Toxicity in Gaming Communities and How to Fix It – Dead by Daylight

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31 thoughts on “Toxicity in Gaming Communities and How to Fix It – Dead by Daylight”

  1. Toxicity is going out of your way to ruin someone’s experience. Simple as that. Your example for instance, the person saying that is not in a position of power, the game is over. And at that point it’s personal harassment.

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  2. I feel like in most cases it could be a self fulfilling prophecy, where because a survivor/killer perceives an in game strategy as being toxic, and comments on it in post game chat(etc.) they themselves engage in more toxic behavior as a means of revenge for an action that isn’t inherently toxic.

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  3. Scott, this video was one of your best. You hit the 'toxic' definition and details right on the head. I am an 'older'/casual player and when toxicity hits – I am completely unfazed by it. I am still having fun with the game!

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  4. Take a walk or play something else. I think a lot of people have a mentality of "ending on a win" which will only make things worse. If you just go outside and breathe fresh air it will scientifically make you deal with it better and make you feel better

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  6. I think the question of "How do you deal with it?" more is them asking you how you still find enjoyment in the game when people play like that. Personally, my answer to that is to quite literally just not give a fuck. The result of the match should not matter to you anymore; just play the game to the best of your ability and what happens, happens. I acknowledge that some people cannot be gracious in defeat, and some cannot be gracious in victory either. Don't give them the satisfaction of you being mad. Just give them a ggwp in the endgame chat and move on with your life, because just as Scott said, it's just a game. Just let them have their little power trip and focus on yourself rather than their need for validation from strangers on the internet.

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  8. I think toxic is verbal abuse in the chat, or hacking. Nothing else qualifies, IMHO. In regard to dealing with it, I agree with you, this is just a game, none of these lil shits matter.

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  9. 8:04 Scott, you forgot the most important part, the people that get mad at "toxic players" are also kids, probably the same age.

    Edit: 11:57 Ah, mb mb, needed to watch 1 more minute before posting the comment for you to say it… Well now that im editing, I might as well add something more relevant.

    12:57 You asked How do you guys deal with "toxic" players. and what I usually tell newbies playing this game is Tunnel the shit out of them, do everything you can do kill them./ Run as well as you can, use every perk to survive.

    Now you might think Well thats the dumbest thing ive ever heard, youre giving the trolls exactly what they want. well yesnt. If youre a new player, the best way for you to learn is by playing against good opponents & most of the time trolls are kinda decent. AND:

    – If you get to kill them = You won and wont be toxic.
    – If you die = You use DS and have more opportunities to loop and learn how to loop.
    – The better you are = the less trolls annoy you.

    Obviously this logic isnt flawless, but I like to think its a lot better than telling a new player Just ignore them. because if they do ignore them, it will usually end with the troll abusing the newbies mistakes and cause a flashlight save/ pallet save/ loss; and a loss that was cause by a "toxic player" usually results in the newbie going with NOED for the next couple of games which just continues the vicious cycle. (Not a rule I follow, but something ive told many new players I personally know and seeing how they manage with trolls & toxicity a lot better after a couple weeks… I think it works.)

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  14. But Scott, with the way the game is right now you could make the case that you DO have to tunnel people to win the game as Killer. If you can get an easy 3v1 early then it is objectively the right now to tunnel that weak link out of the game A.S.A.P. so you can win.
    I'm a fair play Killer, I want twelve hooks and I never want to hook the same person twice in a row. As of late I'm finding this really hard to do. I'm finding it really hard to get even just four hooks most games. Because I refuse the camp and tunnel.
    I find tunneling to me toxic adjacent. More in that it's not so much a toxic action in and of itself in that it's toxic because the Killer player ONLY cares about "their win" and nothing else. As a Killer player I want the game to be fun for everyone, not just myself. So when I see someone else get tunneled or I'm tunneled myself I don't find that to be fun and don't have fun that game which makes it a toxic game to me.

    2:53 Eigh, I don't find it funny at all. Just take the down. Now if it's a "You manage to sneak up on someone and trap them in a corner" now that's kind of funny. Just a normal chase and down is kinda of eiiiiiiigh. It takes something from winning the chase when they have the time to stop and rapid crouch when they know they've lost instead of them continuing to try and escape.

