I obviously don't keep data on this, but what you're describing is my experience. Last week I ran 22 keys and I can't even remember a specific negative interaction.
The entirety isnt toxic but enough of the base is. And for some, those who play at limited times can have the bad luck to get a horrendous group and if that’s the time they have to play, it’s a terrible experience. I do what I can to be positive, make a difference and help others. I can only hope they remember and it makes their day better
@ thank you. I definitely try. I was tanking an 8 Mists that went okay until the last boss. The execution was so bad with DPS not moving for the beam, not switching to adds and standing in stuff. After 35 deaths we called it, but along the way I told everyone what we needed to do to succeed. And in a non aggressive way to try not to offend and at least finish. But all I received was complete silence and it got even worse. I left without any further commentary and left it at that. Point is, another person in my place COULD be one of the toxic people, but I’m not. So hopefully they learned how to do it and can succeed in their future runs, with or without me
@@Netherstrasz I had the same thing happen but in a SoB +4. Having timed the key on my main on a +13 I didn't expect a +4 to be too difficult. Our group was an average ilvl of 610 which is more than strong enough to do a misely +4. The problems started right away with nobody in the dungeon interrupting the mobs, still it was managable because we were basically overgearing the dungeon. When we finally came to the last boss it was obvious that nobody actually knew the mechanics. The tank was running away from the tentacles on every mechanic resulting in the melee DPS dying every single pull. I tried explaining the mechanics to the team so that we would at least finish the dungeon, in 2 more pulls nothing improved so I just disbanded the group.
Hello, hope you had a good day! (I'm doing the thing!) As someone who has played WoW for 19 of its 20 years, I think your argument here is fine but also oversimplified. Sure, if we look at raw player count you run into, it is entirely likely that a vast minority of the people you encounter are toxic. However, as someone who has also played FFXIV for a decade, I think the difference people point at is the likelihood of a toxic event happening when you log in to the game. When I log into WoW, my personal experience is that I am just far more likely to have something negative happen - someone being snippy about heals or something that happens in a dungeon, watching arguments in trade chat, etc. Those happen more in WoW than in other MMOs I play (only really citing FFXIV because it's the one I engage with most outside of WoW) and I think it is fair to conclude that the game and community are more toxic as a result, because while your argument is statistically correct, it doesn't add up to the totality of experience someone might have. If I know I'm more likely to encounter negativity in a play session, it really doesn't matter that the negativity is from a small percentage of players if such things happen 20-50% of the sessions I put into the game. I think the problem is twofold - as a community too many people lay down and let the toxic stuff happen and as a game Blizzard's enforcement of social interaction policies is lackluster. I went through a lot of the former as someone who was in a guild with a fair number of toxic people, which I had to remedy myself by quitting, taking as many non-toxic people as I could with me, and starting a different guild that worked to eliminate those issues, and I faced a lot of backlash from the toxic people for calling out their toxicity. I'm not sure how you handle that in the larger game though - I too struggle to directly confront it when I run into it in groups where I don't already have some measure of social capital. WoW's creator ecosystem can be a problem for sure, but I also think that vastly overstates how many players actually engage with that stuff. I would wager, just from experience with different types of players, that most players actually aren't that plugged in to the game when they're not playing it - even some of the most dedicated players I know don't read news about the game, never go to the subreddit or watch videos from any creator about WoW, and they still have some of the same perceptions of the game as a toxic cesspit. Which is sometimes true! - even if statistically it is a minority of troublemaker players, the structure in the game and community allows that to happen unchecked far more often than in a lot of games, and I think that is worth confronting and addressing. You've done some of that here, but I think leaning on the proportion of players doing the toxic stuff isn't the strongest case and sometimes sounds like denial (it's a minority of players so therefore the game isn't toxic!) when I think there is truth to the idea that WoW is, not toxic generally, but at least more toxic than many other online multiplayer games. I don't think we can fix it by using toxic player percentage arguments to handwave that feeling away and pin the rest on salty creators and Redditors. Even if you want to blame them, they're still players in the community having bad experiences and it's worth understanding why that happens and how we might meaningfully prevent it.
I agree with all of this. I like WoW as a game more, but playing FFXIV for a few years really opened my eyes to how much more toxic WoW is. The amount of negative interactions I had in FFXIV can be counted on one hand, and I don’t even remember any of them. I came back to WoW and wanted to do some time walking dungeons. Maybe 3 of them were nice and friendly, 2 of them had issues of people calling out how poorly some of the DPS were doing (we were getting through the dungeon just fine), and another one had arguments about which direction to go. So 40% of my runs had a negative interaction. This is why I almost never actually use LFG. I just decided to this one time and it reinforced why I never use it.
WoW's playerbase isn't toxic. It's WoW's systems and gameplay that create toxic situations (M+ rushing like we are speedrunning the game, PUGs expecting no mistakes expecting to be carried by others, toxic PvP gameplay, etc.)
if you know what to do in m+ the timer is not an issue below +14. wanna take your time in a dungeon? go to delves, or play m0, or ignore the timer, or play classic. if there was an option to remove the timer from the dungeon (but also reduce ilvl of the gear at the end plus no score) that would be fine, but if you can't do the dungeons in time then you can't do the dungeons in time!!
@@WladcaPodziemia Did Blizz make the real life world too? Because it's full of toxic culture wars at the moment. Or maybe people are just people, wherever you go, and our game world merely reflects that.
I've been playing this game for 17 years, I also played a lot of other games during my lifetime. WoW is quite the opposite of toxic, I meet 1-2 assholish people (that can just be /ignore'd) for the dozens and dozens of cool people I meet, i've created numerous relationships thanks to this game. People often help each other and have a good time, sometimes they can be sarcastic or have little patience but they rarely tell you extremely negative things, it is a far cry from what I consider even remotely toxic.
We literally just dumped a guy from our guild raid (needed a few pugs) for absolute toxicity. All caps immediately after a wipe on callouts for popping queen N's bubbles on Heroic. Raid leader booted him after 3 outbursts. You get what you put up with.
This is most definitely a world problem. It sums up the news and social media, that essentially the loudest most negative person gets the most attention. In WoW I have a macro saying 'Thanks for the group!' that I use whenever I complete group content. I rarely get a response but it's polite and adds a bit of positivity. I ignore the toxic person and move on. It's the reason I enjoy the game far more than my husband, you gets into arguments and debates with the toxic, thinking that he'll somehow change their mind. He thinks most people are toxic and that's his view of the world as well. Unfortunately it will be an uphill battle to get people not to focus only on the bad. Good luck to you!
Not to start some comparison war but when I was playing FFXIV from 2021 to 2023 (practically played almost every day, devoured most content and unsubbed) I found that despite people often saying the game is far more inclusive, friendlier to newbies, super positive, etc, it's actually absurdly cliquey, toxic in quite subtle, manipulative ways, and in general much more "fake nice" people who will talk shit behind your back pretend like you don't exist in convos (this is not what specifically happened to me, just observing how various social/casual guilds operate there), versus people in WoW generally being far more outward and "simple" with their negativity, they say it how it is, they gatekeep, they throw a slur or two, but there's rarely mind games or borderline psychopathy involved. Again, I have limited view of both camps as I haven't played either game for a decade, but I feel like I've interacted with enough people on both sides where I genuinely prefer WoW's "toxicity" versus FFXIV's "toxic positivity" and their own ways of subtle toxicity.
I noticed this in FFXIV too, never personally having any of these issues. But what’s nice about the “toxic positivity” as you called it is that when you just run a dungeon with those people, you don’t experience any of that negativity. Having people in WoW saying negative things every other dungeon feels bad. In FFXIV you have a positive experience and move on.
Blizzard devs have made extremely intentional design decisions that permit and even reward really antosocial behavior. Until they make design decisions that encourage and reward pro-social behavior, one jerk really can ruin your gaming experience. The perception of toxicity is not a statistical phenomenon. It's a subjective phenomenon. We are wired to respond more intensesly to negative experiences. It's a survival habit. It's human nature. Throwing numbers at the problem attempts to sidestep an emotional, mammalian response with logic that technically addresses the issue without really understanding the issue.
