Thread by @TheDStecks

So I'm writing a whole-ass thread about what it is that makes some multiplayer games more toxic than others, primarily in terms of game design.

I'll just say, upfront, the most important thing is community management. Doing that can negate everything I'm gonna talk about.

You put the work in to cultivate a positive community, and it doesn't matter what design choices you make. Conversely, failing to manage a community can, and generally will, lead to toxic elements taking over even the best-designed game.

But the game's design lays the groundwork for how players will think of each other by default, and what they will assume is acceptable behaviour. There is a reason why Payday, CoD, and LoL have toxic communities and TF2 and DBD don't.

You might've noticed that I included Dead by Daylight even though that isn't a normal pvp game, and Payday which is pure PvE. That's because it's easy to think of competition as the root cause, when it's almost the opposite. Toxicity arises from how you think of your teammates.

Trash talk can be an aspect of toxicity, but the vast majority of pvp games restrict your ability to communicate with the other team at all. And a certain amount of antagonistic rapport between sides isn't bad. But that does mean this thread is only applicable to team games.

I'm going to make the argument that, when we talk about "toxicity" in team-based multiplayer games, what we usually mean is "to what degree players of a game criticize each other for their play". Other vectors for toxic expression exist, but that one predominates.

You can look at it from a mathematical perspective, where two main factors add to toxicity, and one can reduce it. I'll state the equation here, then describe its factors:

Toxicity = (Individual player contribution X consequences for loss) / consequences for toxic behaviour

Individual player contribution, that is, how important each player is to the team, can be deceptive; because you might think team size is the major determining factor. It does matter, but what matters much more is the uniqueness of the player's contribution.

What do I mean by that? Let's take Halo as an example. Team size (4v4) is very small, but individual contribution is also quite low, because each player is completely interchangeable. In Overwatch, where roles are both unique and inflexible, individual contribution is very high.

In Halo, one very very good player can make up for three bad ones. No single Overwatch player can be good enough to make up for bad Support Role players, or bad DPS.

This is one way that individual contribution and consequence for failure can be hard to separate. For example, in Payday, players are interchangeable, but a single player can ruin a plan and cost their team the game. Regardless, this is a self-evidently toxic design.

Consequences for loss can be both material and implicit. If the winners get a reward, that's a consequence, but so is a game's presentation reinforcing a desire to win or to dominate. CoD has minuscule material consequences, but huge implicit ones. CoD _wants_ losing to feel bad.

And whatever the consequences for loss are, they get multiplied by match length. The more time it takes to lose, the worse that loss feels, especially if it's a very lopsided loss that takes a long time to actually resolve.

I also want to add that I believe implicit consequences are a lot more psychologically potent than material ones. Consider that at the end of most every CoD match you are materially rewarded, and no worse than if your team had won even, but losing still feels shitty.

Implicit consequences are very complicated because you're basically just asking a specific example of the general question "how do you make the player feel things", and if you follow @docsquiddy you'll know that's the same as asking "how do I make games good"

But to use one example that illustrates the complexity, a tool CoD uses to make loss suck is having an announcer castigating you if your team is losing; but TF2 also has that- but it's so over-the-top that it has the opposite effect, mocking the idea that the outcome matters.

CoD wants you to feel like a badass, it wants victory to be a personal affirmation, but that means necessarily denying affirmation to the loser. This implicit messaging is so powerful that even with low individual contribution and no material consequences, players lash out.

So let's flip the script and talk about Overwatch, a game whose presentation goes way, way out of it's way to discourage toxicity, but nonetheless has one of the most toxic playerbases in gaming. In most superficial ways it's as far from CoD as you can get, and yet...

First, it needs to be acknowledged that many anti-toxicity features of OW are later additions, intended to correct for toxicity. But at the same time, many of the most toxic design choices are also additions.

A crucial difference between OW and the other games discussed is the sheer importance of team composition, to the extent that before play has even started, other players' choices affect you. Duplicate heroes aren't allowed, and the game either encourages or enforces team comp.

I need to be clear what I mean by "encourages team comp", because TF2 does that insofar as a whole team of snipers is not going to win. The crucial difference is that TF2 counts on you to figure that out, where OW's UI has explicit callouts, it tells you "we need a medic!"

This is, in my opinion, the fatal mistake that doomed OW to a toxic community. This little UI element gives sanction to it. It tells you, explicitly, that other players' choices are your business. It tells you that other players are failing the team by choosing Reaper.

Every new feature Bliz added to compensate has also been paired with another feature that intensified the core problem. Role queues are its apotheosis, turning the ability to play as the fun heroes into a material privilege, and foreclosing on any chance of team flexibility.

Before we move onto the main event I think it's also important to discuss the mitigating factor: consequences for bad behaviour. To put it bluntly, in any game released after 2008, there are none whatsoever. Nobody has ever implemented game-wide policing that has any worth.

The problem, again to be blunt, is matchmaking, and the death of dedicated servers. It's somewhat material and somewhat psychological, but the key thing to keep in mind is that people don't shit where they eat.