    4:50 Yeah, no, it happening in the game is what makes it toxic, because they rub it in and ruin what enjoyment I'm getting. When I'm loosing as Killer and people take the time to clicky-clicky or t-bag because they know they're going to win that makes a bad situation even worse and just shits on my feelings. Doesn't even have to be at the exit gate, though that's the prime lowest risk Not-Even-N.O.E.D.-Matters-Now time. People can very much be toxic while in the game. Being toxic doesn't have to be a major thing to have major impacts. If you're having a rough match where you are very clearly outclassed, be it on either side, and the other side takes a moment to just rub it in your face in some way that adds that extra little spice that makes it toxic.
    As Killer I honestly don't mind being outclassed. Run me for five gens, it'll be a fun chase and I'll try and learn to get better. But it's as soon as someone runs me for a few gens and they stop to stand right at windows or t-bag at pallets that it goes from being a fun challenge to someone taunting and insulting me. And i don't like to be taunted and insulted.
    As Survivor I don't mind getting out played by the Killer and downed and hooked, I'll try and learn where I went wrong and do better next time. But I hate it when people four man slug or tunnel me off the hook even when my teammate is RIGHT THERE and not being toxic themselves because that doesn't give me a fair chance to get better.

    Yeah, it doesn't have to be specific. A lot of Survivors are just "Let's make the Killer cry and have a bad time" toxic and they don't know who the Killer is. They are just shitty people wanting to make others feel shitty.

    The thing is we CAN "Fix humanity". It won't be fast and it won't be easy but by just ignoring the problem it also won't get better. Shit people need to be called out, they shouldn't be ignored. They need to be offered help to get better and they need to be made aware that what they are doing it not OK to do. Being anonymous on the internet gives people this sense that their actions have no consequences, but they need to be told that no, their actions do have meaning. By making the world a shit place, even if it's just a "minor" thing in a video game it's making the world more shit than it needs to be and we shouldn't just ignore that.
    So while the "Just grow up" crowd isn't directly part of the problem they are also not part of the solution.

    Seventeen is old enough to know that being a little shit is wrong. TEN is old enough to know that making someone else feel bad is not right. Being a bully isn't right at any age and people should be taught this. If their parents won't do it then someone else needs to. We need to start young on it, maybe then the adults will change. The shit adults were the shit kids that never got told to stop being shit enough times for it to stick.
    You CAN "fix children" by telling them what they are doing is wrong and EXPLAIN WHY it is wrong. Talk to them as equals and explain the problem instead of just dictating their actions. Tell them why what they are doing is wrong and try and get through to them that this is not how people ,of any age, should act.

    The problem with the "ignore it so they learn it gives them nothing" thing is a lot of people will keep trying and trying and trying until they get something and just escalate until it happens. And the indict approach isn't as good as a direct one. The underlying issues of why they feel the need to act this way to get a reaction is what needs to be dealt with, not just a lack of a positive feedback loop. The positive feedback loop needs to be moved from "cause someone else pain" into something else.

    I AM an adult and the reason I have problem with this stuff is because I was bullied relentlessly as a child and it royally fucked me up, to the point where I become a sociopath. I literally burnt out all of my emotions as a kid to just not deal with that shit. And you know what? When I stopped reacting to them? They didn't stop and escalated to the point where I finally almost killed one of them just to be left alone and even then they didn't stop. I had tro be pulled out of public school into home schooling for it to stop. I've gone through years of therapy to be able to fake having real emotions again and because of that I can't really "turn them off". So when people bully me I feel it again. I've got better outlets these days than I did back then but no Scott I can't just "grow up" about it because to me that would be shutting it all down and not caring at all about anything and just, well, not doing anything. Like eating.

    I tell people I hope they get to a better place in life. I tell them that they are doing the wrong thing. Does it work? Not often but I try. I don't just ignore them. Other than that I don't really have anything else for you Scott. I think you are wrong and that we need to be working towards "fixing humanity" because I do believe we can.

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  16. Something kind of tangential to this: the corruption of the phrase "gg/good game". I'd like some feedback on this because all I have to go off of are my own anecdotal experiences: How often do you play a game(doesn't matter what game) and lose, then in chat you only see the winning team typing "gg"? Continuing the example, how often do you see those same players losing the next game and suddenly their lips are sealed? I genuinely believe the average person uses "gg" to rub it in their opponents' faces these days instead of what people used to do online… which was act with some vague semblance of sportsmanlike conduct.

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  21. To me, I consider tunneling (1st to death hook, ignoring body blocking, actual clear tunneling, not your teammates farmed you on hook) toxic from playing console as a solo survivor. My average wait time was around 15 minutes when I was playing a lot. So to me, it wasn't that my game ended early, but that they ended my game early and now I don't get to play for at least 10 minutes, as if I was being punished for disconnecting, while having done nothing wrong. I have found now that I started playing again on PC with crossplay, my wait time is rarely over 5 minutes, and I am considerably less bothered by tunneling, because the punishment for the killer seeming to simply decide I don't get to play anymore is much less noticeable. I find it tends to feel worse as a solo survivor, considering 1v1 killer should win eventually, so it feels like they are taking advantage of a power position and using it to abuse me as a survivor, while if I am playing with a friend, the power dynamic is much more even given the benefit of communication, doesn't feel nearly as bad. At worst its slightly annoying now.

