toxicity
Valve has finally decided to start moderating its Steam forums cesspool
Steam's forums are notorious throughout the gaming industry for being truly awful. Journalists across the industry have been pestering Valve for almost a year...
The Daily Grind: Should being an MMO ‘whale’ absolve a player of toxicity or push him to the front of a queue?
Longtime MOP reader Agemyth recently brought to our attention a couple of bits of commentary that disturb at least my own fundamental sense of...
The Daily Grind: How can we solve Reddit’s gaming ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem?
In dealing with the ArenaNet fallout over the last couple of weeks, I started giving serious thought to the Reddit problem in gaming, and...
Creative Assembly’s Grace Carroll speaks on fighting toxicity with active moderation
Anyone who's been on the internet for more than a few minutes knows how quickly forums and comment threads can quickly descend into toxicity...
Ubisoft is not here for Rainbow Six Siege players’ toxic behavior
Remember last spring when Ubisoft said it was getting serious about cracking down on toxicity in Rainbow Six Siege? The company said it was...
Online games are avenues for hate group recruitment, according to former white supremacist leader
Playing a game of linking awful online activities to white supremacist movements is like the worst possible variant of the old Six Degrees of...
World of Warcraft tackles addon toxicity, previews how you’re going to lose your artifact weapon
A small, seemingly insignificant addition to Battle for Azeroth might have a positive effect on World of Warcraft's modding community. Blizzard is adding a...
The Daily Grind: Does teaching toxic MMO gamers what they did wrong actually help?
As RPS reported this week, Valve has taken the relatively unusual step of making your Dota 2 and CSGO report cards semi-public - that is,...
Leaderboard: What’s the ideal way for an MMO studio to handle toxicity?
MOP reader BulletTeeth pointed us to a piece on The Verge this week about an incident in online shooter Battalion 1944. A highly placed...
SMITE says it’s banned or suspended 20,000 toxic players in season five alone
Toxic players, beware: Hi-Rez may not be talking to its Hand of the Gods players, but it's cracking way down on SMITE miscreants. The...
The war on toxicity: Overwatch League and Rainbow Six Siege crack down
Are studios starting to wake up and take action against particularly odious instances of gaming toxicity in their products? Blizzard, at least, is working...
Overwatch devs consider harnessing machine learning to fight toxicity
According to a new Blizzard interview on Kotaku this week, Overwatch toxicity has a new enemy: AI. Jeff Kaplan says that Blizzard has "been...
The Daily Grind: Are blacklists, quizzes, and threats effective at reducing text toxicity in MMOs?
Toxicity in online gaming just keeps popping up - specifically as it pertains to chat and commenting.
MOP reader Tanek pointed us to a thread about...
The Daily Grind: What’s the most creative way MMOs thwart toxicity?
Forget group-kicks: If you're a tool in Sea of Thieves, your own shipmates might just opt to stuff you in the brig - "a...
MMO studios form Justice League-style alliance to combat toxicity
After years of trying to crack the serious issue of negative behavior and toxicity among their individual communities, 30 game studios and industry leaders are...
Massively Overthinking: The war on MMO chat toxicity
This week, The Ancient Gaming Noob posted up an image of RIFT Prime, where Trion asks people to... play nice. "Just a neighborly reminder...
Blizzard’s Overwatch League addresses toxicity with fines and suspensions, while the Dallas Fuel drops a toxic player
Last week, we covered an ESPN piece in which the author called out Blizzard for sitting on its hands after an Overwatch League player...
MMO business roundup: Steam, toxicity, Kartridge, contracts, dopamine, and guns
What's going on in the online video games business this week? Let's dig in.
Steam, toxicity, and Kartridge
The Center for Investigative Reporting (via Motherboard) has a...
Ubisoft addresses Rainbow Six Siege toxicity, ESPN slams toxicity in Overwatch League
Ubisoft is sick of toxicity in its games, and to combat it, it's whipping out the banhammer as a "first step" in getting the...
Here’s how Saga of Lucimia says it’ll ‘keep toxicity to an absolute minimum’
This week's dev-written Saga of Lucimia blog asks everybody over the age of 35 to think back to bygone days "when reputation used to...