I mean you could have 1/5th timewalking dungeons that are toxic or zero toxicity within the span of hard/extreme dungeons. The latter is governed by extreme formal and informal rules that dictate the overall flow of communication and community engagement in this particular MMO. I don't think your hypothetical works when there's greener grass elsewhere. People don't really need to put up with 1/5th timewalking dungeons, 1/3rd of every m+, and 1/2th of every, I don't know, classic raid. I truly think you need a better benchmark because I was under the same impression. "It's not that bad", "this is just the minority of time", "it's just negativity bias", etc. After discovering FFXIV endgame, I haven't felt the need to raidlog in classic or reattempt M+. Granted, I will give you that the community projects "wow bad" but they've been doing that since Shadowlands & even farther back into BfA. I will even grant you that these misadventures are experienced in the minority of the time. However, what you hit on is something that cannot be addressed properly and doesn't seem to go away: namely, these echoing sentiments from exterior social media websites (twitter, reddit, blizz forums), which may even reinforce bad behaviors. It's why Classic has so many trolls with main character syndrome. It's a very old game where you can waste a lot of people's times. And you get rewarded for that with notoriety. Look at the Calamity Naxx Hardcore wipe where one guy wipes the entire raid due to, in his own words, a disagreement on the overall philosophy of hardcore. 40 toons permanently dead. All their hours wasted. It doesn't matter if he was wrong or right, it matters that he's now a known quantity. You are rewarded for selfish behavior. That is WoW. This has not changed since classic to retail where retail groups have to be inherently gatekeep-y to progress keys. Again, I urge you to play a different MMO for a better benchmark because it doesn't have to be like this. Blizzard has yet to change the social moors amongst the community because it has been the core of WoW since original vanilla, and, as indicated by Blizzard's recent roadmap, where they string people along through different versions of WoW everytime retail or classic needs downtime for major updates, they are not incentivized to significantly overhaul their systems as its too late to build a better community.
"You are rewarded for selfish behavior. That is WoW." --- Facts. A small group of people can ruin it for the Majority. It's just the reality of modern retail wow.
@@cdogknight6661 And don't get me wrong, I actively think there's a lot of things WoW does better than any MMO in the market. I just always caution newer players or returning players on retail-classic ecosystem because I've played multiple versions of it. Blizzard sort of wants me to with the way they setup their roadmaps. You have to take the good with the bad and WoW is definitely far more toxic than other MMOs I've played to lategame. Granted, I'll give video OP this: my perception of WoW is biased from playing so much WoW until recently.
I appreciate both of your perspectives! I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how to go about fixing it. Do you think a better reporting system would be enough?
@@acadiianwow Unfortunately I don't think you will ever entirely eliminate Toxicity/Negative experiences in wow, but the developers could try to minimize them. If I had to offer solutions it would be something like this. Stop designing the game to be an esport for the super sweatiest, I would ratchet down the difficulty to attain endgame rewards significantly. I would still allow players that want to do +13 Mythics to do them, but there just wouldn't be any gear upgrades. Hint - Those players will do it anyway they don't do it for the gear. I also would try and focus on building community through designing fun experiences that the players do outside of DPS Meters and competitive play. Wow housing is a good step I believe, but the point is the game has to shift to a bit of a different developer mindset than what we have now. They just made it so a +12 key will not deplete. Why just a 12 key? Why not all keys can't deplete, wouldn't that create less toxicity?
I'm no expert, but I do remember an article about how our minds are hard wired to look out for hazards, and negative experiences make impressions that are about ten times stronger than positive ones in general. I've seen lots of awful guild drama, had my account hacked on Christmas day--coincidentally after a tank complained about my healing, a rushing tank that expected the whole party to keep up with her reckless pulls, on and on. I've had good times too, flirting with lady night elves, a "free show" from a lady warrior who was apologizing for getting us wiped. Been playing since 2006. Just questing and soloing nowadays. Barely ventured into dungeons with the AI bots. Happy hermit here. Thanks for your channels, brother. Good advice not just for WoW, but for life in general.
Timewalking has been getting a lot of bad rap lately because of it being more difficult in certain level/gear brackets. I found tanking it a bit this last week it was really beneficial to just ask "do you guys want to do the optional bosses?" or "should we pull for xp or a faster clear?" All those runs went great. And, of course, if you are in a hurry, remember many classes have abilities that can speed up the party members in the back, like the shaman totem or the monk tiger lust, so that's a great use for them.
Back in the day the toxic or selfish or just bad people got kicked from guilds prevented to join groups got a reputation because servers were a closed community self regulating.
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since 2006 on private servers, and I’ve never had more toxic experiences than positive ones. People tend to exaggerate everything on forums like the WoW forums or Reddit.
The toxicity is also vastly different depending on where you are. I've been pushing keys on a new character, from 2 to 15. Once I crossed the +12 barrier, the toxicity almost _almost_ completely disappeared. I have had one person out of a hundred keys actually be toxic. Said person then invited me to a key later and apologized and told me to have a good evening. In the lower level keys however, everything is always everyone elses fault. No one takes responsibility for anything. Died with potions and personals ready? Healer fault. Pulled too much for the group comp? "I do this with my normal group, you guys just suck." I think it doesn't help that the mistakes made in lower level keys are significantly more frustrating - and easier to point out. Like, lets be honest, if you're reasonably geared for a key, the only way you even remotely risk dying is by doing mistakes. Not kicking priority casts, not healing/dispelling the affix debuff, failing to kill totems in stonevault. All of these obvious mistakes are so easy to point out, which makes it easy to turn on other people. In higher level keys where the mistakes are much, much smaller, such as being a second too late on your personal CD, or angling the mobs frontal so healer has to move during an intense AoE Healing scenario, the mistakes are, in my optics, more often forgiven. You really cross a barrier where people cease looking at everyone else, and start looking primarily at themselves. Which is when the game gets really, really fun.
There's nothing more cursed on this planet than Wowhead comments. Good god they are a total cesspool of negativity. The less commentary you read (about anything), the more you'll enjoy it. I'm 100% convinced of that.
Absolutely, I try to avoid any commentary on WoW for the most part, people just have a habit of crapping on the game. TWW is one of my favourite Xpac's so far
I don't think the majority of the player base is toxic but unfortunately it only takes one toxic person to ruin a whole group. As of late, this has been my average experience: PvE runs 2/5 Negative 1/5 Positive 2/5 Neutral PvP matches 3/5 Negative 1/5 Positive 1/5 Neutral The toxicity is honestly not even usually directed at me but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It has lead to me doing the majority of the content I consume with my Guild or I just opt to do solo content. I feel myself less willing and likely to participate in group content lately because of my general experience. The worst part is, when I try to be the voice of reason or positivity, I am usually met with silence or negativity for defending the "bad player". It's added a level of social exaustion that is driving me away and it makes me sad. I have been playing for all 20 years and I love this game. I want to keep being a driving force for the good experiences that are possible and keep people coming back but as the late, great John Coffey once said, "I'm tired boss"... Great content though, I think you had some excellent points and I don't think all is lost. I do think we have a lot of work to do as a community and more than a few players out there could and should do better. GLHF and I hope to see you all out there!
It's possible too that if a person has a higher than average number of toxic interactions that they're just a below average player. If that's the case I'd recommend they try to play with a somewhat static set of people that are on their level.
That is true. I think that's another reason why we should try to interact in a more positive way with our groups. Make the toxicity less of a normal thing by being social with one another in party chat.
There’s so much truth to this. We’ve all been in a group where one person picks on another person, and the rest of the group remains silent. Theres one reason for this. If the rest of the group speaks up against the antagonist then that person gets pissed and all of a sudden “everyone is an idiot” and he leaves, depleting the key. People are more prone to just be quiet, let the person talk bad about another party member because the chances of just sticking through completing the key is greater than calling someone out for being a toxic player.
I stopped entering dungeons as every time I tried it was just people running as fast as they can. So I don't know any of the newer stuff, except the ones I can do follower dungeons with. I don't like to say I am new to it, as I just expect to get kicked. Of course when the door shuts and I am locked out, it is blamed on me for not keeping up. I have since gone back to classic with the anniversary fresh release and I am now enjoying it again. People talk and it can't be done at rapid pace
Hey man, I found your videos recently and love your philosophy shown in your content. I also appreciate your points about the social and positive side of WoW, I commented in another vid recently about Classic vs. Retail - I love the visceral speedy combat of retail and M+ is my jam, running with a great group cutting through swathes of enemies and working together is a thrill, but the one thing I miss from classic is a great community and the social aspect. A lot of the time in dungeons most of the interactions are "Hi" and "BL here", then you're lucky if you speak again, other than getting flamed for messing up a mech xD But positivity is something I've been thinking about also which is weird that you bring it up, if dungeons go well I make it a habit now to be like "Big props to the tank/healer, thanks for a great job guys" and they seem to appreciate that. Definitely agree this community could use some positivity
WoW lacks some social engineering in it's systems. A big friction point for toxicity to occur will always be too differing expectations getting thrown together in a queue or pug setting. For example I run 3 characters through heroic queen and 4/8M each week in a pug and despite the age of the raid and stacking raidbuff groups seem to get worse by each week because it is very difficult to "filter" appropriate players for something that's supposed to be a quick farm run. FF14 party (group) finder gives you the tools to precisely set expectations for the kind of run you want this to be: Practice (progress/learn group) / Duty Completion (progress in kill range) / Loot (Farm group/raid, you can only join this if you already killed the encounter). Not saying there aren't also other factors or that there are never any toxic interactions but quite frankly for how difficult some savage encounters are the FF14 party finder experience is just way less frequently toxic because people mostly know what they're getting into and can expect.