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  23. Let go of things out of your control. Practice this and it will become a natural response to things you deem "toxic". Terms like "good" and "evil" are man made. The universe doesn't stop moving when bad things happen. Good luck everyone.

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  24. This is a bit of a false dilimma yeah? There has to be more answers than just "Ignore it" or "fix humanity". You can have options where you both learn to deal with low levels of toxicity while finding ways to reduce (not eliminate just reduce) people who do things like tracking down and doxxing players who upset them.

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  25. I don't see why toxic meaning, more or less, "I think you play like an asshole" is an issue. So long as people can generally agree on what counts as asshole-like play it's useful even if it is inherently subjective what makes a particular player feel bad. People generally can empathise with eachother and react similarly to certain situations so this is not a huge stretch. Just see common examples of toxicity in game: teabagging, clicking, tunnelling, face camping, you can see that a large amount of the community agrees that facing someone who plays like this makes them feel bad, and makes them feel as if the other player is an asshole.

    Sure, this is not hard science, but language can never be. It will never be objective. The ideas I intend to communicate with these words will never perfectly align with the ideas you perceive when you read them. How can they, when we have different minds and different experiences?

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  27. It's certainly not an easy response to give so, I'll bite and try to put it into words.

    I'm a 20 something year old who got medically discharged from the military for anxiety reasons. Caused me to get panic attacks, shutdown, and gave me an irrational fear of the dark. And, well, what I do to get over it is I try to reflect.

    I don't think about getting discharged as a bad thing, not at all, I think that was the best thing for me. But, I also realize that I am a very emotionally sensitive person, and I oftentimes respond to intent accordingly. If someone has the intent to make me feel bad, I tend to feel bad. If someone tries to make me feel good, I feel good, but the two are inherently connected for me. I can't have one without the other. I've tried separating the two, god knows I do, but if I do, I can't feel good or bad, I just don't feel. I'm naturally a very emotionally resonant person, but if I focus and only try to play, then I can't enjoy playing.

    I know I'm still a kid and that I have a lot to learn, but the thing is that right now, if I simply try to focus on not being affected, I just make myself callous, and I see that in my everyday life. Hell, that's how I act in public. I have very little to no emotional spectrum around people because it's been proven to me before that people will exploit my emotions to make me feel bad, or manipulate me, or to try to get me to make a decision I may regret.

    But, when I play a game, I let loose. I don't try to be super focused, and I just try to have fun. But, something I've realized is that, while I do find multiplayer games fun at times, I also find them to be infuriating at the same time. Like you said, toxicity is a very subjective thing, and nowadays it's lost a lot of it's meaning because it's been used and applied to so many people and behaviors that it really exists as a spectrum. There's the little stuff, like rubbing a win in or trash talking someone with no malicious intent, and then there's threatening death on someone and actively harassing them. And, as you said, these are clearly two different things, but they are both charged with the same behavior in mind, just in different intensity. They both want you to feel bad, but one's the equivalent of talking shit about someone, and the other is verbally threatening someone.

    My point is that for some people, being tough and shutting off emotions means not feeling for some people like me. And for others, it just might not affect them. And over time those two things may or may not separate. Only time tells, but what I do know is that it's not always a matter of growing up, it's a matter of how you feel and how emotional you are.

    Also, I know the simple solution to this is to stop playing multiplayer games. No other players means no other people ruining your fun. But, I like the competition and challenge multiplayer games provide. An A.I. can only provide so much challenge before you figure it out, but people, people can think and act in ways that A.I cannot imitate. They can also provide a meaningful challenge, and for those who are willing, a way to learn how to do better. I enjoy learning and trying to do better, while not focusing to the point of losing touch with my emotions.

    As for a way to control anger and getting tilted for people like me, best thing to do is to know when to take a step back and calm down. You may realize it's just a game, believe me, I do, and some people don't have these issues because they simply don't feel the same way. But, if that doesn't help you, take a break, go play something else for a while, read, write, take a walk, whatever floats your boat so you can get your patience back, and then, if you feel so inclined, start playing again while trying to learn and think on what you can do to get better. By approaching the game as a learning experience, you can motivate yourself by accepting your shortcomings and trying to improve, and reinforcing your strengths and to know how to improve even further. Plus, later on you can look back on yourself then and see how much you've improved and feel some happiness knowing that you've gotten good at something through practice.

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  28. I really liked your breakdown of the three main parts of what makes something toxic.

    I think the best way to go about dealing with toxicity on a personal-level is to, as much as possible, deprive your opponent of having that advantage that makes them even able to be a ‘sore-winner’. Set achievable goals for yourself in games outside of just killing or surviving. I find that it feels a lot less bad when someone is trying to rub a loss in your face while you don’t feel like you really lost. Don’t get me wrong, it can still feel bad, but I think this can help a lot.

