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DiscussionSep 20, 2017 8:00 am CT

How bad is player toxicity now?

I have my own opinion on player toxicity — it’s gotten bad enough that I don’t even do LFR anymore and rarely do five-player content. Even then, it’s mostly late at night or when I have four friends on who want to rock some dungeons — but I’m curious what others think. Do games like Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch suffer more from it, because they’re straight-up PVP in most cases? Heroes has a versus AI mode and Overwatch does too, but even then you tend to be playing in a party with other humans and sometimes that can be even worse.

I remember a lot of emote spamming in Hearthstone, but aside from that — and players deliberately dragging out their rounds before conceding — I don’t remember too much toxicity there. But in the games I do play (WoW, occasionally Heroes, and Diablo 3) the only one I don’t see a ton of toxic behavior in is Diablo and that’s because I never play that with strangers.

The last time I joined a raid-finder group in World of Warcraft, I ended up rage quitting because one of the players felt like spamming an emote that combined the infamous Thunderfury meme with racial slurs and bodily fluids. I reported him, but that’s cold comfort when you have to go back into the queue.

We’ve heard a lot lately about the subject thanks to Jeff Kaplan’s recent Developer Update, so it seems to me like a good time to ask you your thoughts — how bad is player toxicity? What games have it worst, and what can make it better?

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