How to make the most toxic and malice community in a game imaginable

Thought experiment: a game called “1v1 Me!”.

A game that is completely based around the idea of cultivating a toxic community.

So let’s just throw this out there, no direct communication to avoid racist trolls. So no chat full stop.

And reward trolling since there is no teamwork.

Im thinking a single lane MOBA, but the details aren’t important.

The important part is figuring out how the game is designed to induce rage.

One idea I had was Clout. Basically a meaningless score that moves in frustrating ways.

I was thinking that you can have anyone challenge you to a fight, and if you decline you lose clout.

Now imagine this: there’s a list of top players on the front page. The top player position is impossible to keep because you will get SOOOO many challenges it will be impossible to accept them all.

Also, there is a dedicated button to mock other players. The longer you hold it, the longer the taunt. But you also gain XP. AND if you lose a match after doing a bunch of taunts you lose a lot of clout.

Basically a mechanic that can help you crawl towards victory of said match, while gambling heavily on losing the substantial clout of you lose.

Those are two ideas that come to mind, any suggestions?

EDIT: third idea: Make clout scalable to the difference in clout. That is, someone with no clout has everything to gain, and someone with tons has everything to lose. So smurfing is doubly rewarded.

Do you mean an actual toxic community, or people playing at being mock-toxic?

The main issue I see with real toxic people in this case is that it’s not actually toxic if everyone’s in on it. If everyone’s playing in order to be toxic then nobody is going to get shocked, offended, or have some other desirable thing ruined. So what’s left to give the feeling of power I suspect those people are looking for?

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Could it work to have bot players that are easily offended, or trying doggedly to accomplish some goals while the players ruin everything for them?

I’ve seen players anthropomorphize bots and NPCs in other contexts, so maybe it would work here too.

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Bots are a good idea, but I’m not up to make something that large in scope.

I am not sure what your goal is, but I think the premise is flawed here.

Players are more toxic to their teammates. Blaming your loss to your teammates is much more of an asshole move than taunting the enemy player, which up to a point is kinda fine for a competitive game.

Also, I’m not sure how you’re going to beat early LoL at being toxic.

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A couple of really big (but also interesting) challenges there.

First, while the context of a chatless online game makes this easier for individual bots, they’d have to do the equivalent of consistently passing a Turing Test. That’s not going to be easy when taken on at scale, because it’d have to be varied enough to obfuscate the underlying behaviour patterns that the bots operate on. This is also getting super close to deliberately misleading. If I thought I were playing a multiplayer game and I found that it was actually computer players doing more than filling empty slots I’d be pretty annoyed.

Second, balancing the ease of “offense” and getting appropriate reactions to appropriate behaviours is also likely to be tricky. I’m guessing here, and it’s probably my own personality showing through (as I certainly don’t understand the target audience here well), but if they got offended too easily then wouldn’t that undercut the sense of power? From what I’ve seen of trolls online they start small and escalate. Bots would need to understand this and behave differently at different stages of the “relationship”.

So is this something you’re thinking of prototyping?

Thinking aloud… I’d play with asymmetry. If people are competing for the same thing then even if they’re trying to be jerks about it it will ultimately come down to who’s better at actually playing the game. A troll doesn’t want a competition of skill, so it won’t satisfy. But if everyone has different goals and they’re all trying to mess with each other in different ways which are designed to seem unfair… could that work?

League of Legends as an example is so toxic due to being a team based game, where the actions of a bad player can carry more weight than a good player, and worse requiring group coordination while placing a random group of people together which more often than not makes that very same coordination impossible, and further still due to the rubberband mechanics of a bad player getting fed by using risky strategies one game, gives them an inflated ego for the next as they attempt to use that same strategy and get creamed by an opponent who sees the flaw, and further still having the games last for up to 45 minutes or even an hour, giving everyone time to become increasingly angry. It’s like "Competitive Anonomous Sh*tposting The Game.

You wouldn’t even need a mechanic like Clout, just create a steep power curve between the winners and losers, and make everyone’s attacks able to deal friendly damage where that same ability if misplaced can just as easily wipe the friendly team as it could the enemy. Add in “Noob traps” such as equipment that scales with kills or otherwise rewards risky behavior. Either they will take advantage of a bad player, or become the bad player while desperately trying to level it up.

Removing chat is a good idea but be sure to give lots of emoticons or “pings”, so players can express their frustration and still verbally harass everyone else. Better yet have it be a popup that blocks your view or even buttons.

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Put some ridiculously overpowered weapons, that randomly appear at odd times. Everyone will be fighting over those weapons, and when someone/team gets the weapon(s), and defeats all of their opponents in less than a few seconds, with these cheap one hit wonder weapons, everyone will be toxic.:stuck_out_tongue:

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Like other people already said I would also agree that people are more toxic in team based game and I wouldn’t make the main goal (toxic community) visible to the players. Instead I would implement hidden “bugs”. Imagine something like a team based game like LoL and then randomly “miss” abilities on purpose (but not too often and it has to be random, otherwise the players will complain about “bugs”. Here are some examples:

2 players, one of them plays support and wants to heal the other player, but the heal is randomly ignored (but still on cooldown), player A will die and rage because player B didn’t heal him, while B claims that he healed

Randomly deal bonus damage (maybe hide the actual damage numbers, so people won’t notice it that easy), imagine going mid lane in LoL and suddenly one of the other attacks deals huge amount of damage, it will make the player confused, he will die and rage and the team will flame him for feeding.

Randomly show the client wrong data on purpose, for example offset the (enemy) players by a little on one specific client, when he tries to make an AOE it will hit at the wrong position and the other players will thing that he is dumb. You can be even more evil if you show the specific client even more wrong data, so that he thinks that his attack hit and the others are just talking shit etc

Send random fake pings, show player A that player B pinged jungle (maybe multiple times to make it more annoying), player A will be annoyed at some point. You can be even more evil and add the fake pings to positions with many enemies, so player A might move there and get killed

Fake kill steals, often people complain when their kill is “stolen” you can add fake kill steals, when 2 (or more) player attacked the same enemy give the kill to a support class player (or some a random player who did the least damage) instead of the actual final attacker

Most of these things should make the player angry and let them rage, as soon as they rage they will get toxic to other players.

I’m curious as to what made Not_Sure, come up with this toxic game idea.:slight_smile:

As already mentioned, a teamwork based game which requires coordination, and includes random team matchmaking. Make leaving an active game include a stiff penalty, to encourage players to stick with frustrating matches.

Any form of advancement, make them items dropped in the game rather than directly awarded to the player. (loot, experience, etc) This will give the teammate who is least pulling their weight the opportunity to just go around picking up the drops rather than contributing to winning. Include a feature to report players doing that, but don’t act on the reports directly. Instead when receiving a report you use the volume of reports to identify dead weight players, you then use that in your match making algorithm to match a single dead weight player to every team, spreading them out to maximize frustration.

Nothing says toxic like racism though. Voice chat you can’t mute, and you’ll be a long way towards true toxic. :wink:

To be honest I find this an interesting idea as oddly enough I really enjoy toxic communities. I love CS:GO mostly because of that it is just way too fun getting thrown into a match with randoms and if they are toxic very funny situations can arise. Of course, this needs a mindset not everyone enjoys this, mainly not in competitive gaming.

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I used to play a lot of Eve Online, and while I wouldn’t call it toxic, basically the whole point of the game is to ruin another player’s day. Spend half the day waiting for an unsuspecting player to make a bad judgement call, and in an instant you’re scooping loot. Grabbing what remains of possibly weeks of their work as you watch them rage quit. Good times!

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