%. I stopped playing a decade ago, but when I played I was always amazed at the behaviour it brought out in people. I would watch people who I considered friends IRL turn into abusive jerks when I played with them. It's this weird prisoner's dillemma of a game where the psychology of the game appears to encourage ganging up on the weakest player.
- That's what happens if you design a game in a way that makes it worse to have a bad player in your team than no player at all.
- I think you’re on to something here. I play all kinds of games with friends, and DOTA was the only one where I’d actively get shit on for my lack of skill. And that’s from real life friends too.
League was the poster child for toxic communities a decade or so ago when I played. It must have gotten better (it certainly couldn't have gotten worse!) if this isn't the top comment by a mile.
Reporting players for in-game behaviour rarely did anything.
And there was no reporting mechanism at all if they decided to continue harassing you through DMs after the game was over - all you could do was block them.
maybe ten years ago, but it's a lot better now. still there's toxicity but nowhere near as bad

Man FFXIV is no ray of sunshine but I can’t imagine it’s anyway near as bad as literally any competitive game. I’ve never been called a slur in FFXIV before and it feels like it happens once a session for things like Dota, LoL, Overwatch, Siege, etc.

Yeah, I kind of disagree with FFXIV. My whole experience there last year was entirely pleasant.
- Second this, you'll get a couple sweatlords every now and then especially if you're running end game content but the first 100 or more hours of gameplay are absolutely pleasant. I only interacted with the reddit group outside of game but those guys were also nice.
I've played with some rude individuals on FFXIV, like those annoyed that new players haven't memorised low-level dungeons and are unable to speedrun them. By and large I'd agree, though. I joined after playing SWTOR for years and could immediately tell the difference.

Im just going to say FFXIV in my experience has a very friendly community, one of the nicest ive seen, so i dont fully understand where that comes from.

For me it would probably be Garry's Mod, as its full of so many edgy teens who constantly say the n word.

Rainbow Six Siege is up there — there’s six dimensions of assholery in the game by my count.

Tom Clancy games tend to attract right-wing assholes because they’re Tom Clancy
competitive FPS
one-shot one-kill gameplay
friendly fire on by default
character picks
you need to play to a specific meta

Not sure if this still happens, but for groups of 4 that used to want to play together, there was no way to lock the team or kick from lobby. So what would happen is you'd get match-maked in as the 5th player, and as soon as the game started, your team would kill you. This would happen about 25% of the time with random matchmaking.
I ended up quitting R6 Siege because of the toxicity and constant slurs on voice chat. It's a shame because it was otherwise my favourite competitive FPS.
- It's common enough that I remember it too. Now you get kicked for teamkilling more than once, but groups can just alternate teamkills to avoid this.

Most MOBAs are pretty notoriously bad, though Heroes of Newerth was definitely the worst one of those i had played.

Anecdotally, my personal worst experience was with FFXIV, which was probably exacerbated by how much praise that community gets otherwise. The Novice Network system they have is a mess, new players are put into a channel with a bunch of "mentors" that don't really want to help anyone, at least on the server I was on. They either wanted a global chat channel for their own use, or just wanted the cosmetic rewards mentors had on offer. I remember one actively trying to get new players to quit if he found out they had come from WoW. The channel is entirely self-moderated, and mentors would kick people out just for fun. It's an AWFUL first impression for newer players.

One thing WoW definitely does better with their Guide channel is giving literally no tangible rewards to guides, if somebody is opting into being a Guide it is only because they want to help new players, they get nothing else for it.

I can tell no one here has played Mordhau lol. It's basically wall to wall neo Nazis spamming racial slurs. I got regular death threats, like almost every match. Destiny? Little league bullshit.

Genshin community,

I get that communities for popular games can be a bit hit or miss, but communities for single player games are pretty chill. Competitive team games like the Source games you mentioned, League of Legends etc. are on a whole different level of toxic. They can't even be compared.

For something like Genshin the real problem is content creators. Much of the so called toxicity has little to nothing to do with the game itself and is more an issue with huge cults of personality clashing with each other. I think every popular game is going to fall victim to this going forward and you just have to learn to ignore it.

Yeah cults of personality + ipad kids on social media tend to be the large problem with genshin imo

Rust

Told someone I played rust and they asked if I was racist or suicidal because those are apparently the qualifiers.
It really does bring the worst out of humanity, but at the same time I've met and known people for years who were my neighbors or even rivals
- Same people I game with today I meet on rust. Only a couple of us still play as we are all older now and have real jobs but great friends.
Was looking for this lol.
I bought a Rust ages ago, back when the development basically had it turning into a new game every year. Maybe I just got lucky back then, but never had a toxic interaction.
Cut to last year, when a group of guild members went to Rust so I redownloaded it after 5 years. Most of us only lasted a few hours and we tried half a dozen servers lol.
- Yes, it's crazy to me that people would think another game is more toxic because in rust most servers (I'm talking main/officiall servers) are really popular for at least half a week being Thursday wipes and Monday, if you build next to toxic you deal with them that whole wipe and then monthly servers same thing. It's not one match and done with them I'm talking days and hours of just straight toxic gameplay.

