Player Toxicity

While writing our less-than-serious guide to choosing a character for WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria, I went back and forth over the Demon Hunter entry a lot.

It's often tempting to forget that MMOs are full of other people.

Game developers are human beings with feelings.

If you've played Overwatch only to have a game ruined by a fellow player being abusive or antagonistic, you may be happy to hear that the statistics say that kind of behavior is declining -- and it may be due to the new Endorsements and LFG rolled out recently.

A new addon function in Battle for Azeroth is going to finally allow players to report bad behavior that pops up in addons like Total RP 3.

Abuse and toxicity have kind of become rampant in gaming, so much so that we're all aware of whose mother has done what in various competitive voice chats.

Overwatch's Winter Wonderland event brings more than just a fun event and new goodies to collect.

Overwatch has gotten a bit of a reputation for toxicity.

We've seen the Overwatch team working on various ways to deal with player toxicity and bad behavior recently, but it's not a new problem nor is it confined to that game. Hearthstone doesn't even let you talk to other players and you can still have some bad experiences with emote spamming and the like (like that one player who starts using up every last second on their turn just to annoy you) and if you've played Heroes of the Storm or World of Warcraft you've likely run into your fair share of disagreeable behavior.

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.