Before diving into the video game world to explore the most toxic gaming communities, when speaking about video game communities, there was a time when video games were seen as a niche pastime for the few – now gaming is an everyday activity enjoyed by countless people all over the world. With so many people playing games, it has led to the creation of communities and fan bases springing up for individual games. Reddit provides a prime example of this, where the subreddits of larger games like Fortnite, Overwatch, and League of Legends have well over a million members each!

While most gamers are a credit to their respective communities, there is always a small subset that likes to indulge in toxic activity. This can range from derogatory and foul language to trolling and using hacks to gain an unfair advantage over other players.

There are various potential reasons why a player might exhibit toxic behavior. However, generally speaking, it comes down two root causes:

1. The player has a heavy emotional investment in the game and takes it very seriously, leading them to insult or lash out at other players depending on whether the match or game is going well or badly.
2. The player is looking to derive humour from the game by harassing or provoking other players into a reaction.

But which game communities engage in toxic activity the most? We analysed thousands of comments across the subreddits of the world’s most popular games to find out which communities most often engage in this kind of behaviour. We also found out how often people search online regarding toxic activity in each game.

Which video game community do you think will come out on top? Read on to take a look at our discoveries.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds turned out to have the community that exhibits the highest proportion of toxic behaviour. It ranked highly in most of our data points: it had the highest proportion of references to hacking, as well as the 2^nd highest proportion of general toxic behaviour like trolling and being banned. It also had the 2^nd highest proportion of online interest according to the data.

If you are interested in improving your aim in Call of Duty Warzone you’d better know that the 2^nd and 3^rd place in the final rankings belong to COD Warzone and Counter-Strike: GO respectively. In spite of these two being the only games to have an average score above 5 out of 10 (aside from PUBG), Warzone’s average is still over 1.6 points behind 1^st place, while CS: GO’s average is nearly 2.5 points lower – showing just how far ahead of the pack PUBG truly is!

At the other end of the table, Overwatch’s community displays the lowest proportion of toxic activity. Despite having the 8^th highest proportion of searches related to toxic behavior, it has the highest proportion of positive interaction by far, as well as the 4th lowest proportion of references to trolling, cheating, and bans.

Minecraft and FIFA aren’t far away in 2^nd and 3^rd place – Minecraft has the lowest swearing tendency and number of references to general toxic behaviour, while FIFA has the least mentions of hacking.

For a better understanding of how we calculated these scores, take a look at the rest of the study and read through our methodology section at the bottom of the page.

Next, let’s go more in-depth and analyze the rankings of each individual data point…

Game Subreddits with the Highest Proportion of Swear Words

The first factor we looked into was the number of swear words on each game’s subreddit comments versus the total number of comments that we analysed.

The Smash Bros. subreddit has by far the highest proportion of swearing out of all our games – over double that of Call of Duty Warzone in 2^nd place!

At the other end of the ranking, Minecraft’s subreddit had the least proportionate mentions of swearing. It was very closely followed by Roblox’s subreddit, which was only 0.003% behind.

Game Subreddits with the Highest Proportion of Hacking Mentions

Next, we checked out each subreddit’s proportion of references to hacking.

The game with the greatest proportionate mentions of hacking turned out to be PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. This is a fairly understandable result – cheating and hacking activity have been seen in PUBG even back when the game was in early access, and can still be witnessed online to this day. Of course, this isn’t to say that the game’s developers are doing nothing to combat hackers. For instance, in July 2020 anti-cheat technology was added to PUBG Mobile, to discourage cheating and to identify suspicious in-game behaviour.

The bottom of the ranking includes the games FIFA, Super Smash Bros., and League of Legends. This isn’t particularly surprising with regard to both Super Smash Bros. and League of Legends: in the case of the former, any modding of the game usually results in an immediate ban, while the latter has generally seen very few instances of hacking and scripting compared to other games (although it isn’t unheard of).

