More like impossible to solve. Toxicity is the price of being on a team with randoms. It's shockingly easy to add normal humans as friends and play with them, or just mute/ignore people.

Total Mayhem games just never end. It wasn't like that before. But the last 3 games I've been in have the game completely stall on the point/payload. It's seemingly impossible for one team to wipe the other. You can wipe 5 of them, but they get a Winston or Mei on the point/payload and they can survive long enough for a teammate to come back from spawn. I just left those games after being stuck in overtime 5+ minutes each.

So many leavers in comp right now

Its not impossible to improve. Its a question of what direction you want to go with the game. Hearthstone doesnt have any toxicity in their game because of design decisions.

And im not interrested in adding people as friends or play with the same people over and over, i want to play with random groups or a friend plus random groups.

Also its shockingly easy to mute/ignore people in a vacuum, but most people are not robots that never want to retaliate to unfair criticism. Thats pretty evident from how toxic the games have become. Obviously the blocking solution isnt all that great unless your a robot.

Its also a matter of what heroes you can play without being trashed from beginning to end. I played a fair bit of hanzo but i have just given it up in comp because i so often will be under constant evaluation and unfair criticism even if i do well. People will refuse to play tanks or healers when they see hanzo, or they will refuse to heal you specifically etc. When i played mccree for a period, playing far worse than on hanzo, the heat was substantially lower.

Hearthstone doesn't have toxicity because no teammates and no voice chat. I don't even see the point of mentioning HS in this context.

I have no idea what you direction you are suggesting based on your post, unless you are saying they should remove voice chat which lol.

Hearthstone doesn't completely lack toxicity. The most obvious example is people who take the maximum amount of time every turn. But yes, it lacks verbal toxicity because it is not a team-based game. I cannot envision any way to design a game like OW to be free of toxicity without fundamentally changing the game. Even preventing all communication would not prevent throwers/griefers/leavers. I literally cannot envision a TF/OW-style game that is designed in such a way as to eliminate toxicity.

Then you have to deal with the downsides, recognizing that there are tons of ****ty people on the internet.

So say your retaliatory piece and then mute them

See above. One of the costs of dealing with random people is that you have to tolerate their (often irrational) preferences. You cannot have it both ways: playing with randoms and playing in your preferred environment.

Ya.. There's legit no way to reduce people raging/being toxic. It's a team game, people want to win, and people blame teammates 99% of the time. Also, a lot of players are young, and lack any sort of emotional intelligence/think they're anonymous. The only real solution is to play a more casual game, or game mode.

Some days I get super tilted by teammates/losing, and my solution is to simply stop playing, or be very quick to mute people I think would annoy me. Days where I am sensitive to that stuff I often just play a more casual game.

So when did they open up Eichenwald on the first choke in the 75 health room?

Makes that play completely differently.

I go over there with hanzo on attack and have free headshots at enemy supports 75% of games, in competitive.

If Blizzard penalised these people a lot faster, it would happen a lot less.

I'm imagining that it's actually really complicated to properly sort out who deserves a ban. I'm sure a lot of trolls report tons of people they play with as well. I'd guess that if someone got reported by 8 people in a single game or something it should probably pretty quickly raise a flag (like they're actually throwing/griefing).

Blizzard could do better, but the last thing they want to do is start suspending/banning people who really don't deserve it.

The only time I've heard of someone getting suspended is a GM/top500 torb 1 trick who would get reported by salty teammates every game... not that I really have a problem with 1 trick torbs getting in crap.

I think this is a problem that can be statistically attacked. Let's assume that an abusive player reduces the chances of their team winning. And let's assume Blizzard have a way to measure skill outside win-loss, which they claim is true and which should be doable.

All they have to do is vary the threshold that leads to a chatban or gameban, and see how the correlation changes. There're so many games that they should be able to move the toxicity index down pretty quickly.

Even if that fails, they can correlate to churn rates. Or they could look at some kind of natural language evaluation of toxicity, though I imagine the voice recognition stuff makes it harder there. I'd find that quite fun as a job to be honest, so I imagine they have a few people like that who could figure it out.

LOL did a whole data research thing on this problem, the real problem is that trolls aren't say 5% of the player population that are just toxic all the time, it's 80% of people who do it occasionally (bad day, tilt, etc.).

That probably makes it easier. You move the 80% a little bit closer to what you'd like via warnings, and you don't even have to lose revenue. Or, how about rewarding people who've stopped being toxic, if you can find a way to avoid being gamed?

It's really hard to move a community in the direction that you want, but in the long term you should be able to do it nudge by nudge.

From experience all that happens if you make an effective reporting system - people start reporting every game they lose, rendering it meaningless.

That shouldn't matter, the correlation will still hold, assuming that toxic players make you less likely to win a game. You can get around cause and effect problems by looking at the content of their language.

Yup. I've added plenty of people on like counter strike as friends after we lost a game and they were civil/chill/friendly, only to play with them two days later and have them be tilting their heads off. I do that all the time too, even though most of the time I'm a good teammate. If I play 5 games in a row with teenage DPS players who screech into their microphones, and game 6 I get a symm 1 trick and a junkrat 1 trick... I'm going to hit a breaking point where I start yelling at children (then quit immediately after).

@Sciolist - I think there could probably be more done in terms of making a threshold for super toxic people a little more attainable, which I'd guess Blizzard is seriously looking at... it seems easier to just suggest to people to take advantage of the tools that are given to remove themselves from that toxic situation.