Matchmaking systems create a space which is temporary, transient, and therefore, implicitly violable. Nothing that happens in matchmaking matters, because once the match is over, the space is destroyed and the players become strangers again. True community is impossible.

What makes matchmaking truly violable, though, is that it is disposable. You could never run out of matchmaking, a new space is created on demand every time. This is why dedicated servers are so important.

Dedicated servers are important for both material and psychological reasons. From a material perspective, they decentralize community management, and the significance of this is impossible to overstate. You're less likely to be a dick when you're playing with an admin.

On a dedicated server it is normal, even assumed, that you will be playing with someone who can, with no accountability and at a whim, permanently ban you from that server. Compare that to matchmaking, which replaces that with a "report" button with no visible effect.

Not to mention concepts like votekicking, which decentralize enforcement even further, but are still hard to make work in a matchmaking environment.

This is because of the psychological importance of dedicated servers: they are finite. A big game like TF2 will have hundreds, even thousands of servers, but you still have the knowledge that if you got banned from all of them, that would be it, you can't play the game any more.

Dedicated servers also allow microcommunities to develop, including ones that choose not to enforce any standards, allowing for the possibility of quarantining toxic players to their own spaces. But the important thing is their decentralization and their finitude.

So now, we come to the main event. The whole reason I have spent over an hour writing this.

League of Legends.

The worst video game.

League does just about everything wrong that can be done wrong, and does nothing whatsoever to compensate.

I should start with the few things LoL doesn't do wrong. It doesn't play into an obnoxious gamerbro mindset like CoD. There are no consequences for loss, other than time.

This actually makes League a great case study, because it means the toxicity is completely emergent from the under-the-hood design elements.

And hoo-boy, those design elements.

So firstly, we can lay some groundwork by saying that League has the same teamcomp problem as OW, but magnified by the fact that you have to pay cash money to play as your chosen hero, giving the whole problem even higher stakes.

It's also important to explain how it works on a basic gameplay level, because it's not a shooter, or at all similar to the other discussed games in terms of moment-to-moment play.

League has tiny teams of 5v5, and this is enormously amplified by its map design. There is one map, which is divided into three linear paths, known as "lanes". Combat encounters are typically one-on-one, and players in different lanes cannot normally affect each other.

To be clear about the implication: league is a team game with little teamwork. Every player is accountable for their own success, and the top-down perspective and linear map makes their degree of success easily visible.

We now need to introduce the concept of "feeding", which emerges from some of the most fundamental design elements of the game.

Over the course of the game, players accrue money and experience, like in a single player RPG. They then spend this on permanent and temporary upgrades

They way they earn these is, primarily, by the core gameplay; that is, fighting enemy players. You may already be able to see the problem.

Early one-sided losses can create a situation that is impossible to recover from, since losing to an enemy makes that enemy stronger.

The final piece of the horrible puzzle is that league matches are long. Like, real long. Easily 30 minutes to a full hour. And game length is only somewhat shortened by one-sided domination. A LoL game under 20 minutes is a brutal clobbering.

I said earlier that game length is mainly important as a multiplier to loss consequences, and this is typically true. Fortnite and Battlefield don't suffer from very long match length because the consequences for loss are trivial in both games. The problem is garbage time.

The worst thing that can happen in any game or sport is to have garbage time. That is, a situation where there is a fixed amount of time left which must be played, but the outcome is already certain, and even perfect play from the losing team could not turn things around.

With its experience and equipment system, and the RTS-influenced way in which progress is measured, means that League is precision engineered to create garbage time. It is very, very possible, even likely, for a match to be lost long before its conclusion.

Garbage time is psychological poison. If it's possible to come up with a definition of the word "fun", then garbage time is its exact opposite. Sheer match length is not a problem, but garbage time is, and no game generates garbage time so regularly and in such quantities as LoL.

That would be bad enough. But that is only multiplied by the first problem, that each player is vitally important and their performance is very visible. Losing in LoL is one of the worst experiences in gaming, and it's very, very easy to point fingers.

I feel the need to state that yes, I am presenting LoL in the most negative possible light, that if you've never played it you might wonder how anyone could stomach it. But, as anyone can plainly see, literal millions of people do enjoy it, and my point is not to "disprove" them.

This is a much less severe problem if you're playing with your friends, and because League is free and not demanding on your hardware, that is how many, perhaps most, players experience the game.

But I will state with total conviction that the people who enjoy League do so in spite of what I've discussed, not because of it. It is not a difference of taste, it is just objectively bad design.

Overwatch is a case study in how you can't add fix a community through anti-toxicity features if it's already gone toxic. CoD is a case study in just how important presentation and implication are, how so much of its toxicity is an almost deliberate choice.

I don't think anything could be done to fix League. The roots of its toxicity go so deep into most every design choice that fixing it would mean transforming it into a completely different game. I don't even think dedicated servers could make sense, team sizes are too small.

I just want to thank you, for making it to the end of this horrifically overlong thread. If you liked it, please retweet it!