Game Subreddits with the Highest Proportion of General Toxic Activity

For our next factor, we delved into mentions of other kinds of toxic behavior, such as trolling, griefing, and references to players being banned.

Rocket League’s subreddit was found to have the highest proportion of references to general toxic activity. Despite cheating and hacking being largely unheard of in the game, it seems that, based on our Reddit data, the community makes up for this with a particularly high amount of trolling and general toxic discourse.

Once again, we find Minecraft at the bottom of the ranking. Just like with its low levels of bad language, it seems the Minecraft community doesn’t engage in a huge amount of griefing or trolling either, compared to other communities.

Game Subreddits with the Highest Proportion of Positive Interaction

For our fourth Reddit-focused ranking, we thought it would be worth taking a look at the other side of the coin. We searched for terms related to more positive behavior, including phrases like ‘well played’, ‘congrats’/’congratulations’, ‘gg’ and many others.

Overwatch’s subreddit comfortably takes 1^st place for this data point, with a positive proportion of nearly 15%! The game has done well in many of our rankings, with the 16^th and 18^th lowest proportions of swearing and general toxic activity respectively. Last year the game’s developer Blizzard Entertainment, implemented an endorsement system which they claimed reduced toxicity by 40%.

Meanwhile, it’s an interesting coincidence that Smash Bros., the community previously found to have the greatest tendency for swearing/aggressive language, also has the 2^nd lowest proportion of positive interaction in this data point.

Games with the Most Online Searches for Toxic Activity

For this data point, we looked at the average number of monthly searches for topics like hacking, rage quitting and for players being banned in each game; we then compared each game’s result to its total amount of monthly searches to get an adjusted proportion.

Top of the table for this ranking is Call of Duty Warzone, although PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is only 0.05% behind. Despite only being released in March 2020, Call of Duty Warzone has built up a massive following, thanks in part to the enduring popularity of the Call of Duty franchise and also for creating a Battle Royale game that players can’t get enough of. Considering the sheer size of its fanbase, It’s not a huge surprise that the game has attracted its fair share of toxic players!

Somewhat more surprising (given its high proportion of swearing and low proportion of positive interaction), is the fact that Super Smash Bros. has the lowest proportion of toxic online searches – it seems that, while the game’s players are often foul-mouthed, they don’t tend to take their toxic behavior as far as many other game communities.
Just above Super Smash Bros. is Valorant in 20th. A relatively new game (fully released in June 2020), it’s great to see that Valorant’s rapidly growing community surrounding seems to be exhibiting lower levels of toxic behavior than many other video game communities.

Methodology

Once we had gathered all the data we needed by scraping Reddit and using Google’s Keyword Planner for our individual categories, we normalised our results to give each game a score out of ten for every factor. To do this, we used the following minmax normalisation formula:

Result = (x-min(x))/(max(x)-min(x))

Once we had these scores, we combined them to find each game’s average, allowing us to create a final ranking that showcases which video game communities exhibit the most toxic activity.

Community Toxicity on Other Websites

Of course, there are various other sites and servers besides Reddit where video game communities gather (including their respective subsets of toxic members), with some of the more famous being Twitch, Discord and Steam.

They each have their own ways of dealing with toxic behaviour. In the case of Discord, their community guidelines recommend that you report anyone who posts messages involving the following:

• Harassment
• Spam messages
• Violating IP rights
• Sharing child pornography
• Glorifying or promoting suicide and self-harm
• Distributing viruses
• Threatening another user
• Sharing images of gore or animal cruelty

Users can also block or mute individuals whose content they don’t want to see. In addition, moderators can kick or ban users on their server if they’re breaking any rules or guidelines.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that sites aren’t working at further refining the ways in which they operate. For instance, March 2020 saw Twitch provide more powerful banning and blocking measures, allowing streamers to remove toxic individuals from their Followers list by blocking them and their Chat list by channel banning them.