Yes, unfortunately, our go to mentality is …if something happens once it happens “all the time…”. and although I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of the richer aspects of experiencing the game. I still tend to keep to myself and solo most content to avoid either disappointing fellow players with a mistake or listening to them berate somebody else for a mistake it’s just better for my sanity personally 😂
I also think the game is not as toxic as it seems. Negativity just gets traction easier. I also think that a lot of people who post these negative experiences are not telling the full story. But I am curious if other games deal with it better, especially since WoW has a rush and optimise culture. I’ve noticed that if you really try to be friendly and good, you’re likely to get it back.
@@Synergy1898 I agree it’s not as toxic as it seems. It’s just like the news where negative, crazy stories are reported more and human nature is to be drawn to tragedy. It’s one of the sad reasons so many content creators focus on that stuff with their videos. Bellular being one of them. Arcadiian is an outlier in the best way!
There has been lot of discussion in Reddit that people who encounter toxicity usually are pretty bad players in general. Ive been playing almost 20 years and the amount of toxicity i get is almost none. I pug 90% of my dungeons. In every version of wow. If you run 5 time walking dungeons and get yelled in 4. Maybe its not the community.
Doesn't take many sour grapes to ruin the bunch. I think the issue is the casual players are leaving and the basement dwellers are doubling down. It's a vicious cycle.
Thank you for the video I personally believe it's more of a people problem than a wow problem. From my experience of several years of playing FF14 I'm confident that the toxicity is very similar if not the same, it's just that among the wow playerbase there's overwhelming negative sentiment towards the game as a whole (people disliking the expansion, company etc. which I don't think is the case with FF14 yet) but both games have been out long enough to see that it's more of a paradigm shift among the player mentality. I personally think it's mainly because people feel the need to rush and minmax every content possible and even the small setback like boss wipe which means the dungeon takes couple minutes more enrages them greatly
You could make the same argument for any other game (that is based on playing with other random ppl), yet there arent this many videos touching on toxicity of all games... just some of them - those that do have toxic commiunities. And keep in mind, most cases, not majority is toxic, but toxic part is usually vocal and allowed to grow - especially with current WoW's systems and implementations
I wanted to write this comment throughout the whole video, waited until 14:31 where, at least it seems, the main argument is done (I agree with all of it, by the way). I will finish the video, of course, but I just had to get this off my chest. First of all, this thing you're doing where you talk about general life stuff in the context of World of Warcraft? It's great and very much needed. Have you considered just full-screening your camera and presenting it that way? You can always cut away to gameplay, especially if it illustrates what you're talking about, or some other kind of B roll when you're not happy about that specific part of the presentation on camera. The background footage is just mostly irrelevant to what you're talking about and sometimes distracting, taking away from the excellent points you're making in the bottom left corner. Second, this whole "2 people out of the sample size of 40, signal-boosted by Reddit and/or other content on the Internet" problem might even be worse than what's presented in your video. Why? Because 1 of those "toxic" people might have just gotten shouted at at work, got back home, had enough time for 5 timewalking dungeons and queued to blow off some steam, fully intending to be nice to people, but had a new player trying to tank. He was already annoyed, so, despite his best intentions, he got too frustrated and tried politely telling the new tank what he should do, only for the tank guy to go on a power trip born from watching a video that said that the tank "sets the pace of the dungeon and controls the route" or whatever, exacerbating our "toxic" guy's annoyance. And then, this "toxic" guy, stressed as hell from work and annoyed at the previous tank, just takes it into his own hands, pulling a bunch of mobs and snaps back when the tank asks him to stop, queue drama. The point is that people sometimes act toxic, but they rarely are maliciously toxic. Usually, it's just them having a bad day or being overly defensive due to PTSD-like learned responses from interacting with, maybe, 20 toxic people in total over the last six years that they still remember two expansions later. I've played my Evoker in low keys, most of my pugs were okay. Sure, they made mistakes, I did too, some were obviously returning players. What do I remember from that entire process playing M+ on my Evoker? I remember a tank who insisted on pulling the mobs in front of the church entrance in Dawnbreaker, despite three of the remaining four team members just landing at the side entrance on the right like most people do in that part of the dungeon. When I asked him to just come in through the side, he said, "I'm the tank. I lead, you follow." Then, he left the group, the timer was more than low enough to time the dungeon. That's it, that's all I remember. If I didn't know better, I'd fall for a bunch of biases that humans fall into, most of which (aside from confirmation bias (I think,) which got triggered in a major way when the first guy read the post on /r/wow) you mentioned in the video. This is an excellent direction for the channel, I think, this niche is more or less empty. All you need is some more visually stimulating/inviting thumbnails and your channel should blow up, because you're saying things that NEED to be said more than anything most WoW content creators are talking about for the health of the game overall. EDIT: Dammit, 20:11, you mentioned it. Sorry for wasting your time, I guess.
Some more great takes! Well said. I love all the positivity you are putting out there with your videos lately. I also saw the Reddit post you were referring to and it made me sad. I’m not sure what the point of these negative posts are. Are they looking for validation? I have overwhelmingly positive experiences when grouping with pugs as well. Let’s be the positive change we want to see in the community! 🎉
Nobody ever talks in game anymore so you never see any positive feedback. Any time anyone speaks in group content it's mostly to complain about something. So yea, not everyone is toxic, but the ones who are are also the only people who speak.
I think the comments about negativity bias and then the echo chamber that can build up around people sharing negative experiences are a fair and useful take. However your comparison with watching a baseball team doesn’t stand. If the Red Sox lose 1 in 5 matches, ok you have a 20% chance of a not great experience. However, being personally abused is a much more negative experience, it hurts and you may want to avoid that far more even if the chance of happening is far lower. I was thinking of an analogy of walking down a street at night many times and it’s fine. But one time you are threatened or even assaulted. You may choose to never walk down that street again due to the risk of that happening again even though statistically it’s unlikely.
The base argument is incorrect, I believe, since you assume that players who chose not to talk with other group-members while in dungeon is a good thing, not a negative experience. The game taught players that being anti-social was good. Performance is key. Well, in dungeon, when I feel like I could replace my group-members with AIs and it wouldn't change anything, I for one would say that I'm having a very negative and miserable experience. Blizzard hasn't added the whole "Follower Dungeon" feature for the fun of it. As someone who used to have fun in dungeon way back during Vanilla, I got to see the change happen, and the biggest cataclyst was the addition of LFG in Wrath of the Lich King. To me, the simple truth is that WoW has become un-enjoyable outside of playing with friends and guildmates. Sadly for me, all my friends and guildmates got sick of the game during BfA and Shadowlands and refuse to give another chance to Blizzard and WoW.
Been playing since launch and I can’t even remember any toxic encounters in wow besides maybe a ninja looting raid leader. Some people love to harp and focus on the negative. 😮💨 couldn’t be me
While I agree with your main argument, I think this would have been a richer analysis if you looked at the proliferation of sexist/racist/homophobic speech in WoW spaces. I love WoW and have played since launch, but the difference between the amount of homophobic or fucked up shit people share in chat in WoW compared to FFXIV taught me a lot about how problematic the WoW community can be compared to others.
2 points. First is that you should use a script, even just loose bulletpoints to keep yourself on track. In the beginning you were repeating yourself a ton and it feels like this video could be so much more streamlined. The second is that the problem is not that one person out of 20 said something slightly mean. The problem is that's the only communication in dungeons. In classic, I play healer and occasionally the tank congratulates me for saving rough pulls. In retail I don't believe I've ever experienced that. I enjoy getting typing in chat and getting a lil silly sometimes, especially when running raids with randoms but it's very rare to see others join in casual conversation. W hen there's no conversation that's neutral/positive, only negative, it creates a negative feeling. I get the feeling you're more intelligent than this, but the first point combined with misrepresenting the issue as "people have 1 negative interaction out of 100 is just them being dumb" just makes you sound dumber than you probably are
the game is more toxic in some very specific areas of content. if you are killing a world boss or farm mats with 3 other people you wont encounter any negativity, but if you try to complete coordinated group content with 4 randoms you never seen before and are not in voice with instead, you cant act surprised if things dont go your way. a high failure rate leads to frustration and negativity. the game wants you to make friends and look for a guild. i started playing the game in bfa and instantly got into a guild since a friend of mine from said guild convinced me to play the game in the first place. since then im playing with the same 15-20 people. since i never use the lfg tool the only toxicity i encounter is some manchild beeing mad to lose the roll on some purple item from the raid. BuT bUt It Is My BiS xd. we are playing alot of dungeons aswell but aslong as you dont use the tool or pug one random at max you wont encounter any issues. also playing with the same people drasticly increases the success rate and winning people aint complaining ^^.
