Video games are never made with harmful intentions in mind, and while your mother’s best friend keeps telling her that the shooter game you keep playing will make you violent, there’s not much truth to that. They simply give you a world where you can escape and have a good time.
But as sweet of an angel you may be, not everyone else playing the same games as you possess similar temperaments. Along with online games come player bases and communities that are vile, toxic, and uncouth simply because they are behind a screen and can get away with saying whatever they want. Sadly, some design decisions just lead to toxic gaming communities, and in turn, that leads to titles becoming known as toxic games.
If this sounds like a nightmare, you might want to steer clear of the games we have on our list below.
The most toxic game communities in the world
15) Destiny 2
Heaven help me. I love Destiny 2, but what was once one of my favorite gaming communities has unfortunately fallen pretty far. Over the years, increased monetization options and one of the most half-hearted moves into “free to play” ever has worn away the community. The vocal players seem to be constantly at odds with the devs, and some long-established members of the team have been driven away due to extreme and dangerous levels of toxicity within the community. Frankly, it is that early operant conditioning focused Destiny design coming home to roost, as people who are unhappy just don’t seem to be able to walk away from the game.
14) Dark Souls
Another series of games that I absolutely adore, but sadly the community can leave a lot to be desired. FromSoftware, under the direction of Hidetaka Miyazaki, has provided us with some truly amazing gameplay experiences. The fractured lore and shattered worlds invite patience, calm, and consideration, but you would rarely know that in some circles online.
It is dangerous when someone opts to make their entire personality a difficulty level in a game, but that has sadly been the case for some Dark Souls fans. Things get even more confusing when internet folks can shout about how important the difficulty of Dark Souls is to them but then, in the same breath, claim they never once struggled to defeat the various bosses.
13) Ark: Survival Evolved
Survival games can often be rough, but even in a genre known for producing some griefers, Ark: Survival Evolved produced a fairly garbage community in places. With the odds stacked firmly in their favor, established players would often go out of their way to make the game hell for new people.
Rather than think it’s a good idea to give folks a reason to continue to play, they would just torture and annoy new players, seeming to buy into the idea of a trial by fire. It’s a shame, because the game is actually a lot of fun if you don’t take it so seriously.
12) Minecraft
Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the last decade, and quite naturally, this will bring a lot of jerks and griefers into its player base. While the game has its fair share of peace-loving adults who just want a relaxing time in their sandbox world, many young players feed off of causing chaos.
You will quickly witness public servers devolve into every player screaming at each other, tarnishing each other’s creations, and just generally making it difficult for players to have a good time. Since Microsoft or Mojang doesn’t run the game’s online servers, neither company steps in to stop the mess, causing toxicity to continue running rampant.
11) Overwatch
Team-based shooters have a penchant for being toxic, but add a high level of variety and competition to the mix, and you are bound to pull in a bunch of hostile players. Released in 2016, Overwatch continues to be one of Blizzard’s most popular games, and with Overwatch 2 being out at the moment, the stakes and toxicity are still soaring.
Blizzard has claimed in the past that the game’s “disruptive behavior” has been reduced by around 40 percent since the game first skyrocketed into the limelight, but in fact, toxicity is still pretty rampant. Quite a few top players have quit Overwatch League due to the community’s hostile nature.
10) Rocket League
Rocket League is unique because it has an emote system that lets players communicate in matches. While typing in the chat is possible, the quick-paced nature of the game makes it less than ideal. Most players have a couple of preset messages tied to a few hotkeys at most.
Does this stop players from being outrageously toxic? Not really. Players will still go out of their way to chat spam in Rocket League, with the game having high griefing potential. Matches are pretty quick, and players are incredibly quick to judge others and their mothers too.
9) Roblox
You would think that Roblox wouldn’t be the worst community ever, right? Wrong. Those kids can be wild, let me tell you. The big problem with kids is that they often don’t really understand quite how brutal they can be. The fact that it teleports everything back to the schoolyard is just worse, somehow.
Developers are, weirdly, not always much better. Dev teams in Roblox will often plunder popular trends, shows, and movies for very obvious ripoff content, make a huge batch of cash, then bail out before the lawyers get involved. This can lead to a culture of little community investment, letting the kids run wild, so to speak.
8) World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft, to date, stands to be one of the most popular MMOs of all time, and as we know, the larger the community a game possesses, the higher the chances for toxic players to slip in. The game has a horrible blend of old-school players that are salty about the game’s ever-shifting focus, jerks who treat everyone poorly, and newbies struggling to find a place where they feel they belong.