On top of this, game developers themselves will often encourage good behavior in their games. For instance, DotA 2 (one of the most popular games on Steam) gives players a behavior score based on their interactions in the game: if you’re friendly and helpful you’ll have a high score, whereas if you continually ruin games and get reported you’ll have a low score. The game applies this when matching up players so that those who have a high behavior score are less likely to interact with those who have a low behavior score, limiting the negative effect that toxic players will have on the rest of the community.

Conclusion

While it’s clear that the level of toxic activity does vary from game to game, it’s also fair to say that no online games are entirely free from toxicity. However, there are certainly better ways of responding to and dealing with this kind of behaviour. For instance:

1. Report them. The majority of online games offer a way of reporting other players if they’re being toxic or otherwise deliberately trying to negatively impact the game.

2. Mute/block them. This depends on the game, but many give you the ability to either mute or block other players.

3. Ignore them. If possible, don’t let toxic players get inside your head. They’re hoping to force a reaction out of you – don’t give them what they want!

These days there are many well-known streamers and gamers who are try to play in a distinctly non-toxic way – they focus on giving out good vibes and they always encourage their teammates and audience to do the same. Examples include:

• CouRageJD
• Cuppcaake
• AnnieBot
• barcode_ow
• Upshall

Can you list the most toxic gaming communities you’ve ever been to?

And how much toxic behavior have you experienced while playing games online?

Let us know in the comment section below.

The post Most Toxic Gaming Communities appeared first on 3D Aim Trainer - Training for FPS Games Blog.

We break down the world’s international hotspots for budding gaming enthusiasts and competitive gamers alike.

Gaming is a growing, multi-billion-dollar industry – and it’s showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. With streaming services like Twitch and Mixer catapulting talented competitive gamers into the spotlight, the popularity of games is growing exponentially.

For some, it’s a career path and a primary source of income. For others, it’s more of a passion or hobby. Either way, that doesn’t stop millions of people flocking to some of the world’s biggest cities for gaming events, console releases, and competitions.

Whilst the industry is growing, interest is springing up worldwide. If you’re passionate about immersing yourself in the events, working in the industry or gaming competitively, it’s best to know which cities share your obsession with the craft. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best cities for gamers worldwide. Read on to discover our findings.

Which Cities Hold the Most Major Gaming Industry Events?

We started by looking into major gaming events hosted in various cities across the globe. To do this, we scraped the data from the Events for Gamers calendar and tallied how many events were hosted by each city across 2018 and 2019.

San Francisco took the top spot with 36 major gaming events across 2018/19. In second place was Los Angeles and in third was London.

The United States is home to six of the biggest gaming cities in the top 10 in terms of events, with two located in Canada and two in Europe. Adjusting for population, San Francisco dominated the tables with by far the most events per-capita, proving it to be a sizeable hub for events on the world stage.

Which Cities Have the Highest Number of Major Gaming Companies?

Using the list of companies and locations provided by Golden.com, we tallied up the number of large, world-renowned game industry companies. This showed us which cities are home to the highest number of companies.

It was Japan that topped the list with a higher number of gaming companies than the next five cities put together. San Francisco ranks second, showing it is indeed a gaming haven – likely to be because of the influence that Silicon Valley has in the gaming community. Europe is also proving to be a big global player. This data set wasn’t adjusted for population size as there seems to be no correlative link between the number of companies and a city’s population.

Which Cities Have the Biggest Game Store Density?

To get the data here, the quantity of video game shops was found using data provided by Google Maps searches. We set their data against each city’s respective populations to calculate the number of shops per 100K people that the public has available to them.

When it comes to shop availability, New Delhi came out on top convincingly, having the second smallest population but the third-highest total shops, meaning when accounting for the population it ranked first. Porto and Lisbon followed in second and third respectively. The only North American city to feature on the list was Miami coming in seventh. South Africa’s capital Cape Town and largest city Johannesburg broke into the top ten for the first time in our tables, showing there’s a definite appetite for games in the country.

