Toxicity is a given in online multiplayer games. Whether you run into griefers, cheaters, throwers, or just someone screaming into comms, a minority population can easily ruin the experience for everyone else. Even worse, one person’s bad attitude can spread to other people in the lobby. Their frustration can then ruin the next match they play, continuing the cycle of unenjoyable gameplay.
It seems simple to just “be best” and not let toxicity affect you, but even remaining level headed doesn’t make you invulnerable. Last week, I played a match where two of my teammates were throwing. Server issues in South America had recently forced a mass exodus and the North American servers were flooded with players from Brazil. Matchmaking turned into a lottery - getting Brazilian teammates was a death sentence. They were mostly unable to communicate and suffered gambreaking lag. Toxicity lost teams most of these matches, not laggy allies. Instead of trying to win players would lash out and do their best to lose. I had (North American) people on my team kill me, flash me, block map control, and give up my location to “teach our Brazilian teammates a lesson”. Sometimes other neutral players would get angry with the throwers and get heated themselves.
Watching Twitch Plays Pokemon illustrates the danger of trolls. When a malicious input enters conversation with an NPC, it takes a handful actions (and a chunk of time) just to get back to the world. Sometimes, this repeats for minutes without the community making any progress. Worse still, manipulating combat or item use can represent a huge loss of time. Similarly, a single troll does more than counter one player. In many games, they can easily take out 2-4 teammates and in-game countermeasures do little to stop them. Vote-kicking doesn’t work if people are in teams and bans do little to dissuade dedicated griefers.
If there are ten players in a game and we need 90% of matches to be clean for a good player experience, a game needs to have a 99% positive playerbase. Considering how much fun people seem to have trolling, It’s actually rather impressive that more games aren’t ruined.
Unfortunately, some communities aren’t that lucky. Counter Strike’s official matchmaking is filled with hackers. It’s been this way for years and none of the in-game systems do much to combat it. There are two main types of cheaters: blatant hackers who use throwaway accounts (either free, stolen or they’re just wealthy) and legit hackers with established profiles. Blatant hackers are pretty easy to deal with so they only ever impact a small number of matches. Legit hackers, however, are careful to hide their cheats and escape even manual review. Although it’s unfair that people are cheating, this doesn’t noticeably affect the play experience either.
Another example is Rainbow Six Siege. Although they have a horrible track record with managing cheaters, the high price tag and basic anti-cheat is enough to keep hacking under control. The bigger problem has been teamkilling. Many Siege players see a TK as the best way to manage conflict, make decisions, and have a laugh. In response, Ubisoft has worked to develop an anti-teamkilling system. They started with the same system most games have - optional vote-kicking and a two-kill limit. In a best of seven, killing someone twice can take them out for half of the game and bringing friends only makes it worse. After a couple years, Ubisoft introduced a new system called Reverse-Friendly Fire (RFF). This system causes friendly damage after a certain threshold (one full kill or any damage over about half your teammate’s health) to be inflicted to the player who would be dealing it. The RFF system preserves friendly fire as a penalty for sloppy teamwork without enabling toxicity. It has since been updated so that players in parties share the RFF threshold and accidental teamkills can be forgiven.
When it was first introduced, RFF quickly turned into a metagame. Players who normally weren’t toxic would trick their allies into team killing them and chase them around, trying to catch a second stray bullet or C4. Something about the big red triangle by your name (or your teammate’s) made team killing and baiting even more appealing. Now that the novelty has worn off, the system seems to work and is no longer counter-productive. Like other mature games, Siege has reached a point of limited toxicity. I assume toxicity just has a very short lifespan. For most people, messing with other players gets old faster than playing with them. This is probably why new releases have the most people trolling.