There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I’d rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so … annoying.
As an example, I once dared to suggest that a game developer implement a mode to prevent crouched status from rendering on death cams so that players that are bothered by t-bagging could avoid it (after a match where a friend rage quit because someone just kept head shotting him – possibly with cheats – and then t-bagging). This post got tons of hate, and like -50 upvotes on reddit because of course someone should be forced to watch someone t-bag them.
Another example on a official game forum… I made a forum post suggesting Bungie use Mastodon (or really just something else being my intent)… The response I got was some positivity but mostly just “lol nobody uses that sweetie” and other patronizing comments.
Meanwhile studios themselves often seem to be filled with developers that understand this stuff is a problem, and the lack of sportsmanship (or generally civilized attitudes) does push away players. It just doesn’t make sense to me that no studio is saying “get lost” to these elements or implementing anti-toxicity features. I just want to play games with nice normal people, is that really so much to ask?
That why I usually try to avoid matchmaking as much as possible, and stick to a smaller communities within the game.
For example, when I was spending some time few years ago in the WoW roleplay community, which was one of the most fun I ever had with that game, I’ve found out that if I do pugs with people from within it, be it just picking up people on the main realm’s Discord or from one of the RP guilds I’ve met, I’ve never had issues with toxicity. Even if I eventually stopped RPing, I still have a friendlist full of people I know I can pug with without problems, or I can just hop onto the Discord again and pick up a pug there. Also - I’ve never had as much fun progressing through raids as when it was with a group full of hardcore RPers from our RP guild, who we’ve managed to convince to give raiding a try, even though they mostly just use WoW as a platform for playing DnD. Most of them weren’t really good, it was slow and painful progress, but we still had a lot of fun.
And I have the same experience with Sea of Thieves, where I found a smaller local Discord server that used to host game nights, and it was also a nice experience. Sure, I had to make the effort to get to know the people, instead of relying on anonymous matchmaking - but that’s what multiplayer should be about. And still, in general, even if I play with random people I don’t know from within the smaller community, it’s generally a lot better experience - because assholes and toxic people generally don’t last long there.
And if I do play a MP game with random people, I just mute people at the first sign of toxicity, and just add them to my ignore list.