When did the world accept harassment and toxicity as the norm, and trying to remove it made you whiny and thin-skinned? Ignoring/muting the person is a short-term solution, but letting the underlying problem of toxicity go unpunished just fosters a shitty environment. I play games to have fun, not be insulted and belittled. It shouldn’t be my initiative as a bystander or recipient to mute every toxic person I come across, there should be a system in place to actively weed toxic players out. They are the ones being intrusive, they should be the people to feel the most inconvenience.
If a person is consistently toxic to people they play with, they should be automatically muted for increasing amounts of time, and banned if they don’t change. Casual shittalking is fine if everyone involved knows and is fine with it, but playing with strangers and just laying down vitriol comments with the intent to annoy, hurt, or disturb the person is not acceptable at all. Played a few matches last night that had two people show up who started insulting another player for being a girl and another player for standing up to their toxicity. Among other generally unpleasant things they said, they also sexually harassed the first player, threatened to rape her, and turned on the second player for “trying to get between her legs”. A quick search of their steam profiles hinted at a consistent pattern of toxicity.
Are these the types of players we want in this game? I can safely and without question answer a resounding no. It may be a game, but we are people before we are players. If somebody can’t treat another player with basic human decency, they should feel the consequences of their antisocial behavior: isolation and exclusion.
