This game has a serious problem with toxicity and enabling toxicity#876

The game gives people tools to be toxic; through chat emotes who’s primary purpose is to be toxic, and through taunts, which, while they can be used in good faith, most of the time when used online in matchmaking they are used to be toxic.

I encounter behavior like this several times per session, almost every time I open the game.

The game doesn’t even offer a way to report people who are clearly trying to be toxic and bring their opponent down.

Behavior like this makes me want to close the game, and often times I do. Behavior like this has also made my partner stop playing the game altogether.

People open games to have fun and have a good time. Encountering behavior like this, especially when the game itself enables behavior like this by providing tools to be toxic, does not lend itself to having fun or having a good time when these tools are being used against you.

I’ve been here since the release of the game, and IMHO the real problem is that devs have never cleared up this situation for us, maybe they are working on these features, maybe not, but we’ll never know until they make a clear statement about it, from my perspective, they are purposely ignoring every request for a feature that could alleviate toxicity, wether it’s blocking players, muting players, disabling in-game chat, fix the matchmaking so you won’t get paired against the same person that you clearly don’t want to fight despite this being the 11th time in a row that you abandond the match, any feature that could make this game more tolerable has been systematically ignored since the release of the game, and not a single time devs showed up on these type of threads, they clearly don’t want to add these features, but they also don’t want to say no because they know people will complain a lot, I just wish devs had the courage to actually show up here and tell us what they actually think regarding these features, it’s not that difficult to say “yes, these features are in the works right now”, or “no, we don’t have any plans to add these into the game”, but they remain silent on these matters, and that saddens me.

An option to hide chat would be nice

I think muting a player might be a good option, or just allowing the player to hide all comms in the settings.

Blocking players could result in even more wait time or bad connectivity in matches in casual, and it’s definitely not fair to do in ranked.

Cutting out taunts would probably be way too much dev work for what it would provide too, not sure there’s a great answer on that one.

This is an unsolvable problem, people are always going to find ways to express themselves in any multiplayer game, regardless of what tools are available to them. If you disable taunting and emotes, people will still teabag and troll. Its not like you can moderate those things effectively anyways, because you need determine the difference between a “Haha that was a silly combo” teabag and a taunting one, which is a highly subjective matter that would lead to every player being in danger of a false ban just for trying to communicate to their opponent.

You can still remove things that are primarily used to be toxic and design the game and future content to avoid fostering an environment of toxicity. Take the “Get a job” emote. How would people likely use this emote online with strangers? It’s very highly likely that this emote would be used to be toxic. The only way I can imagine this emote not being toxic is if you use it with a friend sarcastically. But you have to remember that most of the time that chat is used is between two strangers who do not know each other online in matchmaking. It’s much more likely in this environment that the emote would be used in a toxic way. Even if it is used sarcastically, that is hard to read as sarcastic when you don’t know the person and can’t tell their intent through text.

When designing these chat emotes you have to think “How is this likely to be used? How can someone use this emote to cause damage?” and design emotes in a way that you can only really use them in a positive or neutral way.

In Rocket League, people spam the “What a save!” chat bind to yell at their teammates for letting in a goal. Should the devs remove quick chat because people use a positive message to be toxic? I think the answer is obviously not. So long as there are ways to interact with your opponent, toxic players WILL find a way to be toxic. Getting rid of certain messages does absolutely nothing to help this and only serves to restrict communication and expression.

We can remove messages that are primarily toxic. “Get a job” is not a good message to have. There are very few scenarios where it could be used positvely and a very large likelihood it will just be used to be toxic.

Today I came with another idea to alleviate this, devs could make it so you cannot send two messages in a row, this will prevent those pesky players from spamming toxic emotes one after another, and I know devs don’t owe us anything, we are not entitled to a response, I don’t expect them to show up on this post, but if they could provide us some insight on their future plans regarding this situation, that would be really appreciated, it could put an end to this debate once and for all.

A potential option is adding an option to disable chat, which would necessitate the addition of an indication that another player has chat disabled, considering that there are many chat messages with practical purposes.

I say option because the solution is to suck it up. Aviator is correct: you cannot stop other players from expressing themselves, and there will always be players who choose to express toxicity. Smash Ultimate disabled taunts online and only has friendly premade messages, but this doesn’t stop players from teabagging, camping, disconnecting to deny GSP, or using positive messages sarcastically (“You almost had me!” when 3-stocking someone, for example). Players who use chat and taunts as intended shouldn’t be punished because others don’t know how to cope with toxic individuals trolling them.

And regarding the “intended” use of chat: what’s wrong with a little bit of banter? I’m so sick of fighting games curating how I can and can’t communicate with other people. Fighting games as a genre are deeply interpersonal and communal, and it frustrates me to no end when communication is so heavily curated that it feels like there’s a physical wall between you and your opponent. SF6’s battle hub lets you chat with other players, but you can’t even say GG on ranked the last time I checked. (And, like Ultimate, this does nothing prevent players from using the rematch timer to be toxic.) Sincere praise, bitter sarcasm, respect, trash talk, coping, seething; these are all parts of the full, emotional spectrum of playing fighting games. Sometimes you hit ‘em with the “How embarrassing…” because you SD your last stock with a suicidal edgeguard, sometimes because they switch to your character, very obviously BM, and get 3-stocked. It’s so refreshing to play a fighting game where there’s room for nuance despite chatting with premade messages.

tl;dr you can’t control other people’s toxicity, and they will always find a way to be toxic if that’s what they want to do. Serenity prayer.

Trash talk, coping, seething are not really parts of fighting games, or any games for that matter, that I’ve really enjoyed. I don’t think intentionally pissing people off or harrassing people should be celebrated.

I also think it’s kind of toxic to just say you should “suck it up” to this kind of behavior

Allowing players to mute/disable chat makes sense to me.

That being said it’s not realistic to ask the developers of a game to sanitize everything like this, people will BM in any way they can.

At some point the way you let things affect you is your responsibility.

This guy never actually plays matches, all they do is spam emotes until the time runs out and always leaves without actually playing, and then I get queue’d against the same opponent 10 times in a row and there’s no way out from this cycle, all this could be solved if I was able to block this opponent, or disable the chat, or fixing the matchmaking so I won’t get paired against this opponent for the next couple hours, and there’s also no way to report players like this, and yet, there are people here that think that this is somehow okay, and that we need to “suck it up”, there’s a huge problem here & it should be addressed, thank you @Searing Arrow , I came here to make a thread like this but it turned out I wasn’t the only one experiencing these type of issues.

My suggestion is to add a special emote that says something like “Can you please stop?” that mutes all emotes.

So if someone posts:
“HAHA HAHA”
“HAHA HAHA”
“HAHA HAHA”

you post:
“Can you please stop?”

and then they stop.
Not only does it fix the issue by muting them, but it’s also satisfying to use on people being annoying without being toxic.

For taunts, they are minorly annoying but can’t be spammed much so it’s not that bad.
And for teabagging, that’s just all video games, I don’t think there’s a fix. It’s just crouching

These emotes are continuing to be used to harrass people.