This is the reason everyone think Latam players are toxic. Yes, there are toxic people in ragnaros (I'm not playing in that realm tho), SAME AS IN EVERY OTHER REALM. And just bc some people don't speak english then suddenly they are toxic. Like, first of all, if the group is mostly Spanish speakers then we will speak Spanish between us, but if we need u to know something then we will type it in english. Yes, there are toxic players in ragnaros but then you add EVERYONE in there. It would be the same if we as Spanish speakers say "every American is toxic" just for some players of the english realms. And stop with the language thing. Yeah, not all of latam players speak english, but most of the wow latam community does. And remember, you speak english bc is the only language you know. We speak english because is the only language YOU know. Ps: You wouldn't know that you are playing with a latam player if they're realm is any other than the latam ones, so stop saying LATAM players are toxic pls
WoW certainly has a Toxic Player base. Even if it is a product of its systems and design. People are very petulant, entitled, and could care less about anyone other than themselves. nearly no one works together outside of a guild, and people will report you just for fun. People will kick you from a dungeon with the reason being "lawl it's funny :D " And WOW forums is the most deplorable cesspool of insufferable individuals imaginable. If you even make a post with a sugestion, you'll have Blizz forum white knights attack you personally, and insult you, and when you defend yourself they'll all label you a troll. I've played many MMOS with systems like WoWs. And WoWs community is by far from my experience the most toxic, and petulant and malicious group of players I've ever experienced. Now, of course there are good players too. Naturally. I love it when DPS pings where YOU hsould go as tank even if you're going the right way. And they'll run off and get themeslves killed and blame YOU. And I'll say "What are you doing? Why are you not following me?" They'll say "You're supposed to go this way it's faster!" I then say "If you want the privilege of telling people where to go, and what to do then you need to also take upon yourself the responsibility of being a tank. you don't get to relax as DPS and them command everyone around.
At least when I stopped playing, all server channels were filled with player boosting and a little LFG, you joined silent dungeon and raid groups to complete your content and that’s it. I fail to see the display of any emotion, let alone toxicity If gameplay criticism if negativity and toxicity , stop playing a massive multiplayer online role playing game where 20% affects the 100%, or 5% affects the 100%
I’m going to go ahead and call bs. The WoW is toxic as all hell. I played during Legion. My first day playing my first 20 mins in the game I got randomly harassed with spam tells talking shit and literally just for standing around taking in the world area. I wasn’t even in a group. Day one new player don’t know anyone didn’t interfere with anyone and that’s what I get. Time progresses, character progresses and every other time I played wow be it dungeons or solo content if someone wasn’t randomly starting shit with me they were doing it to other’s. Watched a group implode because one guy decided he hated how the frost mage looked. Had nothing to do with how he was playing. Raids are even worse behavior. That’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Yeah you love Wow but don’t shill while claiming you’re not shilling. Your experience is not the only experience… To say the wow community isn’t toxic is a boldfaced lie.
The fact that there isn’t an in game voice chat opens the door to toxicity. Theres keyboard warriors out there in M+ because they know they’ll never see people in the group again. It blew my mind 10 years ago that you didn’t automatically join voice chat like any multiplayer game these days, and it’s still mind boggling to me. I know there’s people out there who would love to communicate with other WoW players (especially those regularly pugging 4-10s), but just don’t because it’s not easy.
I honestly don't understand this video. If 2 people out of 40 are toxic and spreading toxicity in a video game, especially a video game with grouping like world of warcraft then 40 ppl by definition have been subjected to the toxicity. If these 2 people group up 20 times in a dungeon, then they will influence 80 other players negatively, thus the game is toxic. It's just simple math. In other words, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
With this logic literally all communities are toxic. There will always be bad apples in a bunch. The point of the video is to not let that one person define a community and to encourage people to put more positivity into the world. Toxic people will never go away, but we can do better at not amplifying them or letting them be the face of our community.
@@acadiianwow The point I'm making is that the majority of the players will experience toxicity in wow just by the nature of how the game is built, mythic plus pugging and group finder, or just pugging in general, time walking, LFR whatever. The majority of the community doesn't have to be toxic for the game to be toxic. Think of it this way - If you live in a town with a thousand people in it and 5 of them are murderers and they are constantly going around murdering people, then the town has a murder problem, even though the majority of the "community" aren't murderers. It's the same thing with wow.
There are most certainly toxic, abusive players; who treat one another like toilet paper. Like any tumor, they cluster together & poison everything in their vicinity.
Its usually xiv players who say it. I know wow players who play both games but I know none of them who play wow but nearly all of them have this visceral negative reaction to the game and what is more fascinating is most of them have never played the game themselves to experience it, its entirely bad experiences explained by a friend of a friend who likely also didn't play it who heard it from their friend who may have played for 3 days, 7 years ago. I don't know many people on the inside who say that the game is entirely and fully toxic just rumors and gossip from the game's closest competition and their brand-loyal members and whoever they can tell first.
Nah, wow community is the worst MMO community ive experienced. Remember back in shadowlands i was runnig dungeon. Going fine. Boss i wanted an item from didnt drop it. All I said, "damn no boots" in party chat. Thats it nothing else was said. Kicked. Ehh just for fun well vote kick this player cuz they said some thing in party chat? Yeah. Ovetall worst pppl ive ever met playing that game. Raiding was a trip.
I genuinly dont understand why people say that WoW is toxic. Comparing it to most online games I would say WoW community is actually pretty good. Sure, WoW community have its flaws (M+ and gatekeeping everything behind having a "curve" f.e), but other than that its fine. Especially that you arent forced to play with randoms - you can find a guild that suits you and play with people you know/like. Oh, I would forgot the most important thing: in most cases you can just leave the group/ignore people you dont want to play with. In the worst case you will maybe waste some time, but it completely fixes the issue usually. There is barely any punishment for leaving any content in WoW. PS. I say this as someone who did basically everything in WoW across the years except rated battlegrounds. I have been mythic raider, pushing m+, I have been complete casual doing LFR's, I have been playing casual PVP, I have been playing arenas, doing achievements - literally everything and I met all kind of different people.
Classic era is relatively nontoxic. The community, at large, is very toxic and the problem is pervasive. Even in the examples when everything goes ok, it’s largely because of avoiding doing things that will trigger them
Perfectly good water with 1% poison in it is still toxic. There are arseholes everywhere, it's the matter of intensity. I found out based on many many years of experience with many MMOs that WoW is by far the most toxic. Sometimes I encounter these people every single run, sometimes once every 5th but it's guaranteed that you will meet them. In other games I might have an unpleasent interaction once a month if I'm playing it a lot, sometimes it's so rare that I don't even remember it. I still have not figured out why WoW is so exceptional in that regard, followed closely only by League of Legends community.
Yeah the community never has been an issue when it comes to the actual game, it only has been an issue outside of the game which is kind of nuts to think about how much more toxic the WoW community is outside the game than in the game itself.
I dont know 1 person in my 20 years in wow that uses wow reddit... so those who do are guilty for them selves of that bias. Useless recording only adding to the toxicity.
I obviously don't keep data on this, but what you're describing is my experience. Last week I ran 22 keys and I can't even remember a specific negative interaction.
The entirety isnt toxic but enough of the base is. And for some, those who play at limited times can have the bad luck to get a horrendous group and if that’s the time they have to play, it’s a terrible experience. I do what I can to be positive, make a difference and help others. I can only hope they remember and it makes their day better
You do make a difference.
@ thank you. I definitely try. I was tanking an 8 Mists that went okay until the last boss. The execution was so bad with DPS not moving for the beam, not switching to adds and standing in stuff. After 35 deaths we called it, but along the way I told everyone what we needed to do to succeed. And in a non aggressive way to try not to offend and at least finish. But all I received was complete silence and it got even worse. I left without any further commentary and left it at that. Point is, another person in my place COULD be one of the toxic people, but I’m not. So hopefully they learned how to do it and can succeed in their future runs, with or without me
@@Netherstrasz I had the same thing happen but in a SoB +4. Having timed the key on my main on a +13 I didn't expect a +4 to be too difficult. Our group was an average ilvl of 610 which is more than strong enough to do a misely +4. The problems started right away with nobody in the dungeon interrupting the mobs, still it was managable because we were basically overgearing the dungeon. When we finally came to the last boss it was obvious that nobody actually knew the mechanics. The tank was running away from the tentacles on every mechanic resulting in the melee DPS dying every single pull. I tried explaining the mechanics to the team so that we would at least finish the dungeon, in 2 more pulls nothing improved so I just disbanded the group.
