Toxicity is a symptom, not a cause: to fix it, treat the discontent around the game, not the players reacting to it.
Inspired by discussion here.
Toxic players don't create toxic games. Toxic games create toxic players.
About a year ago, I wrote up a comprehensive report on why Overwatch's community is such a shitshow. Give it a read if you're at all interested in why game communities turn toxic, or if you're curious why Overwatch didn't stick longer as a phenomenon.
(At this point, with Overwatch now past its prime and usurped by other games due in large part to reasons I described there, I'd like to also offer a nice fat 'I told you so' to actiblizz. I didn't want to stop playing...)
The baseline question was this: Overwatch has great representation, an entertaining formula, and good messages. The game is super fun to play on the surface, and offers hundreds of hours of unique new experiences. So why is it so easily considered to have one of the most toxic competitive communities out there?
There's no explanation or reason for why naturally toxic players would gravitate towards the title, stick around, and infect the rest of the community. Nothing about Overwatch would indicate that it was going to somehow filter out the worst of the worst and keep them for itself, and that's because - bumbudaaa! It didn't.
Toxic players didn't infect Overwatch; Overwatch created toxic players.
The same things can be said for basically any other huge competitive game on the market, with CS:GO, LoL, and DOTA2 being the easiest examples. Their communities are all total swamps.
Despite this, there is virtually no game on the market which properly addresses the root cause of community-destroying toxicity: the game itself.
I'd rather not repeat myself because that above link will do a better job of going in-depth and can be applied to a lot of games, but the baseline problem is this: games catch and ban bad apples, but do nothing to stop those bad apples from forming. Failing to realize that parts of an otherwise amazing experience are fundamentally frustrating, the focus and blame is put on the players for reacting (see above thread) in exactly the way the games are designed to make them.
Chief among these issues? Games demand teamwork, cooperation and a community voice, but do nothing to facilitate them. Games that are designed to be fun casually will be frustrating competitively - and vice versa. Toxic communities will not form where every style of play is catered to, which is sometimes balance, but often a fundamental disconnect between what the game was built for, what's actually promised, and what the player's trying to get out of it.
So, I'd rather send the discussion in the other direction, which is why I posted this here. Rather than blame the community, it's time to look for solutions from the actual people responsible.
(To be clear: yes, there are assholes in the world, and yes, they play games. But the idea that the culture has only just now soured to a patch of racism and misogyny is laughable to anyone who grew up playing Xbox Live. It's been blown completely out of proportion by a fundamental discontent with games themselves, like further kindling on a fire, driven mostly by competitive culture.)
I disagree completely with this. This is the kind of attitude that's led to so many games recently trying to prevent people from even being able to communicate with each other. They've been removing text/voice chat and restricting players to a small set of "emotes" or similar techniques. It's defeatist and treats toxicity as inevitable and unsolvable, when there's no reason it needs to be.
The problem is that this type of behavior has become normalized and doesn't have any meaningful consequences. Games and social media are very similar in that way. The problem is a social one, not technological, and it will never be fixed by just changing mechanics.
You're very clear about your intentions to make Tildes a more hospitable, pleasant platform, and you're taking measures to make it so.
If you were a game dev and you had a game that had a toxic-players problem, how would you improve the situation?
It's the same overall: you need to have standards for behavior and—crucially—be willing to enforce them. The core issue is that most companies (both social media and gaming) aren't willing to deal with anything except the most egregious offenders, and often will still only do that in response to pressure.
Their priority is community quantity and not quality, because their user numbers are the most important thing. It's difficult to justify putting much effort into fixing it when it would involve doing things in direct opposition to the company's priorities.
This is in line with my experience. It doesn't take much to tip things over. In a game with 5 people, just one of them being mean, rude, selfish, or whatever can easily make the entire team start flipping out or dog-piling on them. So it's very important to maintain behavioral standards. The cultural norms around being a gracious winner, a gracious loser, and an encouraging teammate just aren't being inculcated. Since so many people on games are young (teenagers), they haven't actually learned these lessons anywhere yet.
Back in school, when we did team sports they actively taught "sportsmanship" as a virtue. Even then it doesn't always take, but my coach caught us being rude or mean to teammates he'd have us run extra laps or do extra push-ups. We were taught that the team rises and falls together.
Games fail at this because there IS no team, functionally. You're thrown into a bin of random people with no opportunities to socialize aside from a voice chat that, half the time, has children being foul-mouthed (which just makes everyone else tune out). There need to be "coaches" or adults in the room to regulate or it's just not going to work.
