Zaven Haroutunian  🇦🇲 🇺🇸

This has turned out to be problematic. We’ve given players the expectation that they will become a diamond player if they just try hard enough. This is not true. This perception breeds toxicity, especially among team games where you can feel others are “holding you back.”

I think the biggest reason for toxicity is that as humans, we have fragile egos. When we win, we attribute it to internal factors, like our skill. When we lose, we attribute it to external factors, like RNG, P2W, matchmaking, or “my team sucks”.

Believing my team sucks protects my ego. And if I believe that, I get mad at my team and that often results in toxicity. Never mind that because of MMR we are all at the exact same skill level. My team doesn’t actually suck. (or at least, if they do, I do too.)

Increasing pressure to win increases the emotion associated with winning or losing, and so I do think tying rewards (especially limited time rewards, which trigger loss aversion) to skill performance can increase toxicity, but I think it’s actually just amplifying the root cause.

I agree toxicity is complicated, and I too believe its rooted in human behavior and psychology. But I feel that can be much challenging endeavor for design, whereas modifying our progression systems is much more straight forward. Thanks for your insight Ben!

Great discussion. I have definitely seen a significant measurable increase in toxicity between two exact same game activities when you add "Ranked" to one of them. Adding leaderboards further increases this.

So now I feel like being very careful that the activity and culture around the activity really gets enhanced by rankings / leaderboards first. For example, if the top players are already clearly defined and known through live tournaments, leaderboards may be a net negative.

For Ranked, if your game culture isn't asking for Ranks and distinction, maybe it's not needed. Though in PvP, if you end up with a large audience searching for some form of more clear feedback, at least having some kind of rank fits.