Be the change you wish to see in the world ... of warcraft.
Hello, hope you had a good day! (I'm doing the thing!)
As someone who has played WoW for 19 of its 20 years, I think your argument here is fine but also oversimplified. Sure, if we look at raw player count you run into, it is entirely likely that a vast minority of the people you encounter are toxic. However, as someone who has also played FFXIV for a decade, I think the difference people point at is the likelihood of a toxic event happening when you log in to the game. When I log into WoW, my personal experience is that I am just far more likely to have something negative happen - someone being snippy about heals or something that happens in a dungeon, watching arguments in trade chat, etc. Those happen more in WoW than in other MMOs I play (only really citing FFXIV because it's the one I engage with most outside of WoW) and I think it is fair to conclude that the game and community are more toxic as a result, because while your argument is statistically correct, it doesn't add up to the totality of experience someone might have. If I know I'm more likely to encounter negativity in a play session, it really doesn't matter that the negativity is from a small percentage of players if such things happen 20-50% of the sessions I put into the game.
I think the problem is twofold - as a community too many people lay down and let the toxic stuff happen and as a game Blizzard's enforcement of social interaction policies is lackluster. I went through a lot of the former as someone who was in a guild with a fair number of toxic people, which I had to remedy myself by quitting, taking as many non-toxic people as I could with me, and starting a different guild that worked to eliminate those issues, and I faced a lot of backlash from the toxic people for calling out their toxicity. I'm not sure how you handle that in the larger game though - I too struggle to directly confront it when I run into it in groups where I don't already have some measure of social capital.
WoW's creator ecosystem can be a problem for sure, but I also think that vastly overstates how many players actually engage with that stuff. I would wager, just from experience with different types of players, that most players actually aren't that plugged in to the game when they're not playing it - even some of the most dedicated players I know don't read news about the game, never go to the subreddit or watch videos from any creator about WoW, and they still have some of the same perceptions of the game as a toxic cesspit. Which is sometimes true! - even if statistically it is a minority of troublemaker players, the structure in the game and community allows that to happen unchecked far more often than in a lot of games, and I think that is worth confronting and addressing. You've done some of that here, but I think leaning on the proportion of players doing the toxic stuff isn't the strongest case and sometimes sounds like denial (it's a minority of players so therefore the game isn't toxic!) when I think there is truth to the idea that WoW is, not toxic generally, but at least more toxic than many other online multiplayer games. I don't think we can fix it by using toxic player percentage arguments to handwave that feeling away and pin the rest on salty creators and Redditors. Even if you want to blame them, they're still players in the community having bad experiences and it's worth understanding why that happens and how we might meaningfully prevent it.
I agree with all of this. I like WoW as a game more, but playing FFXIV for a few years really opened my eyes to how much more toxic WoW is. The amount of negative interactions I had in FFXIV can be counted on one hand, and I don’t even remember any of them.
I came back to WoW and wanted to do some time walking dungeons. Maybe 3 of them were nice and friendly, 2 of them had issues of people calling out how poorly some of the DPS were doing (we were getting through the dungeon just fine), and another one had arguments about which direction to go.
So 40% of my runs had a negative interaction. This is why I almost never actually use LFG. I just decided to this one time and it reinforced why I never use it.
WoW's playerbase isn't toxic. It's WoW's systems and gameplay that create toxic situations (M+ rushing like we are speedrunning the game, PUGs expecting no mistakes expecting to be carried by others, toxic PvP gameplay, etc.)
True. Blizzard made game that way and commiunity simply adapted to it.
if you know what to do in m+ the timer is not an issue below +14. wanna take your time in a dungeon? go to delves, or play m0, or ignore the timer, or play classic. if there was an option to remove the timer from the dungeon (but also reduce ilvl of the gear at the end plus no score) that would be fine, but if you can't do the dungeons in time then you can't do the dungeons in time!!
I love M+ and don't find it any more toxic than the rest of the game. Most M+ pugs are chill and gg at the end. I think people exaggerate.
Excluding the m+ timer which is a stupid argument by itself. What other systems create toxicity?
@@WladcaPodziemia Did Blizz make the real life world too? Because it's full of toxic culture wars at the moment. Or maybe people are just people, wherever you go, and our game world merely reflects that.
I've been playing this game for 17 years, I also played a lot of other games during my lifetime.
WoW is quite the opposite of toxic, I meet 1-2 assholish people (that can just be /ignore'd) for the dozens and dozens of cool people I meet, i've created numerous relationships thanks to this game.
People often help each other and have a good time, sometimes they can be sarcastic or have little patience but they rarely tell you extremely negative things, it is a far cry from what I consider even remotely toxic.
We literally just dumped a guy from our guild raid (needed a few pugs) for absolute toxicity. All caps immediately after a wipe on callouts for popping queen N's bubbles on Heroic.
Raid leader booted him after 3 outbursts. You get what you put up with.
This is most definitely a world problem. It sums up the news and social media, that essentially the loudest most negative person gets the most attention. In WoW I have a macro saying 'Thanks for the group!' that I use whenever I complete group content. I rarely get a response but it's polite and adds a bit of positivity. I ignore the toxic person and move on. It's the reason I enjoy the game far more than my husband, you gets into arguments and debates with the toxic, thinking that he'll somehow change their mind. He thinks most people are toxic and that's his view of the world as well. Unfortunately it will be an uphill battle to get people not to focus only on the bad. Good luck to you!
Not to start some comparison war but when I was playing FFXIV from 2021 to 2023 (practically played almost every day, devoured most content and unsubbed) I found that despite people often saying the game is far more inclusive, friendlier to newbies, super positive, etc, it's actually absurdly cliquey, toxic in quite subtle, manipulative ways, and in general much more "fake nice" people who will talk shit behind your back pretend like you don't exist in convos (this is not what specifically happened to me, just observing how various social/casual guilds operate there), versus people in WoW generally being far more outward and "simple" with their negativity, they say it how it is, they gatekeep, they throw a slur or two, but there's rarely mind games or borderline psychopathy involved.
Again, I have limited view of both camps as I haven't played either game for a decade, but I feel like I've interacted with enough people on both sides where I genuinely prefer WoW's "toxicity" versus FFXIV's "toxic positivity" and their own ways of subtle toxicity.
I noticed this in FFXIV too, never personally having any of these issues. But what’s nice about the “toxic positivity” as you called it is that when you just run a dungeon with those people, you don’t experience any of that negativity.
Having people in WoW saying negative things every other dungeon feels bad. In FFXIV you have a positive experience and move on.
I solved some of this problem by getting banned from the WoW Reddit for being honest.
2:43 no not right ive never had 4 perfect groups in a row let alone in a day
You're probably the negative player
Blizzard devs have made extremely intentional design decisions that permit and even reward really antosocial behavior. Until they make design decisions that encourage and reward pro-social behavior, one jerk really can ruin your gaming experience. The perception of toxicity is not a statistical phenomenon. It's a subjective phenomenon. We are wired to respond more intensesly to negative experiences. It's a survival habit. It's human nature. Throwing numbers at the problem attempts to sidestep an emotional, mammalian response with logic that technically addresses the issue without really understanding the issue.
I mean you could have 1/5th timewalking dungeons that are toxic or zero toxicity within the span of hard/extreme dungeons. The latter is governed by extreme formal and informal rules that dictate the overall flow of communication and community engagement in this particular MMO. I don't think your hypothetical works when there's greener grass elsewhere. People don't really need to put up with 1/5th timewalking dungeons, 1/3rd of every m+, and 1/2th of every, I don't know, classic raid. I truly think you need a better benchmark because I was under the same impression. "It's not that bad", "this is just the minority of time", "it's just negativity bias", etc. After discovering FFXIV endgame, I haven't felt the need to raidlog in classic or reattempt M+.
Granted, I will give you that the community projects "wow bad" but they've been doing that since Shadowlands & even farther back into BfA. I will even grant you that these misadventures are experienced in the minority of the time. However, what you hit on is something that cannot be addressed properly and doesn't seem to go away: namely, these echoing sentiments from exterior social media websites (twitter, reddit, blizz forums), which may even reinforce bad behaviors. It's why Classic has so many trolls with main character syndrome. It's a very old game where you can waste a lot of people's times. And you get rewarded for that with notoriety. Look at the Calamity Naxx Hardcore wipe where one guy wipes the entire raid due to, in his own words, a disagreement on the overall philosophy of hardcore. 40 toons permanently dead. All their hours wasted. It doesn't matter if he was wrong or right, it matters that he's now a known quantity.