I don't play a lot of team games online but the one I really enjoyed was "Star Trek Bridge Crew" for the simple reason that whomever the Captain was could easily and swiftly kick a player out for any reason. Disruptive players wouldn't last long and would eventually get bored and move onto other games where they weren't being kicked all the time.
I kinda wish more games would have the same type of controls.
Yes, this is the exact problem with these communities. Companies like Blizzard will do little to deter toxic people from their platform because it contradicts their short-sighted desire to maximize profits at any cost. I would argue the only reason why companies like activision take efforts to Foster a community is because they know that it helps transform users into advertisers to attract more people to their product.
I've always thought that if a player ever exhibits toxic behavior (using slurs, team-killing, etc.) they should be given an extended or permanent ban. As long as someone has shown themselves to be malicious then the more draconian the punishment the better IMO.
Of course, if a game is free-to-play this doesn't do much.
I'm guessing you mean something like Tildes, where players specifically come to because of the encouragement of discussion and good behavior? I guess if it starts off with this as a baseline, further ill behavior could be discouraged from within the ranks.
But then, can you make it scale? Can you keep up the momentum after it has 10k+ active players? (Warframe has 20k and seemed alright the last time I played it. Dota 2 has 400k... let's just leave it at that.)
Again, it's mostly a question of willingness and priorities. Only on the internet is it considered normal and acceptable to scale your business/service far beyond your ability to effectively manage it and act like the consequences of doing that aren't your problem.
Wait, hold on. You're talking about irresponsible scaling like the devs are printing their users. People join, don't they? They join because they like the product.
Suppose the next Reddit April Fool's doesn't go so well – in fact, it backfires massively, and people start searching for an alternative platform. By that time, you've opened registration but haven't implemented the trust system or any other sort of moderation tool because, you know, life gets in the way.
The people flood in, except it's not a hundred of them or a thousand: you get 30 thousand new users in three days, all with their Reddit mentality still intact and their panties still in a twist over the what-the-hell-that-was on Reddit, because someone told them this here is a good place to be.
Would that be your responsibility to make sure the place keeps order on that scale? You haven't been able to conjure up the trust system in a year, even with the help of the rest of the proficient coders, 'cause, you know, life. How would you be able to do it now?
And even if you managed to – you tell your wife you'll see her in a week and lock yourself in a basement with a stock of ramen and Red Bull – it would still be unbalanced, because in the chaos it's quite difficult to assign things right, partly because the system is new and requires a period of adaptation that it can't have.
Was it the new users' responsibility? Is it the old guard's? Reddit's?
I'm assuming, in this hypothetical scenario, that the authority body – i.e., you and the users with mod capacity – is fundamentally benevolent and seeks to live up to their ideals. That's not the case with oh so many of the businesses that grow quicker than they can handle. They still don't make the decision to attract users or not to: they make their services available and publicized, they attract a crowd... then whaddaya do?
You're talking like it's a hypothetical situation, but it's exactly what we've already been doing the whole time. Tildes easily could have had 10x as many users if I wanted them, but I've specifically avoided multiple major influxes, generally avoided promoting it much, and even kept the site fully private for most of the time. I know the site isn't ready to handle rapid growth, so I deliberately slow it down.
I've had lots of people saying I'm an idiot for making it so difficult for people to join, but it's exactly because I have different priorities.
Man, I hope it pays off. I'm really digging this site.
By the way, are you working on this full-time? Or is this just a side-project/hobby thing?
I have been working on it full-time, yes. I'm likely going to start taking on some part-time/contract work soon to supplement my income a bit, but I'm hoping to keep this as my main focus overall.
Regardless, there's zero chance of the site shutting down or anything like that. The donations already more than cover the actual expenses, at this point it's just about when it reaches the point that I can pay myself enough to consider it a "real job".
I don't have an answer regarding competitive multiplayer games or how they should be managed to prevent toxicity from developing. But in the case of your Tildes hypothetical, registration need not be permanently open and there is always the option to close it again, temporarily as needed, or even permanently.
E.g. If open registration is ever implemented here (not guaranteed), and there is major outrage from an event on reddit that causes redditors to seek out alternatives for reasons which don't align with Tildes goals (e.g. if T_D finally got banned), registration can and probably would be shut down here until that outrage subsides and the mass migration comes to an end. And in fact we have already done something similar with several official invite request threads, waiting until the latest major reddit outrage subsided before opening up the next one.