Easily Rocket League. It's always been toxic but it's been much worse since becoming free to play.

Rage quitting
Malicious compliance (AFK, accidental own-goals)
Team mates playing for the opposing team entire games
Passive aggressive quick chats
Overtly aggressive free-form chats (being chastised over every tiny mistake)

The game's competitive ranking systems makes it so each win and loss matters, and people often take their vitriol out on their own team before looking inwards.

I turned the chat off a long time ago. Instantly made the game better. I don’t need a kid to show off his NSFW vocabulary.
- I play both Rocket League and Apex with chat off. Can't be bothered to entertain these little shitheads tenper tantrum
Every game community has some rotten apples but RL has by far the highest percentage of 'em in any game I've played. I get the urge to play RL a few times per year, but it only takes a few games (be it casual or competitive) to put me off again.
People do that stuff in casual, too, which just blows my mind.
I turned off "all non tactical chats" or whatever the setting is called, and that helped a lot.

Heroes of Newerth was the most toxic community I've ever been apart of. Nothing comes even close. It was rotten from top to bottom and made me quit a game I otherwise loved to play. I'm talking "The CEO frequently calls people slurs in all chat" level of bad.

Technically not my own experience, but my partner plays Dead By Daylight and the community there seems absolutely terrible. I ask them why they play it at this point and they don't even know.

Yeah, the DBD community is pretty bad.

Tbh the genshin community isn't necessarily toxic, genshin is so large that it's genuinely difficult to pin down an entire genshin community. There's the twitter genshin community, the tiktok community, different content creator's communities, etc. It's not a monolith just because the game is so gargantuan. The social media communities tend to be horrible but like, i watch a small genshin tiktok-er and theorycrafter and his discord and related communities around that have been genuinely lovely and actively elevated my experience with the game. I think it's important to look at how, past a certain point, specific communities dont really exist? and that's not just a genshin thing that goes for anything, different communities sort of splinter off and it's hard to hold the whole thing to task ig

In any case, FFXIV is a weird pull because in my time playing GW2 I have many friends that have gone to ffxiv and come over to guild wars from it and almost always I hear nothing but good things about the broader community. It might have a bit of a toxic positivity vibe to it at times but I think the broader community seems to be pretty good? But uh. Valorant's gotten pretty bad. I love the game and the people I've met through my time with the game, and the community was quite good around the beta but it's just at a point where it's just. fueled by ego and weird horny tiktokers, it's not a great time lol

It's pretty broad but I have met some truly awful human beings playing Minecraft. the "community" as a whole is... fine? for a game community, but the individual pockets you find can be truly horrifying. Hell, even in so-called "friendly" communities you can meet some pretty terrible people. People treat their servers like little fiefdoms, and all the toxicity with a fiefdom comes with that.

I'm surprised to see FFXIV in the OP because I've had the opposite experience. But to stay on point, Pokémon has one of the most toxic communities I know of. It's nearly impossible to say anything semi positive about a game without getting a barrage of hate

Halo. There is nothing 343 could have done to appease them.

I have only been around the reddit halo community (maybe others are worse) and to be honest I don't think it was that bad. A lot of the complaints were/are valid. For sure not the worst

Dark Souls

tbh I've always found the community to be very helpful when I've needed a hand with anything
- And I play offline because all online play did was waste my time with trolls
Anything FromSoftware really. Any question is answered with a variation of "git gud". Not to mention the elitism.
- The only appropriate response to that is
  
  git: 'gud' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
- “I think DS is pretty ok”
  “Git gud dude! DS is amazing!”
Ah, sadness...
But behold, cramped area!
100%!
Idk, the community on Reddit/online is pretty friendly and active. In PVP and co-op it's typically pretty great the first week after launch and about 2-3 years after launch.
You can't really get around the fact that self imposed challenge is a huge part of how the core fans enjoy the game and I think it's difficult for newcomers to know when hardcore fans are speaking to them vs their own compatriots.
Sekiro fans are hugely supportive of newcomers though, probably because it's a relatively less played game. The community around Elden Ring suffered from its own success I think.

Bro what did ff 14 do to you? who pissed in your chereos there? starcraft the elitism, the rage there is nothing that will ever come close to the levels of salt that that community produced

What I think is weird about folks hatin on the Genshin Community is it's essentially a single player game. There is no community really outside of social media. I would say social media is the problem.

