Can a video game company tame toxic behaviour?
An interesting article: http://www.nature.com/news/can-a-video-game-company-tame-toxic-behaviour-1.19647
10 Comments
Nice article, I found the parts about the colour of the tips particularly interesting, didn't expect it to have an effect.
Ive always stood by the opinion that a game can tame toxic behavior by design. GW2 did this really well in PVE on launch imo. But its always going to be much much harder to do in a competitive game compared to a PVE cooperative game.
The second your personal 'score' depends on someone else's performance toxicity will occur. Riot could greatly reduce toxicity by making LP and rank determined by how well you perform individually in games and not just solely on win and loss but it would have other drawbacks that naturally wouldn't make it worth it.
I'm really tired so i'll read it later, but for now I gotta say that toxicity is build in LoL by design. If someone wants to reduce toxicity, all he needs to do is reduce competitiveness. I belive there are already data out there supporting this. I'll post it later.
Honestly if you devote the resources into curbing the negative behavior, toxicity will stop. It takes a lot of toxic behavior to get banned in League. If there were moderators who got called to games with a click of a button and people got banned immediately, the negative behavior would cease overnight. Not practical but it can be done. As in the case of GW2. Very low tolerance for toxic behavior when the game launched. They set the tone for what they expected out of players early.
Toxicity is the nature of competition and its within our animalistic nature. You can't tame it fully unless you go full on bodhisattva.
I think the best way to deal with it is to let it out by feeling physical pain face to face as can be seen in the most primal activity which is combat fighting
I know how to solve this problem!
The mute button. Seriously, people need to grow the fuck up and stop and thinking that game developers should be stopping toxic chat when a mute button exists. It is like willingly going to a KKK bar as a black guy, you already know shit is about to happen- why wouldn't you just, you know, go to a bar you are actually welcome in? Do you have something to prove?
Seriously, this is the internet people.
Nothing will ever stop League "toxicity" until the entire ranking system is reworked. People are always going to get frustrated when they are punished for their teammates poor performance. That is the root of all toxicity.