We have also talked about potentially treating Tildes like a torrent tracker in the future, carefully controlling growth by opening and closing account registration so the established userbase and culture here doesn't get overwhelmed by too many new users coming in all at once. IMO new users should have to adapt to the already established userbase and culture, not the other way around.
I agree. Makes me wonder if there's a way to guide the adaptation without closing the gates.
(From here on, it's just mental notes I have on that matter)
HackerNews hides several features behind a "karma wall", where the user has to acquire X score for their collective comments to be permitted to do Y. Simple, straightforward, maybe a little crude.
Hubski combatted its spam wave by restricting posting ability only to those the older users could vouch for. The new users can make comments on existing posts, and the old users may choose to "promote" the ones that make a valuable contribution.
I can imagine that restricting new users to a handful of "easy" topics (like the welcoming/present-yourself threads, and a bunch of things that aren't readily muddied) until a promotion (karma wall, vouching, character count etc.).
You may be interested in an old discussion on this: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/31s/daily_tildes_discussion_how_can_we_help_people_acclimate_in_a_friendlier_way
I'm not the write of the GP but I think the most valuable goal would be to make players feel like reporting bad behavior feels useful and rewarding.
Word filters that just blanket ban words or similar usually don't lead to much improvement, toxic players will remain toxic.
Players should be encouraged to report bad behavior, instead of banning words, if a player uses certain words or a level of aggression is detected in voice chat, their team will be asked at the end of the match if they felt comfortable with that player or if they broke rules or were racist/hateful. Friends of that player should obviously be excluded, if the entire team is friends there is little use in asking for that. The opposing team would not be able to report players other than for hacking, it's likely to be abused in frustration.
More importantly, players should receive a followup on any report in form of a notification or email. The punishments should include in-game consequences like reduced XP or reward for completing a round, bans should be handed out for up to 2 months for first time offenders, permanent bans only to people who repeat their behavior with no signs of improvement. The reporter is notified that a punishment was enacted, possibly even which punishment. This notification should be sent to anyone who reported them in the past X weeks, even if the report didn't lead to any action. If you do nothing, you wait until that timer runs out to send the notification that no rules where broken.
Telling the people affected what actions you took makes them feel empowered and like their report means something, that the developer looks at them and takes action.
Lastly, reports should be rationed. A player should be able to only report Y players per day they played with. This would both reduce the amount of report spam and make the players actually think about if the behaviour is something to report over or just something minor.
In short:
Honestly part of the problem is that we treat punishment as the only lever we can pull. Punishment is usually a later resort. But you need a lot of softer, socialization things to happen to cut bad behavior off before it escalates to being punishable.
When I moderated a web forum I tended to start with gentle reminders to be nice. THEN it would escalate to "mod text" to make it clear I meant it. I only started locking threads or dishing out temp-bans if it continued.
I would consider that part of what I said above, even verbal warnings can be considered a form of punishment, even if there is no real consequence. And it does play into what I said too; if you can dish out a verbal warning, you can do so often and users can see it. You "can take action often". It's a reminder to the users that moderators are active and listening.
I totally agree, but I think that reaction has been in completely the wrong direction, and totally unrelated to my points. It's the same as it is everywhere else; alienate, stigmatize and attack the problem offenders like they're tumors to be cut out, which sprout up on their own, and hope that the problem goes away. It's little to do with acknowledging or fixing the problem, and more removing everything surrounding it entirely. Got a mole? Cut off the nose.
And the thing is, it works for extremes, but I'd argue that what the gaming community has seen is a direct result of games going in that direction; by lumping the 15 guys who don't know better ('idiots') with the guy who's a KKK sympathizer, you've now got 14 KKK sympathizers, 1 idiot and 1 guy who quits entirely.
The fact of the matter is, looking at this problem from a consequences standpoint is not going to fix anything. Assuming that you could find a consequence which would deter that behavior without blatantly threatening everyone (which is a totally different discussion), implementation would be a nightmare. So, you're left with a false choice: you either impose false consequences which make the problem worse (which they have) or wait for society to right itself on its own (which it has no reason to and there's no way to create one).
Best case scenario, you're left with an unsustainable 'not my problem,' where you've cleaned up your sandbox but further polluted the beach.
That seems OK to me. Then at least I'd be able to play in the sandbox.