    Outside of that, I personally think dealing with toxicity is in the hands of the devs. A reputation system would be really useful. If you want to go the safe route, you could focus on awarding players with high reputation scores. If the awards are serious enough, that might have a somewhat meaningful impact on people deciding to play nice. If you want to be more aggressive, you could take a sort of GTA route and punish those with low reputations who are constantly being reported (in the rep system or otherwise) by others. Throw all the little shits into a pool of players just like them and let them have a great time with people who share their behavior for a bit. You could tweak the specifics of how that works to avoid abuse or having regular players be punished. Overall, the aggressive route definitely has more drawbacks and would take some work to be done right. I would support either system really.

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  29. I'd say the toxicity itself creates this kill barrier of new players all around which creates this self feeding biome of ever increasing salt due to no new blood. Either way this game was doomed to begin with due to just how badly want to win on both sides

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  30. As someone else pointed out, the definition is bound to change as our views and outlooks as a society change (Language, like all social constructs, evolve). You might ask someone 500 years ago a question adjacent to "What is something toxic you experienced" and hear something like "The asshole neighbor pissed on my wife's grave after she died of Plague, blamed her for his kid catching it."

    Personally, while I like the initial argument (Intent, Action, Advantage), I disagree with Advantage. Even people who are losing can be toxic to someone else, in my opinion, as it rather is about a Disadvantage the victim is faced with, in the game or out of the game, and not an Advantage the toxic person possesses. What are some examples? Let's take your idea of toxic, Scott – a guy posts a death threat to my family. Realistically, in this situation, he has more to lose by threatening like this. But this still puts the victim, in the brief moments prior to action taken against the toxic jerk for such a thing, at a state of disadvantage. People are very tender and protective about their loved ones. This sets them off balance. You don't expect this kind of thing (at least I hope not), and this kind of thing probably SHOULD make you concerned (I hope so, if someone threatened the people I care about, I'd be bothered). That was all that was needed for toxicity to exist in that situation. He (the toxic guy) wasn't in an advantage state over you, he just sunk you down low enough to damage you somehow, and there continues to be no advantage to doing this – infact this is a detriment long term to him.

    For me, a good example of your average online toxicity using this argument as an outline would be slugging for the purposes of bleedout. In most cases, this actively puts the killer at a disadvantage, or at least in a zero-sum situation. It's not like tunnelling or camping, where there is a logical, non-toxic possibility to it. If they were trying to slug for additional pressure, then there's also a reasonable explanation, and still a potential for someone to overcome this disadvantage state with wiggle, unbreakable, etc. But, a killer standing over a single survivor, preventing anyone else from picking them up, tunnelling them back onto the ground if picked up, and holding them effectively captive for 4 minutes with no chase or boldness points, no wiggle or struggle points, and no interactive gameplay, then even if the killer is throwing the match to do this and ultimately at a bigger disadvantage than you, they still impose a disadvantage on you for the sole purpose of ruining your experience, even if only briefly.

    I agree, to a degree, that a lot of people's definition of toxicity is incredibly lax or broad. People need to start knowing where the line is between someone being toxic towards them, and them having frustrations with the activity they're participating in. Getting tunnelled/face camped is frustrating, but it's not necessarily toxic. A person posting some dumb comment to your steam profile with "-rep" because they don't like you, though it may not hurt you, was still a toxic act because they tried to impose a disadvantage on you (in this case a public/social one), as it could shape how people you play with or meet will perceive you in the future. It's hard to draw a line, so it's nonsensical to do so.

    So here's my take to your posited end-question. "If fixing humanity is off the table, what advice could you give someone to help them to overcome the emotional challenge of dealing with toxicity, to be tougher than it?" It's less about overcoming the toxicity – or relative difficulty based on your life (I'm 26, but I still get upset time to time about people doing things like, making fun of my disability) – it's about handling frustration. Because, most likely, the problem someone is facing right now, is frustration, not toxicity. And even if they are facing toxic behavior, frustration management is half the tools you need to deal with most of it. I tend to pull away from and stop playing DBD for about a month at a time after a few solid days of gaming, because I recognize the game is making me frustrated (I mean, who wouldn't be IF LITERALLY OF 7 MATCHES YOU GET WHEN YOU COME BACK, 4 ARE SWAMP AND 3 ARE PURGATION AND LITERALLY EVERY SURVIVOR IS DOING THAT DUMB BOILED OVER SHIT). Hell, I quit League of Legends due to how frustrating it was back in 2015 and it made me an emotionally healthier person. I suck at frustration management, but I know it's doable. Frustration is what drives people towards defensive responses of anger and sadness. It makes you take things personally, when really, they aren't usually.

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