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?
I get what you’re saying. When I was a kid playing some Red Alert or C&C game with a friend we’d be censored when saying “cum?” - which means “how?” in our language. I thought that was stupid as shit. I still do now for the most part. It’s hard to have a conversation when everyday words are censored (and I was too young to know the meaning in english).
A more relatable example: If a group of friends of a particular minority want to play with each other and call each other names (that would be offensive otherwise) that may be in good fun and censoring that would be stupid and ruin the fun.
BUT
If somebody is being harassed and targeted for being black or asian or a girl or whatever, that’s way different. I think we’ve all seen it happen quite often and it sucks and it often goes on for quite a lot - some of these games can last for up to 90 minutes AND they punish you if you leave early! So having to endure all that abuse certainly sucks and that sort of behavior should be punishable so that people don’t become punching bags for others to vent their frustration. In a lot of cases these folks are kids or young adults.
I think companies could deal with that but they choose not to out of convenience (having to implement some sort of moderation could get expensive and to do it properly you need to get some human eyes involved to decide on the matter), and fear that they might lose a paying customer (in case they ban an abusive player for example).