You are rewarded for selfish behavior. That is WoW. This has not changed since classic to retail where retail groups have to be inherently gatekeep-y to progress keys. Again, I urge you to play a different MMO for a better benchmark because it doesn't have to be like this. Blizzard has yet to change the social moors amongst the community because it has been the core of WoW since original vanilla, and, as indicated by Blizzard's recent roadmap, where they string people along through different versions of WoW everytime retail or classic needs downtime for major updates, they are not incentivized to significantly overhaul their systems as its too late to build a better community.
"You are rewarded for selfish behavior. That is WoW." --- Facts. A small group of people can ruin it for the Majority. It's just the reality of modern retail wow.
@@cdogknight6661 And don't get me wrong, I actively think there's a lot of things WoW does better than any MMO in the market. I just always caution newer players or returning players on retail-classic ecosystem because I've played multiple versions of it. Blizzard sort of wants me to with the way they setup their roadmaps. You have to take the good with the bad and WoW is definitely far more toxic than other MMOs I've played to lategame.
Granted, I'll give video OP this: my perception of WoW is biased from playing so much WoW until recently.
I appreciate both of your perspectives! I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how to go about fixing it. Do you think a better reporting system would be enough?
@@acadiianwow Unfortunately I don't think you will ever entirely eliminate Toxicity/Negative experiences in wow, but the developers could try to minimize them. If I had to offer solutions it would be something like this. Stop designing the game to be an esport for the super sweatiest, I would ratchet down the difficulty to attain endgame rewards significantly. I would still allow players that want to do +13 Mythics to do them, but there just wouldn't be any gear upgrades. Hint - Those players will do it anyway they don't do it for the gear. I also would try and focus on building community through designing fun experiences that the players do outside of DPS Meters and competitive play. Wow housing is a good step I believe, but the point is the game has to shift to a bit of a different developer mindset than what we have now. They just made it so a +12 key will not deplete. Why just a 12 key? Why not all keys can't deplete, wouldn't that create less toxicity?
If you think FF's community is any better I don't know what to say lmao 💀
I'm no expert, but I do remember an article about how our minds are hard wired to look out for hazards, and negative experiences make impressions that are about ten times stronger than positive ones in general. I've seen lots of awful guild drama, had my account hacked on Christmas day--coincidentally after a tank complained about my healing, a rushing tank that expected the whole party to keep up with her reckless pulls, on and on. I've had good times too, flirting with lady night elves, a "free show" from a lady warrior who was apologizing for getting us wiped. Been playing since 2006. Just questing and soloing nowadays. Barely ventured into dungeons with the AI bots. Happy hermit here. Thanks for your channels, brother. Good advice not just for WoW, but for life in general.
Timewalking has been getting a lot of bad rap lately because of it being more difficult in certain level/gear brackets. I found tanking it a bit this last week it was really beneficial to just ask "do you guys want to do the optional bosses?" or "should we pull for xp or a faster clear?" All those runs went great. And, of course, if you are in a hurry, remember many classes have abilities that can speed up the party members in the back, like the shaman totem or the monk tiger lust, so that's a great use for them.
Back in the day the toxic or selfish or just bad people got kicked from guilds prevented to join groups got a reputation because servers were a closed community self regulating.
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since 2006 on private servers, and I’ve never had more toxic experiences than positive ones. People tend to exaggerate everything on forums like the WoW forums or Reddit.
The toxicity is also vastly different depending on where you are.
I've been pushing keys on a new character, from 2 to 15.
Once I crossed the +12 barrier, the toxicity almost _almost_ completely disappeared. I have had one person out of a hundred keys actually be toxic.
Said person then invited me to a key later and apologized and told me to have a good evening.
In the lower level keys however, everything is always everyone elses fault. No one takes responsibility for anything. Died with potions and personals ready? Healer fault.
Pulled too much for the group comp? "I do this with my normal group, you guys just suck."
I think it doesn't help that the mistakes made in lower level keys are significantly more frustrating - and easier to point out. Like, lets be honest, if you're reasonably geared for a key, the only way you even remotely risk dying is by doing mistakes. Not kicking priority casts, not healing/dispelling the affix debuff, failing to kill totems in stonevault. All of these obvious mistakes are so easy to point out, which makes it easy to turn on other people. In higher level keys where the mistakes are much, much smaller, such as being a second too late on your personal CD, or angling the mobs frontal so healer has to move during an intense AoE Healing scenario, the mistakes are, in my optics, more often forgiven.
You really cross a barrier where people cease looking at everyone else, and start looking primarily at themselves. Which is when the game gets really, really fun.
This has been my experience as well.
There's nothing more cursed on this planet than Wowhead comments. Good god they are a total cesspool of negativity. The less commentary you read (about anything), the more you'll enjoy it. I'm 100% convinced of that.
Absolutely, I try to avoid any commentary on WoW for the most part, people just have a habit of crapping on the game. TWW is one of my favourite Xpac's so far
I don't think the majority of the player base is toxic but unfortunately it only takes one toxic person to ruin a whole group. As of late, this has been my average experience:
PvE runs
2/5 Negative
1/5 Positive
2/5 Neutral
PvP matches
3/5 Negative
1/5 Positive
1/5 Neutral
The toxicity is honestly not even usually directed at me but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It has lead to me doing the majority of the content I consume with my Guild or I just opt to do solo content. I feel myself less willing and likely to participate in group content lately because of my general experience. The worst part is, when I try to be the voice of reason or positivity, I am usually met with silence or negativity for defending the "bad player". It's added a level of social exaustion that is driving me away and it makes me sad. I have been playing for all 20 years and I love this game. I want to keep being a driving force for the good experiences that are possible and keep people coming back but as the late, great John Coffey once said, "I'm tired boss"...
Great content though, I think you had some excellent points and I don't think all is lost. I do think we have a lot of work to do as a community and more than a few players out there could and should do better. GLHF and I hope to see you all out there!
It's possible too that if a person has a higher than average number of toxic interactions that they're just a below average player. If that's the case I'd recommend they try to play with a somewhat static set of people that are on their level.
Too much passivity. Even in your example, there were players who just watched this happen.
That is true. I think that's another reason why we should try to interact in a more positive way with our groups. Make the toxicity less of a normal thing by being social with one another in party chat.
There’s so much truth to this. We’ve all been in a group where one person picks on another person, and the rest of the group remains silent. Theres one reason for this. If the rest of the group speaks up against the antagonist then that person gets pissed and all of a sudden “everyone is an idiot” and he leaves, depleting the key. People are more prone to just be quiet, let the person talk bad about another party member because the chances of just sticking through completing the key is greater than calling someone out for being a toxic player.
I stopped entering dungeons as every time I tried it was just people running as fast as they can. So I don't know any of the newer stuff, except the ones I can do follower dungeons with. I don't like to say I am new to it, as I just expect to get kicked. Of course when the door shuts and I am locked out, it is blamed on me for not keeping up. I have since gone back to classic with the anniversary fresh release and I am now enjoying it again. People talk and it can't be done at rapid pace
Hey man, I found your videos recently and love your philosophy shown in your content. I also appreciate your points about the social and positive side of WoW, I commented in another vid recently about Classic vs. Retail - I love the visceral speedy combat of retail and M+ is my jam, running with a great group cutting through swathes of enemies and working together is a thrill, but the one thing I miss from classic is a great community and the social aspect. A lot of the time in dungeons most of the interactions are "Hi" and "BL here", then you're lucky if you speak again, other than getting flamed for messing up a mech xD
But positivity is something I've been thinking about also which is weird that you bring it up, if dungeons go well I make it a habit now to be like "Big props to the tank/healer, thanks for a great job guys" and they seem to appreciate that. Definitely agree this community could use some positivity
thanks for watching! keep putting out positivity, it does make a difference.
WoW lacks some social engineering in it's systems.
A big friction point for toxicity to occur will always be too differing expectations getting thrown together in a queue or pug setting.
For example I run 3 characters through heroic queen and 4/8M each week in a pug and despite the age of the raid and stacking raidbuff groups seem to get worse by each week because it is very difficult to "filter" appropriate players for something that's supposed to be a quick farm run.
FF14 party (group) finder gives you the tools to precisely set expectations for the kind of run you want this to be: Practice (progress/learn group) / Duty Completion (progress in kill range) / Loot (Farm group/raid, you can only join this if you already killed the encounter).
Not saying there aren't also other factors or that there are never any toxic interactions but quite frankly for how difficult some savage encounters are the FF14 party finder experience is just way less frequently toxic because people mostly know what they're getting into and can expect.