I have no sympathy for the people who harass others online and I would be over the moon if they were actually ever cut out of the community with any kind of consistency. If people bugged me in the grocery store or at the gym the way they bugged me in games I'd call security on them, not sit and take it until they were rehabilitated by some external force. The issue is that they're harassing me now and saying terrible things about me now and for some reason it's tolerated by the owners of these virtual spaces.
When they aren't banned, or even warned, then their engagement is prioritized over mine - it really is "me or them". I simply have lost interest in the entire "genre" of Online Multiplayer Whatever and I know for a fact there are many women in the same boat.
I don't think this is true. As you mentioned yourself, you grew up around Xbox Live which was incredibly toxic despite not being tied to any single game or sole community.
Can you name me a single competitive game where the toxicity element is kept to a minimum? Because as someone who has avidly played a ton of competitive games across the full spectrum, the only games I can think of are ones where the size of the competitive sphere is small enough that the community can self-police itself. Even the Smash community which should not fall prey to your analysis features one of the most toxic competitive communities out there. The only competitive communities I can think of that end up not falling prey to this sort of thing are the smaller ones surrounding games like Slap City where the community self-polices and is small enough to be able to do so.
I'm interested in hearing your competitive history too, because I've played Smash (both Melee and the latest), DotA (both the original and the remake), Overwatch, League, Tribes: Ascend, Street Fighter (4 and 5), Marvel vs Capcom and many more on various different levels. Some going as far as competing in tourneys, others more casually climbing ranked modes. Across all of those games I've encountered many toxic players, people that would call me expletives both racial and homophobic in DMs, ragequitters and more. At some point I've started to consider that there's something wrong with the gaming community as a whole, and the fact that gaming subreddits tend to be cesspools as well as movements like GamerGate existing for the sole purpose of harassing people, well. If you're telling me that's all the result of games and not the community as a whole, we'd have to agree to disagree.
My competitive history is mostly split between LoL and Overwatch, with a sprinkling of a few other titles in there. I haven't gone to tournaments, but I'm looking directly at the online facet of competitive communities. In that respect, I don't think that the tournament scene itself is super relevant insomuch as experiencing the online scene.
The thing is, I don't disagree with you; competitive games are inherently toxic. But I'm pointing at that toxicity and calling it a side effect of design, not an inherent flaw of the player. Nothing else makes any particular amount of sense. Our society is not so turbocharged with assholes that the gaming community is a cross-section - and I'm not talking about reddit's 'super-duper-extreme-minority' status of players actually participating in outside discussion, I'm talking about games where 1 in 3 lobbies are affected by random assholes. There are few, if any, fundamental differences between competitive gaming and competitive anything else, conceptually, that would cause such problems. Assholes don't get drawn to games, the games turn people into assholes.
The problem and solution lies in community and game design, too, as you've pointed out. As soon as the community can no longer self-regulate (as soon as it ceases to function as a community and people become anonymous), problems emerge, based entirely around frustration with the game. Particularly around games which are either not designed for competitive play, not suitably catering to everyone playing it, or inherently frustrating in some other way. There are few, if any, competitive multiplayer games made which suitably fix this problem, hence, the issue being so uniform. The idea of simply filtering players by skill level is still a huge work in progress, never mind filtering by play preference.
Conversely, take a look at the competitive scene for, example, Magic: The Gathering. Magic players are nice. The communities which spring up around the game are generally honest, with exceptions being the rarity. The problems only start to emerge when the game gets big enough as to be unaccountable to those communities, and are often based in fundamental frustrations with things that are going on, rather than the people involved (pay, set design, format state, price).
I can agree to disagree, ultimately, if that's still your mindset - it's just saddening to me that the solution presented thus far is a handwave and sweeping the problem under the rug, universally, rather than perhaps taking a look at why the problem comes about in the first place.
I agree with some of the points you made in the overwatch article, but I disagree on quite a few of them.
I think you have a good point - games can be smartly designed to reduce toxicity by keeping balance, but the reality is it's very hard to design a game from the beginning to be this way. As you mentioned numerous times throughout the overwatch post, people want to be flashy and have crazy kills.
It makes me think about how a particular large corporation tried to remove sales and sell everything for the same low price all the time. Their profits went down the tank. Emotional connection is important to everything humans do, especially games. If you made the perfectly balanced game you envision, I think people would simply not want to play it because it's too boring!