I have become very quick to mute people that are being toxic/negative/purposefully annoying, instead of dealing with it or attempting to rationalize/yell at them. Even if it hurts the communication a bit, it's better than getting so salty that everybody just stops trying.

seems like either a pc only problem or people consider literally anything they don't like "toxic"

i just play the game and let people ghana people

Yeh it's been pretty ok for me lately on PS4.

I have noticed a correlation between skill and chill. In Gold I thought people raged way more, blamed people for not winning, etc.

In Diamond people understand the game on a higher level, including the importance of team work.

You get the occasional "come on soldier, kill the pharah dude", but I think it's improved for sure. Remember what goes around, is all around Rick.

I had the house to myself for about 24 hours, so got a chance to play a bunch of competitive last night and this afternoon. Shockingly, I encountered no real toxic chat.

I had made it just above 2000 SR this season, but fell to the mid-low 1600's going into last night. Alternated wins and losses for a while but then went on a nice run. Continued it today, won maybe 10 in a row total. I think I'm done for the season (family is home, makes it harder to play) and am now at 1928.

Wish I could've done better, but got to gold for the first time and gained about 300 SR in this final stretch, so that was satisfying.

Toxicity seems to come in bursts. There was one week where I was getting so much toxic chat that I gave up on competitive and only played QP or arcade. But I hadn't experienced much if any toxicity before that. Season starts tomorrow, and I'll see if it's any different.

On another subject, really getting bad luck with the anniversary loot boxes. Only legendary I got from the event is the beekeeper Mei. Only emote worth noting is Sombra's dance emote. Will eventually craft the D.Va skin and possibly Genji (though probably not because I rarely play as Genji). But it really sucks that my two favorite skins from the anniversary belong to characters already featured in the Heroes event. Also want the B.Va skin, but I that'll be three new D.Va legendary skins in the space of a month.

Total Mayhem seems to have a completely different meta, which makes it fun and different.

Three characters in particular seem really popular:

Zarya is clearly elite tier in this mode, as it is dead simple to keep her charge at 70% the entire game.

Mei is just impossible to kill because she can just put herself in ice so often. And she has ult very often.

Sombra builds up her ult easily. Since this mode relies so much on ults, this makes Sombra really useful. She still does so little damage that she's not on the level of the other two.

Other notes:

The healers are pretty good. Lucio has amp it up so much that he works well as a solo healer. Mercy has rez up all the time and Ana has sleep dart/grenade up all the time. Zen doesn't seem to be used very much.

As for tanks, Winston is nearly impossible to kill. Doesn't do a ton of damage, but he has his barrier up constantly. Orisa didn't get her shield up time reduced, which is unusual. Not really great in this mode. Due to the increased health of everyone, I don't find D.Va or Reinhardt to be very useful either. Roadhog is dangerous because he feeds ult to the opposing team like crazy. He has hook up every 2 seconds, but one-shotting is less likely. Biggest bonus is Whole Hog. Wiping the opposing team is difficult in this mode, so you just need to knock them from the point.

As for defense, they seem pretty meh in this mode. Symmetra's shield gen is 150, though, which can be very useful (yes, I know she's not technically defense, but you know what I mean).

DPS standouts are Sombra (mentioned above), Tracer (always has blink), and Genji (always has deflect). The other three don't seem very popular, which is unusual. Soldier would seem to be good in this mode with more rockets and more healing, but people aren't picking him much.

I'm a little surprised Reaper hasn't been more popular, he can constantly wraith and his ultimate is useful for clearing the point. Soldier is not as popular I guess since his ultimate has much less value in this mode.

Pharah can be very good since the usual hitscans are much less used and there's so much carnage going on she can avoid attention, especially at the end of a match. Had a game on Dorado where I spent the entire last section floating above dropping rockets and JFA constantly without anyone really shooting at me.

Yeah, the only skin I've gotten is Mei and it was from the loot box I automatically got at the start of the event. I assume everyone gets a legendary from that one. I've gotten maybe 3 dance emotes and that's it (Mei and D.Va for sure, can't remember if I got another).

Hey guys, finished up the free weekend and wanted to give my thoughts and wanted to get yours too. It's going to be pretty lengthy so bear with me.

I got to level 22 by the end of the free weekend. The game is pretty fun, I can see why it's very popular. Games feel like a breeze, never at any point did I feel that the game was a grind or slow. That being said, there were some games where I felt utterly powerless to make a difference in because of the game itself. This happened on the game mode where you need to attack and capture 2 points. The defense usually consists of Orisa and Symmetra at a choke point, especially in King's Row. Orisa shield and Symmetra turrets at the choke point makes it almost impossible to bust through without a 2nd main way to get to the first checkpoint.

The game really does emphasize teamplay/teamwork. Too many times, someone just runs off only to die by a team that had all of its members next to objective. By far my favorite game mode is where you need to hold the key point until you hit a 100%, best 2 out of 3. So many times the round went to overtime and a lot of the rounds, it was very competitive.

The characters are fairly well balanced, though I wish there was more variety of characters for each role. For the most part, I think some characters need tweaking such as a longer cooldown time for Orisa's shield, D.Va's ultimate should have a lower blast radius, and Mercy's ult should revive characters at half health, but all in all the characters are fine. My favorite character by far was Tracer, she's fun as hell to play, love it when I stick my bomb on someone and then do a time warp to GTFO. Other favs include, Solider 76, Bastion, Roadhog, and Symmetra (situational). I wish I was good with Genji, they seem to reck me.

I still have questions though. What game modes does Competitive use? How do you get those stars underneath your portrait? How do you use voice chat? I tried it but it didn't seem to work? I'm still debating whether or not to purchase the game or not, I'm leaning towards yes.