Which Cities Have the Most Gaming-Related Job Openings?

The aim here was to find out which city has the largest proportion of its job openings dedicated to the gaming industry. We pulled the amount of video-game related opportunities from two job-searching apps, Indeed and Careerjet. We then referenced that as a percentage of the total amount of jobs available on each app and averaged their results, showing us which cities prioritize game development roles.

Montréal swamped the competition, having nearly double the proportion opportunities of the next two promising cities, Brighton and New Delhi. In terms of job availability, Montréal had five times the openings than that of its nearest competitor, Los Angeles. Surprisingly, the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Osaka didn’t even rank in the top ten despite having 61 major gaming firms between them.

Which Cities Have the Highest Online Interest in Gaming According to Google?

Using Google’s Keyword Planner, we were able to extract data about people’s search habits for games. Using keywords centered around the topic of video games, we were able to break down which cities had been showing the most interest by search volume.

In terms of search volume vs each city’s potential number of reachable Google users , Australia leads the way with the cities of Melbourne and Sydney coming in first and second respectively. With Melbourne edging Sydney by only 0.42%, it’s no surprise they’re on top given Australia’s growing love of video games.

Istanbul, despite not having the highest percentage when factoring in reach, is an interesting case – it had the highest number of video game searches in the top ten.

What Changes Have Been Seen in Gaming Interest Since Lockdown?

By analyzing each city’s search volume data over time, we’re able to quantify how much time their residents spend searched for video games each month in recent years. This allowed us to see how peoples’ gaming interests have grown since world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The increase in video game-related searches was almost inevitable. We were bound to immerse ourselves in an online world to stay connected to one another, particularly in response to the lockdown measures introduced in many countries.

Surprisingly, not a single city on the North American continent made it to the top of the list, despite leading in the number of companies and the number of major gaming events held.

It’s interesting that 90% of the cities that had the biggest increases are based in Europe – it could be a sign of a rapidly growing market across the continent.

Which Cities Love Gaming the Most – The Final Results

Taking all metrics into account, the city with the highest overall interest in video games turned out to be Montréal. While it isn’t home to a huge amount of game companies, the fact that the Ubisoft Montréal (one of the largest studios in the industry) has been based there since 1997 must more than make up for it. This might explain Montréal’s very high proportion of games industry jobs on Indeed and CareerJet. 

The city also saw a steady increase in online video game interest since lockdown, coming 21^st in the world. It had respectable finishing positions for the number of gaming events and density of game stores which helped it maintain its high ranking.

New Delhi finished in second overall. Despite ranking quite low for major games industry events and major games companies, it had the highest density of games stores and had the third highest proportion of games industry job openings, guiding it to a top spot.

Third place was awarded to San Francisco – a strong result based on the fact that the city had by far the largest number of games industry events in the world and scored highly on the number of gaming corporations. On the flip side, the city has a low density of games stores and a lower proportion of online interest in video games compared to most of the ranked cities, consequently bringing the score down.

At the other end of the spectrum, Mexico City came firmly last. Aside from ranking at the bottom for the number of major industry events and the number of major games companies, the city has actually seen an 11.4% decrease in online interest in gaming since the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Methodology

After gathering the requisite information from the individual data points, we normalised the results to give our cities a score of out ten for each factor. This was achieved via the following minmax normalisation formula:

Result = (x-min(x))/(max(x)-min(x))

We then averaged each city’s scores to create an overarching total, allowing us to discover which city loves gaming the most.

All major cities listed by the UN Statistics Division were considered for the index. To refine the list, all cities with any missing data points were removed to provide rankings of the utmost accuracy.
In this study, we delved into factors that we felt were reflective of a city’s level of interest in video games. If you’d like to see the full rankings of each data point, as well as their sources, click here.

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