I think a bigger problem with design is not the game itself, but how the community is rewarded and policed. Overwatch could have solved a ton of problems with a simple rating system. I can't tell you how many times I encountered the same trolls in competitive overwatch, season after season, in the same brackets. There was no way for me to effectively remove them from who I was matching, despite how large the game was.
The ability to voice distaste with another player's behavior, in a way that is entirely automated, is absolutely essential. While some people are going to rate others negatively whenever they lose, or whenever they think someone had a particularly bad game, the wonderful part about these games is the huge number of ratings we can get. A player who is repeatedly toxic will slowly accumulate a much higher number of negative ratings than a player who is simply bad or unlucky and gets matched with "salty" individuals. After enough of these ratings, they can sequester these individuals to their own queue. People who regularly vote everyone negative because they hate losing can also have their votes discounted or weighted less in importance.
Similarly, people who regularly help out their team, will get positive reviews. These positive reviews and rankings I think may need to be incentivized in some fashion to get people to actually give them out in a meaningful manner (perhaps bonus experience once per day for giving someone a positive review, and an extra bonus of experience once someone you've reviewed reaches a certain rank, or something like that). However, players that rack up a lot of these reviews could also similarly be placed into their own queue or alternatively their rankings can be weighed differently so as to more quickly remove negative players.
I also think that "soft bans" of various sorts can be implemented better. Enough negative input for racism, or toxic behavior should ban players from certain playlists, from communicating in chat, or otherwise remove features for short periods of time (1d-1w) with an increasing length of ban as offense is repeated. I know people worry about the system being abused to troll or otherwise harass, but I think a system designed smartly can easily capture and weed out the votes of bad actors.
Basically this is my whole point in a nutshell, in conjunction with how the games are designed. I'd expand it, though, to "designed, maintained, rewarded and policed." As it is, we're doing the equivalent of throwing better armed cops into poor, uneducated neighborhoods - hoping to 'deter' the problems, without addressing the causes. Does it work? Kinda. But it'll never be as effective as understanding and changing what are causing the problems in the first place, and that lies in the core pillars of the experience: what's the game like, and what's making players so angry and toxic? What's the community like, and more importantly, who's in control of how it's being molded?
Most developers I've ever seen (basically ANY competitive developer) are either fundamentally unwilling or simply unable to control the answers of those two questions.
How would you address the problem?
As the person above you said:
As soon as you introduce a required level of skill for the player to succeed, especially in an enviroment where teamwork is required, people will get mad. If you make it too easy, the people who are actually good at the game will feel frustrated because it will seem for nothing.
I think Overwatch tried to address this partially with it's design in characters, at least at the beginning. If you aren't good at aiming and clicking, play a character which doesn't need it or rely on your ultimate. This has of course lead to complaints that ultimates are too powerful, because they need to be so bad players can succeed sometimes. Press Q to win is a term for a reason. I don't know if you can have a truly competitive game without the toxicity. I don't even have an idea where you'd start with the gamedesign. You could create community bandaids like banning words, but it's pretty much ineffective, as people will just find more creative ways to insult each other.
For winners you need to have losers, and people sometimes are sore losers (or winners even), especially when they get to blame teammates. I think a good way is to offer users themselves tools to block or silence others in game, as that is by far the most effective way to keep the peace, because your cooperation will not bear fruit anyway. You might as well just focus on yourself and/or the rest of the team.
Ultimately, addressing the problem is pretty simple (purely in theory)
Regularly identify and change areas of the game which are surrounded by frustration, BUT avoid whitewashing the game while doing so. There is no competitive game on the market that does this, but it would not be hard to do. There is frustration in winning and losing, yes, but simplifying all frustration down to that point removes the WHY. Is the player frustrated becausr theyre losing - or are they frustrated because theyre losing due to something rhey have no control over? A difference in skill, or a fundamentally problematic mechanic that could be caysing grief? Overwatch has mobility. League of Legends still, 3+ years later, has Yasuo. I dont know much about Dota2, but I mean... Pudge. And NO competitive game on the market properly facilitates coordinated teamplay or proper advancement. You will NOT reach competitive league status WITHOUT first going outside of the provided structure to get there, for example.
Make sure everyone (or at least most people) are properly and individually catered to. Again, no game does this. Overwatch should have about 5 different queues for different playstyles and the game should constantly be reinventing itself on top of that. The fact that League of Legends went without role-queue for more than 6 years after launch is a HUGE part of the reason why the community is so irreperably damaged.