Yes, unfortunately, our go to mentality is …if something happens once it happens “all the time…”. and although I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of the richer aspects of experiencing the game. I still tend to keep to myself and solo most content to avoid either disappointing fellow players with a mistake or listening to them berate somebody else for a mistake it’s just better for my sanity personally 😂
Man, I appreciate your content so much. ❤
I also think the game is not as toxic as it seems. Negativity just gets traction easier. I also think that a lot of people who post these negative experiences are not telling the full story. But I am curious if other games deal with it better, especially since WoW has a rush and optimise culture. I’ve noticed that if you really try to be friendly and good, you’re likely to get it back.
@@Synergy1898 I agree it’s not as toxic as it seems. It’s just like the news where negative, crazy stories are reported more and human nature is to be drawn to tragedy. It’s one of the sad reasons so many content creators focus on that stuff with their videos. Bellular being one of them. Arcadiian is an outlier in the best way!
There has been lot of discussion in Reddit that people who encounter toxicity usually are pretty bad players in general. Ive been playing almost 20 years and the amount of toxicity i get is almost none. I pug 90% of my dungeons. In every version of wow. If you run 5 time walking dungeons and get yelled in 4. Maybe its not the community.
Doesn't take many sour grapes to ruin the bunch. I think the issue is the casual players are leaving and the basement dwellers are doubling down. It's a vicious cycle.
Thank you for the video
I personally believe it's more of a people problem than a wow problem. From my experience of several years of playing FF14 I'm confident that the toxicity is very similar if not the same, it's just that among the wow playerbase there's overwhelming negative sentiment towards the game as a whole (people disliking the expansion, company etc. which I don't think is the case with FF14 yet) but both games have been out long enough to see that it's more of a paradigm shift among the player mentality. I personally think it's mainly because people feel the need to rush and minmax every content possible and even the small setback like boss wipe which means the dungeon takes couple minutes more enrages them greatly
You could make the same argument for any other game (that is based on playing with other random ppl), yet there arent this many videos touching on toxicity of all games... just some of them - those that do have toxic commiunities.
And keep in mind, most cases, not majority is toxic, but toxic part is usually vocal and allowed to grow - especially with current WoW's systems and implementations
Like others said it only really takes one person to ruin your day
I wanted to write this comment throughout the whole video, waited until 14:31 where, at least it seems, the main argument is done (I agree with all of it, by the way). I will finish the video, of course, but I just had to get this off my chest. First of all, this thing you're doing where you talk about general life stuff in the context of World of Warcraft? It's great and very much needed. Have you considered just full-screening your camera and presenting it that way? You can always cut away to gameplay, especially if it illustrates what you're talking about, or some other kind of B roll when you're not happy about that specific part of the presentation on camera. The background footage is just mostly irrelevant to what you're talking about and sometimes distracting, taking away from the excellent points you're making in the bottom left corner.
Second, this whole "2 people out of the sample size of 40, signal-boosted by Reddit and/or other content on the Internet" problem might even be worse than what's presented in your video. Why? Because 1 of those "toxic" people might have just gotten shouted at at work, got back home, had enough time for 5 timewalking dungeons and queued to blow off some steam, fully intending to be nice to people, but had a new player trying to tank. He was already annoyed, so, despite his best intentions, he got too frustrated and tried politely telling the new tank what he should do, only for the tank guy to go on a power trip born from watching a video that said that the tank "sets the pace of the dungeon and controls the route" or whatever, exacerbating our "toxic" guy's annoyance. And then, this "toxic" guy, stressed as hell from work and annoyed at the previous tank, just takes it into his own hands, pulling a bunch of mobs and snaps back when the tank asks him to stop, queue drama.
The point is that people sometimes act toxic, but they rarely are maliciously toxic. Usually, it's just them having a bad day or being overly defensive due to PTSD-like learned responses from interacting with, maybe, 20 toxic people in total over the last six years that they still remember two expansions later. I've played my Evoker in low keys, most of my pugs were okay. Sure, they made mistakes, I did too, some were obviously returning players. What do I remember from that entire process playing M+ on my Evoker? I remember a tank who insisted on pulling the mobs in front of the church entrance in Dawnbreaker, despite three of the remaining four team members just landing at the side entrance on the right like most people do in that part of the dungeon. When I asked him to just come in through the side, he said, "I'm the tank. I lead, you follow." Then, he left the group, the timer was more than low enough to time the dungeon. That's it, that's all I remember. If I didn't know better, I'd fall for a bunch of biases that humans fall into, most of which (aside from confirmation bias (I think,) which got triggered in a major way when the first guy read the post on /r/wow) you mentioned in the video.
This is an excellent direction for the channel, I think, this niche is more or less empty. All you need is some more visually stimulating/inviting thumbnails and your channel should blow up, because you're saying things that NEED to be said more than anything most WoW content creators are talking about for the health of the game overall.
EDIT: Dammit, 20:11, you mentioned it. Sorry for wasting your time, I guess.
thanks for watching and giving your perspective!
Some more great takes! Well said. I love all the positivity you are putting out there with your videos lately. I also saw the Reddit post you were referring to and it made me sad. I’m not sure what the point of these negative posts are. Are they looking for validation? I have overwhelmingly positive experiences when grouping with pugs as well. Let’s be the positive change we want to see in the community! 🎉
Nobody ever talks in game anymore so you never see any positive feedback. Any time anyone speaks in group content it's mostly to complain about something. So yea, not everyone is toxic, but the ones who are are also the only people who speak.
Wows player base is toxic this is a fact
I think the comments about negativity bias and then the echo chamber that can build up around people sharing negative experiences are a fair and useful take. However your comparison with watching a baseball team doesn’t stand. If the Red Sox lose 1 in 5 matches, ok you have a 20% chance of a not great experience. However, being personally abused is a much more negative experience, it hurts and you may want to avoid that far more even if the chance of happening is far lower. I was thinking of an analogy of walking down a street at night many times and it’s fine. But one time you are threatened or even assaulted. You may choose to never walk down that street again due to the risk of that happening again even though statistically it’s unlikely.
The base argument is incorrect, I believe, since you assume that players who chose not to talk with other group-members while in dungeon is a good thing, not a negative experience.
The game taught players that being anti-social was good. Performance is key. Well, in dungeon, when I feel like I could replace my group-members with AIs and it wouldn't change anything, I for one would say that I'm having a very negative and miserable experience. Blizzard hasn't added the whole "Follower Dungeon" feature for the fun of it.
As someone who used to have fun in dungeon way back during Vanilla, I got to see the change happen, and the biggest cataclyst was the addition of LFG in Wrath of the Lich King.
To me, the simple truth is that WoW has become un-enjoyable outside of playing with friends and guildmates. Sadly for me, all my friends and guildmates got sick of the game during BfA and Shadowlands and refuse to give another chance to Blizzard and WoW.
i think thats one of the reasons they are making m+ without a time limit
Been playing since launch and I can’t even remember any toxic encounters in wow besides maybe a ninja looting raid leader. Some people love to harp and focus on the negative. 😮💨 couldn’t be me
There's no time to type and be toxic in timewalking with these OP as fuck lvl 11 warriors/monks just zooming along and destroying everything
It gets toxic i think for new ppl because players arent very willing to help or give someone a break for being new to something
While I agree with your main argument, I think this would have been a richer analysis if you looked at the proliferation of sexist/racist/homophobic speech in WoW spaces.
I love WoW and have played since launch, but the difference between the amount of homophobic or fucked up shit people share in chat in WoW compared to FFXIV taught me a lot about how problematic the WoW community can be compared to others.
It’s surprisingly rampant. Sad to see, but even worse to see that nothing gets done to reduce it.
2 points. First is that you should use a script, even just loose bulletpoints to keep yourself on track. In the beginning you were repeating yourself a ton and it feels like this video could be so much more streamlined.
The second is that the problem is not that one person out of 20 said something slightly mean. The problem is that's the only communication in dungeons. In classic, I play healer and occasionally the tank congratulates me for saving rough pulls. In retail I don't believe I've ever experienced that. I enjoy getting typing in chat and getting a lil silly sometimes, especially when running raids with randoms but it's very rare to see others join in casual conversation. W hen there's no conversation that's neutral/positive, only negative, it creates a negative feeling.