No matter the meta and popular playstyles, PvP sees veteran players using exploits to sweep the rug under low-level players. Dungeons and raids are chock-full of people rushing through dungeons and screaming at everyone if they’re too slow to catch up, with chat never being one to shy away from the constant trolling. With constant updates and expansions, the toxic community seems to be thriving, unfortunately.
7) Call of Duty
The gargantuan size of this game franchise is both a blessing and a curse. While this makes the game incredibly active and engaging, the players you’re gonna be engaging with are highly likely to scream your ear off if you make a single mistake—or if you play well. The game’s toxic player base doesn’t need a reason to be toxic, really.
With Call of Duty dating back to 2003, many players have reached their skill cap and want to begin anew. This means that new players would constantly come across highly skilled players that might not always be tolerant of newbies. This frustration may manifest in the form of petty insults in chat to getting booted for low rankings, which will ultimately prevent you from playing.
Many content creators on the game have also been centered on trash-talking, fostering the hostile environment of the game further.
6) Fortnite
Fortnite is a game title that is synonymous with streaming, which is an industry that is known for its users getting hostile. That, combined with the fact that the game’s cartoonish graphics and low cost are aimed toward children, make Fortnite a hub for spoiled, angry teenagers to scream into voice chat while munching on chips right after.
Flex building, using emotes on getting eliminations, you name it, and there will be a toxic practice that haunts the game. One of the most heinous things that players do is teaming in Solo mode, where one player in a one-vs-one situation secretly gets a third person involved to team up with them and eliminate the player, sharing the loot afterward.
This goes against the Terms of Service of the game and has also seen players getting banned for it in the past.
5) Halo
With the franchise going back to 2001, Halo is the poster child of multiplayer shooters out there but has quickly turned into one of the most toxic games due to its player base. Most harassment complaints connected to Xbox Live result from Halo games taken a little too personally.
A leading factor that has brought the game into its pitiful state is the professional Halo esports players and content creators that don’t think twice before pushing toxicity to the forefront of the games they play. It is not uncommon for trolls to milk money off toxic troll content they post on YouTube.
The game even invented the term “teabagging,” in which a player will taunt another player by standing over their dead body and repeatedly crouching over the corpse representing, well, vile things.
4) League of Legends
Mistakes are easily punished in League due to its complex mechanics, and along with the five-vs-five structure of games that essentially has you roll the dice nine times each game, little kids (and even adults) that can’t keep a lid on their emotions are one button-mashing session away from making your eyes bleed at the enraged wall of text they managed to conjure up mid-game.
Thankfully, League does not have any sort of voice communication during its games, along with text chats having filters, making sure the toxicity present in the game’s fanbase doesn’t go completely overboard. League would have most definitely taken a higher spot on this list if it wasn’t for the countermeasures added in by the devs.
3) Grand Theft Auto Online
Okay. So maybe it isn’t the biggest shock in the world, but the GTA Online community can be pretty rough going. The average public lobby is just a grief-fest, and hackers have been a problem pretty much since launch. Aggressive monetization also means that a lot of people are happy to splash the cash on was to ruin everyone else’s fun. Rockstar seems happy enough to roll with it, but unfortunately, many of the extensions of the community, such as the TikTok and Youtube scenes, can be filled with frightful behaviors.
2) Dota 2
Dota 2 is a game where emotions run high, which highly factors in the risk and reward element. Such a game component can easily make it so that players often have negative game experiences, and not every player can keep their cool.
Like several of the other games on this list, players in Dota 2 also grief and abuse voice chat but manage to be one step ahead in degeneracy. Players have discovered ways to avoid AFK detection by going permanently invisible near a creep wave, while angry players regularly waste wards, tomes, and smokes.
Factoring in the simplicity of making burner accounts and rampant smurfing makes Dota 2 almost unarguably one of the most toxic gaming communities out there. Heck, there’s even a 2019 study that says the game is the most toxic one out there, but evidently, the study is a little outdated.
1) CS:GO
What do you get when you have an online multiplayer game that combines its free-to-play nature with a high-skill ceiling and voice chat? The potential for an incredibly vile and hostile community to foster within the game, and over the years since the game’s release back in 2012, we can see that just that has taken place.
To make matters worse, Valve does not really enforce any strict guidelines and anti-measures to prevent toxic practices from plaguing the game, which means that friendly fire for no other reason than trolling can and will go unpunished multiple times before the player finally gets booted from the game.
Cheating and smurfing have both infested the muddy waters of CS:GO, even with Valve taking big steps to discipline one of the most toxic gaming communities out there. The company sees itself chat-banning 10s of thousands of players every couple of weeks.
With all of these incredibly unfortunate points in mind, it is safe to say that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive swiftly snags the No. 1 spot on this list.