Most of all, this comes out in making sure that youre not actively alienating certain players while building something for others. See above points about frustrating mechanics.
Pudge isn't a problem from a game design aspect, he's just a hero who's very dangerous in skilled hands against an uncoordinated team . He can also become a liability, if the player sucks. This is why so many people trying to imitate the pros with their picks fail.
Too often people fuck up on their own and then blame someone else. That's easy to do and human and I don't think switching up video game design is going to change that, because that kind of behaviour has been around for a long time.
I don't know how realistic your wish is. Splitting queues might just show people that they aren't in fact wanted when their queue becomes significantly longer because everyone wants to play DPS. Your solution has just alienated a bunch of the players, even if you wanted to be full inclusive.
I do agree on your third point, companies often don't provide enough of a good native platform foe players to discuss the game. Probably because they know that players will just organise themselves for free (i.e reddit or YouTube) and in the latter case, can even provide free advertising for the game.
I think (sadly) as a community grows, it becomes more toxic, but there are ways to remedy this.
Is it the growth itself – i.e., 100k people are necessarily more vexatious and cursative than 10k – or is there an underlying issue that causes some sort of a mathematical increase in ill behavior?
Yes. The number of edges in a fully connected graph grows exponentially with the number of nodes in that graph.
In other words, the more people you have, the more chances there are for bad interactions. Negative stuff weighs much more heavily on people than positive stuff. You need at least two positive interactions for every negative interaction, and it might be closer to four or five. 1:2 is the average ratio for random stuff, 1:5 is from marriage/divorce research.
And of course, trolls are much louder than ordinary people, and they tend to suck others in. A single troll can easily "tilt" an entire team, creating four people who then go on to mess up games of their own.
You have a fair point, but I think a factor might be for every 100 good people, you have an asshole. The more assholes you have, the more blatant it becomes.
From my experience in online games, the more mainstream and the lower the entry cost results in greater levels of toxicity. If this is true, I'm sure there are numerous reasons why an easy entry leads to toxicity, yet I suspect it has to do with age.
For example, games such as overwatch can be played on cheap hardware and children are more likely to have mediocre computers. I would theorize as system requirements increase, toxicity will decrease. I believe there's an inverse here, but admittedly I have nothing but anecdotal evidence.
I know there are toxic players of all age groups and individuals mature at different rates; however, immaturity is certainly more prevalent in children.
I think they'll be ok with that in exchange for the likely billion+ revenue they made from overwatch. Acting like Overwatch is a failure because it has declining player numbers three years after it released is a joke. It was one of the most successful games of the decade. It was successful for basically all the reasons you outlined as conducive to creating toxicity also. Literally every popular competitive team game has a toxic community. It's inherit in the concept of semi-anonymity, high stakes, and an expectation of teamwork. There's nothing that can be done in terms of game design to curb that in a team focused competitive game. All you can do is effective moderation.
Just to clarify: You believe that people who would normally not be toxic begin to behave in a toxic way because of game design?
I think there is an element to game design that can amplify what I'll call "toxic inclinations", or at least to reduce the ability for communities to naturally self-regulate in a healthy way.
A decent example is the shift from server-browser based multiplayer games to matchmaking. In a server oriented context, you have to make an affirmative action to select a server from a list, and you will eventually find a small set of (or just one) servers that suit your game mode and community preferences. Servers were small enough that you could get to know the regulars and admins, and each server could have its own standards for behavior that were enforced as rigorously as the admins cared to.
By contrast, in modern matchmaking approach, there is only the larger pool of users who are thrown together by the matchmaker, more or less at random. This goes beyond the pseudonymity of just using a screen-name, and makes it extremely unlikely that you'll ever encounter the same user twice. Every match is a new round of faceless team mates you are dependent on, and none of whom have the community context of a stand-alone server group to give weight to their personhood.
I think that while matchmaking systems don't necessarily encourage toxicity, they lack the self-regulation and community building nature of the server-browser approach. So again, it's not that any given piece of design encourages or discourages bad behavior, but that it's possible for design elements to enable community building and to emphasize the notion of player-as-local-community-member, which I believe is necessary (but not sufficient) for reducing toxicity.
Yes, correct. I also believe that people already prone to toxicity become more toxic because of it.
This was a really interesting post. I had never thought about it this way. This is the type of posts that will take a while to truly understand.