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

LoL

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.

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

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.

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.

Dark Souls

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.

As a FFXIV player, your experience or understanding of the game sounds like an outlier... I've played for 2+ years, it's the most positive, welcoming and lively community I've ever come across!

Rust

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.

Dota 2.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Call of Duty

R6 Siege

Halo

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

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.

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

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.

OSRS high level PvM or deep wild pking.

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

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

So you're saying it's a game community? ;)

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

Individual pokemon fans are sweethearts, but forever reasons, most major online pokemon communities are dens of awful where some of the worst people gather and make you question why you're even a fan in the first place.

Escape from Tarkov

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

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

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.

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.