It tells me they are used to cuddly friendly fandoms. They've definitely never played real toxic games like Mordhau or anything Paradox has made. There are games that are legit 50% neonazis and avowed racists.
This! I've always had super friendly interactions with Genshin co-op, even when searching through the co-op tab rather than looking online (aside from one kid I had to kick because I was not going to buy them a welkin lol). The only time I've come across problematic behavior is through social media. It's also very popular so of course on twitter and reddit there is going to be a large loud volume of immature people, but that's most games. In game people are usually good.
- even around the game people are good provided you aren't broadly exposed to it via tiktok/twitter/reddit/twitch. Some of the smaller genshin discords have been really helpful and sweet and full of good people. But honestly I think there's just a critical mass where communities like that kinda blow up so that's not a genshin problem so much as that's a "so many people in one place at one time" kind of problem lol

Back in the day, Undertale. Many made YouTubers and livestreamers have less fun by spoiling the pacifist, genocide and neutral routes and letting everyone only go the pacifist way. If they didn't then the fans would get all angry. Outside of playing the videogame was also another can of worms.

Don't know if Deltarune, also made by the creator, has the same problem since I've only ever played the game myself and never seeked out the community.

Eve Online where, as long as you're not telling your victim to use real world money to buy things before you scam them, anything goes.

I always thought that part was interesting. I personally never had a downright toxic interaction in Eve Online and I used to multibox 7 accounts.

League of Legends. I used to enjoy playing it but could only do so many games before I got sick of the angsty teenagers

Call of Duty

R6 Siege

Halo

Left 4 Dead 2 versus. I dare you to join a random match online and last longer than 10 minutes without getting kicked. Or just search for "left 4 dead 2 versus kicked" and you will find countless examples of people complaining about it.

It's become a meme at this point and I'm pretty sure that people kick for fun although some claim that people kick you for not being good enough or too good. Just play with friends instead or play campaign, people are nice there.

For some reason all fighting game communities seem to be split down the middle between friendly, chill people who want to help you learn and complete, uncompromising psychopaths

League of Legends is toxic in the way of people getting too emotionally invested in a game, but Counterstrike (in the old days, pre Source and GO) was toxic in a casually bigoted way almost completely detached from the state of the current match, which I think is worse.

CS:Go has some pretty unwelcoming and newbie-haters out there.

I got kicked out of casual for not being good enough. CASUAL.
Reminds me of valorant ( Indian server )
That's surprising, maybe depends on region (I'm in the US) but in my ~10 years of playing competitive it's almost always been a good experience
- Yeah. I've been playing with an outwardly transfem teamtag and have had nothing but positive interactions tbh.

It's been years since I ever played CoD but my experience was that it is basically a racial abuse simulator with an FPS in it.

Nowhere near as bad, but I was shocked how intensely elitist and gatekeeperish Hollow Knight's community can be. I'd already finished the game when I found the sub on Reddit but damn they are mean to beginners!

Pokemon. If you like pokemon, then it is your fault that pokemon sucks now. Even if you agree with them that it sucks, if you don't agree with them exactly what sucks about it and how we got to the point that it sucks, which games started sucking, then you're a fucking moron and should be banned from the community.

I know most fandoms hate the media that they are allegedly fans of, but I haven't seen a community hate the media (and each other) as much as pokemon fans.

Dead by Daylight, leaving the community and game single-handedly cured my depression

OSRS high level PvM or deep wild pking.

Haven't played in a while but Warcraft all day unless you're on an established RP server.

CSGO can be pretty toxic but I'm glad I don't have other reference points to compare it to tbh.

I played a game and a girl talked then someone said "is that a girl" then threw up a vote to kick and it passed. This was in ranked.

Cyberpunk, easily. Everyone loves to hate it for some reason, and shit all over everyone that dares to enjoy it.

just throwin in another anecdote that XIV has had one of the best game communities I've experienced, even when the game gets pretty stressful in endgame content.

WoW's right now is something else. (timed M+ ruined everyone's chill mindset)

Path of Exile. If you say anything positive about it you get shit for being a mindless fanboy, and if you say anything negative about it you're a mindless hater. Plus the whole "zoom zoom" meta

FFXIV for sure. Endgame players who have tryed this game understand how much is toxic be actually part of challenges. All the time FFXIV is advertise as happy place with happy community but no one talks about the toxicity of making groups for raids. I don't regret to have quit and I don't looking to returning as well.

- I quit 1year ago after 5y of dealing with it. Helpeful in random content, sure, daily and stuff. But if we talking about extreme, savages, ultimate, then the toxicity spill like diarrhea. Friendly community ends as soon you step in a serious fights, and becomes a game you want to play only with close friends because of this.
I mean id understand endgame players but 90% of the people you will see in game are nice people who are just playing the game, like ive learned so much about xiv just from talking to other players.

Destiny has to at least be an honorable mention. Not trying to be a Bungie apologist, but the amount of content people get for $100/year is pretty outstanding, and the community acts like all they get is a ten hour campaign or something.

As someone who played hundreds and thousands of hours of Destiny, it still weirds me out to hear people call "Destiny 2" Destiny. They are very different games.
Destiny 2 is predatorily-monetized garbage. Destiny (the game it was at the time of its untimely murder by money-grubbing assholes, not the game at launch) is one of the best games I've ever played.
The content isn't good. There hasn't been anything with interesting level design or enemies since maybe the taken king.
I'd rather still be playing D1 strikes than anything they have now. But we don't have that option because they want to force you onto their treadmill.