There are two kinds of people in this world:Those who say, “Let’s just play one quick game.”And those who know that sentence is a lie. Welcome to part 7 of my board game obsession — where friendships are tested, alliances are broken, and someone always says, “Wait, that’s not the rule.” This week’s lineup? Chaos, speed, survival, and strategy. In short: emotional damage, but make it fun. 1.…

helps me with my ganer rage

contributes to my over all health

gives me room to figure out what I did wrong

[intro]

_(Visuals of chaotic gameplay moments, angry voice chat snippets, fast cuts between win/loss screens)_

Every multiplayer games these days cultivate a toxic community, but there is a better way,

[dramatic pause]

### Coop Games

Cooperative games are about helping your allies and doing favors for everyone to progress to a common goal.

- i will do this so you can do that

- i take aggro and you heal me so they can dps

- i give you a platform so you can mine that ore

there is this see saw of things you can do that other people can help you, and you can help them do their things. you being limited and relying on other people and them relying on you is part of the fun.

### Comp Games

on the other side of the coin there is competitive games, the see saw is replaced with prediction and reaction of your opponents actions, there is no social contract or expectations of your allies to worry about, everything you can do to win is allowed.

in a fighting game this is expressed as the triad of poking, going in and reacting,

if you poke and i go in your poke will interrupt my all in, if i react and you go in i can't react to it, if you react and i poke, you will react to my poke and punish me.

this creates a even ground of options that rely on positioning and prediction of what your opponent will do to choose the right option.

kart games are all about knowing the map and best times to use itens while testing how well you drive.

### Team Based Games

team based games integrate both aspects of playing along side and against other people. Allowing you to interact alongside and against other players.

## Every game is so Toxic

But then why does every game community has a problem of being anti-social and toxic? In my opinion, the core problem is the system around the game, where every bridge is burned after the game ends, if you want it or not.

Modern matchmaking makes so you play with and against people you will probably never see again, making you unable to create bonds with or against people. Not only that, but you are usually reliant on those strangers, which is frustrating if they don't meet your expectations of them.

When people talk about their teammates, its usually in a negative tone, "my teammates are trash these bunch of apes", in the best of cases is advice saying that you cannot rely on your teammates when you usually have to, rarely is about how you have expectations of them and how they aren't meeting those, either by your very high standards or whether you think you should win this game.

People play multiplayer games to satisfy a need for interacting with other people, but most people play alone, unable to find community in the games that they like.

In the end, you are gambling for a good or bad time with other people, maybe the people that you are reliant on is just bad and you can't rely on them, so you get out with a bad taste on your mouth, maybe everyone did their part and the game was great, that makes playing the game in itself a skinner box.

If you can't rely on those people and get frustrated, you will control the experience of the game the way you can, IE, you will be toxic towards your teammates to vent your frustration.

Even with good moderation tools, the problem is fundamental of the format, the format in and of itself creates toxicity and no amount of moderation will fix that design issue.

long term, this becomes normal and even expected, specially by the problem person that is toxic first for no reason, in the end, this type of people just want a excuse to be toxic to someone.

## How can this be fixed?

The easiest way to fix this is to facilitatelong term relationships to emerge. for friendshipe to emerge you need 3 things:

1. a prosperous enviroment

2. the right density of people

3. repeated encounters between people

In a battle royale you won't make friends because is you agains't everyone else, they are your enemy. In a crowd of 100 people, you won't make friends, there is simply too much people and actually getting to know someone is hard, same if its just you or a couple of people, there is more chance there but its not the right enviroment.

Now, the biggest problem is that every single time you queue you are put in the game with different strangers, you probably don't make friends out of meeting them, so to fix this you need spaces for people to interact repeatedly, the most common way is thru text chats also know as guilds or clans.

With everything in mind, the solution is to allow players to create social circles thru guilds and community servers, this allows a small number of players to have repeated encounters in a non threatening enviroment.

One thing i should add, allow people to be in multiple guilds, each guild is a abstraction of a social circle, and unless you are in a literal cult, people usually have multiple social circles to interact with, having to choose between the map makers circle and the competitive one isn't fun.

The other change they should add is gate keep the competitive mode thru having a guild focused on it, this wold allow people to communicate safely and help their team to get better thru talking about their expectations of each other.

Each guild could be focused on one type of competitivenes so you can enter multiple of them, but only be in one guild per mode, so you either have to change teams or fix this one.

so playing competitively means strengthening your social bonds and coordinating just as much as it means to improve at the game.

## Why isn't this done?

The short answer is that this isn't the expectations of what players feel familiar with and that people don't know how to do this.

the long answer is that the skinner box effect makes so that people will play more for longer, keeping players around thru frustration and making so they buy more stuff in the in game store.

The skinner box means that if you had a good game you will queue again to keep the streak, if you had a bad one you can't leave now and has to end on a win.

Hot Hoops Alert! Dive into the ultimate basketball showdown with the HOTE category! Get ready for slam-dunking action, nail-biting finishes, and games so hot they'll melt the net! Step onto the court and prove you've got what it takes to dominate. It's game time, are you ready to bring the heat? Let the games begin!

Basically the system overvalues raw damage and back-flanking, especially when taking the Bounty system into account. Because of this, some characters (Soldier 76, Reaper, and Reinhardt are the worst offenders, not necessarily in that order) inadvertantly seem to heavily encourage lone flanking. This has always been a problem to an extent in most non-silly modes, but the credits take it one step further, making it appear that players who dash into the backline, maybe get a low-priority kill or two, and die, leaving an often-unprepared force trying to hold or push, are somehow the highest-ranked players on the team despite effectively doing nothing.

Because of this, after the first couple weeks of the season, those players disappear from the mode, convinced that, somehow, every team they get matched with is terrible, and they are the best so they are going to go play and shout slurs in 'real' comp.

It's… It's kind of nice to have a friendly competitive mode. Having been 'pro gaming' for a good portion of my life, I have never seen a generally-friendly mode or community like this. The wonky numbers actually filter out the bad people, and that's definitely unintentional but I hope it continues.