I get the feeling you're more intelligent than this, but the first point combined with misrepresenting the issue as "people have 1 negative interaction out of 100 is just them being dumb" just makes you sound dumber than you probably are
the game is more toxic in some very specific areas of content. if you are killing a world boss or farm mats with 3 other people you wont encounter any negativity, but if you try to complete coordinated group content with 4 randoms you never seen before and are not in voice with instead, you cant act surprised if things dont go your way. a high failure rate leads to frustration and negativity. the game wants you to make friends and look for a guild. i started playing the game in bfa and instantly got into a guild since a friend of mine from said guild convinced me to play the game in the first place. since then im playing with the same 15-20 people. since i never use the lfg tool the only toxicity i encounter is some manchild beeing mad to lose the roll on some purple item from the raid. BuT bUt It Is My BiS xd. we are playing alot of dungeons aswell but aslong as you dont use the tool or pug one random at max you wont encounter any issues. also playing with the same people drasticly increases the success rate and winning people aint complaining ^^.
This is the reason everyone think Latam players are toxic. Yes, there are toxic people in ragnaros (I'm not playing in that realm tho), SAME AS IN EVERY OTHER REALM. And just bc some people don't speak english then suddenly they are toxic. Like, first of all, if the group is mostly Spanish speakers then we will speak Spanish between us, but if we need u to know something then we will type it in english.
Yes, there are toxic players in ragnaros but then you add EVERYONE in there. It would be the same if we as Spanish speakers say "every American is toxic" just for some players of the english realms.
And stop with the language thing. Yeah, not all of latam players speak english, but most of the wow latam community does. And remember, you speak english bc is the only language you know. We speak english because is the only language YOU know.
Ps: You wouldn't know that you are playing with a latam player if they're realm is any other than the latam ones, so stop saying LATAM players are toxic pls
The problem is you are looking at it as 5% of the population is toxic in your example but people will look at it as 20% of their gameplay was toxic.
WoW certainly has a Toxic Player base.
Even if it is a product of its systems and design.
People are very petulant, entitled, and could care less about anyone other than themselves.
nearly no one works together outside of a guild, and people will report you just for fun.
People will kick you from a dungeon with the reason being "lawl it's funny :D "
And WOW forums is the most deplorable cesspool of insufferable individuals imaginable.
If you even make a post with a sugestion, you'll have Blizz forum white knights attack you personally, and insult you, and when you defend yourself
they'll all label you a troll.
I've played many MMOS with systems like WoWs. And WoWs community is by far from my experience the most toxic, and petulant and malicious group of players I've ever experienced.
Now, of course there are good players too. Naturally.
I love it when DPS pings where YOU hsould go as tank even if you're going the right way. And they'll run off and get themeslves killed and blame YOU.
And I'll say "What are you doing? Why are you not following me?"
They'll say "You're supposed to go this way it's faster!"
I then say "If you want the privilege of telling people where to go, and what to do then you need to also take upon yourself the responsibility of being a tank.
you don't get to relax as DPS and them command everyone around.
At least when I stopped playing, all server channels were filled with player boosting and a little LFG, you joined silent dungeon and raid groups to complete your content and that’s it. I fail to see the display of any emotion, let alone toxicity
If gameplay criticism if negativity and toxicity , stop playing a massive multiplayer online role playing game where 20% affects the 100%, or 5% affects the 100%
Terribly toxic.
I’m going to go ahead and call bs. The WoW is toxic as all hell. I played during Legion. My first day playing my first 20 mins in the game I got randomly harassed with spam tells talking shit and literally just for standing around taking in the world area. I wasn’t even in a group. Day one new player don’t know anyone didn’t interfere with anyone and that’s what I get.
Time progresses, character progresses and every other time I played wow be it dungeons or solo content if someone wasn’t randomly starting shit with me they were doing it to other’s. Watched a group implode because one guy decided he hated how the frost mage looked. Had nothing to do with how he was playing. Raids are even worse behavior. That’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Yeah you love Wow but don’t shill while claiming you’re not shilling.
Your experience is not the only experience…
To say the wow community isn’t toxic is a boldfaced lie.
The fact that there isn’t an in game voice chat opens the door to toxicity. Theres keyboard warriors out there in M+ because they know they’ll never see people in the group again. It blew my mind 10 years ago that you didn’t automatically join voice chat like any multiplayer game these days, and it’s still mind boggling to me. I know there’s people out there who would love to communicate with other WoW players (especially those regularly pugging 4-10s), but just don’t because it’s not easy.
I honestly don't understand this video. If 2 people out of 40 are toxic and spreading toxicity in a video game, especially a video game with grouping like world of warcraft then 40 ppl by definition have been subjected to the toxicity. If these 2 people group up 20 times in a dungeon, then they will influence 80 other players negatively, thus the game is toxic. It's just simple math. In other words, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.
With this logic literally all communities are toxic. There will always be bad apples in a bunch. The point of the video is to not let that one person define a community and to encourage people to put more positivity into the world. Toxic people will never go away, but we can do better at not amplifying them or letting them be the face of our community.
@@acadiianwow The point I'm making is that the majority of the players will experience toxicity in wow just by the nature of how the game is built, mythic plus pugging and group finder, or just pugging in general, time walking, LFR whatever. The majority of the community doesn't have to be toxic for the game to be toxic. Think of it this way - If you live in a town with a thousand people in it and 5 of them are murderers and they are constantly going around murdering people, then the town has a murder problem, even though the majority of the "community" aren't murderers. It's the same thing with wow.
All 40 of those people were not there for the 2 in this scenario. A total of 8 other people were subjected to 2 cruddy people.
@cdogknight6661 if you think someone can be toxic in a videogame then you're soft. Your ancestors that stormed Normandy are rolling in their graves
@@adinaholmes5269 what he's saying is those 2 ppl group up multiple times, 5 times 4 equals 20, 2 times 20 equals 40
There are most certainly toxic, abusive players; who treat one another like toilet paper.
Like any tumor, they cluster together & poison everything in their vicinity.
Its usually xiv players who say it. I know wow players who play both games but I know none of them who play wow but nearly all of them have this visceral negative reaction to the game and what is more fascinating is most of them have never played the game themselves to experience it, its entirely bad experiences explained by a friend of a friend who likely also didn't play it who heard it from their friend who may have played for 3 days, 7 years ago. I don't know many people on the inside who say that the game is entirely and fully toxic just rumors and gossip from the game's closest competition and their brand-loyal members and whoever they can tell first.
Nah, wow community is the worst MMO community ive experienced. Remember back in shadowlands i was runnig dungeon. Going fine. Boss i wanted an item from didnt drop it. All I said, "damn no boots" in party chat. Thats it nothing else was said. Kicked. Ehh just for fun well vote kick this player cuz they said some thing in party chat? Yeah. Ovetall worst pppl ive ever met playing that game. Raiding was a trip.
I genuinly dont understand why people say that WoW is toxic. Comparing it to most online games I would say WoW community is actually pretty good. Sure, WoW community have its flaws (M+ and gatekeeping everything behind having a "curve" f.e), but other than that its fine. Especially that you arent forced to play with randoms - you can find a guild that suits you and play with people you know/like.
Oh, I would forgot the most important thing: in most cases you can just leave the group/ignore people you dont want to play with. In the worst case you will maybe waste some time, but it completely fixes the issue usually. There is barely any punishment for leaving any content in WoW.
PS. I say this as someone who did basically everything in WoW across the years except rated battlegrounds. I have been mythic raider, pushing m+, I have been complete casual doing LFR's, I have been playing casual PVP, I have been playing arenas, doing achievements - literally everything and I met all kind of different people.
Classic era is relatively nontoxic. The community, at large, is very toxic and the problem is pervasive.
Even in the examples when everything goes ok, it’s largely because of avoiding doing things that will trigger them
Perfectly good water with 1% poison in it is still toxic. There are arseholes everywhere, it's the matter of intensity. I found out based on many many years of experience with many MMOs that WoW is by far the most toxic. Sometimes I encounter these people every single run, sometimes once every 5th but it's guaranteed that you will meet them. In other games I might have an unpleasent interaction once a month if I'm playing it a lot, sometimes it's so rare that I don't even remember it. I still have not figured out why WoW is so exceptional in that regard, followed closely only by League of Legends community.
Not my experience. People are people. Toxicity in WoW is no worse than the rest of the world.
Yeah the community never has been an issue when it comes to the actual game, it only has been an issue outside of the game which is kind of nuts to think about how much more toxic the WoW community is outside the game than in the game itself.
I dont know 1 person in my 20 years in wow that uses wow reddit... so those who do are guilty for them selves of that bias.
Useless recording only adding to the toxicity.
No. No. They're toxic, definitely toxic... most of them.
No I'm toxic lol. I've been banned permanently on my main account from the forums.
My 2nd account I'm still OK.
😆
People are just too soft
You wear camo pants to bed bro 😂
@KrisCleans joined 1 week ago😂 you bot
@ I know you are BOT what am I?
@@KrisCleans I bet you have pronouns in your email sig
@@DeltaTango2024 what’s an email sig?