Encountering Toxic Players: Redditors Share their Stories
A thread on Reddit sees users sharing their stories of encountering toxic players in games, from deranged players in League of Legends to cheaters in GTA Online.
A user asks other online game players to share their experience of encountering deranged players, and a host of Redditors reply with their own stories. From League of Legends to Rust, World of Warcraft to Destiny, and many, many more games, players recount times they’ve been targeted, harassed, and generally disturbed by other gamers.
“Tell me about your experience with toxic players,” the original poster asks. “We all know they exist, but what kind of deranged things do they do?” Many other users reply with their own stories, with stories of bullying and harassment in games like Rust and World of Warcraft sharing space with tales of players throwing tantrums over loot in raid games.
“There was this guy in World of Warcraft who would just constantly shout during gameplay,” one user recalls. “He would annoy the entire group and would be kicked from the group after a few kills. He would then just make a new character and join the group again.”
“We had a guy who claimed to be the king of a virtual world,” another replies. “He used to brag about how he knew everyone in the top guilds, and that he would always get his way. He was kicked from the guild and banned from the realm. His parting words were ‘I’ll be back.’”
There are some pretty absurd excuses in here, too; “I’m a beta tester,” “I know a guy who works at the company,” that sort of thing. I’ve had someone claim they were a QA tester, got into a heated argument with a guy who said his dad worked at Rockstar, and someone once told me they had relatives at Blizzard.”
“About 15 years ago I played a MMO game that had a hide-and-seek minigame,” another replies. “I was hiding in a spot, and this idiot climbed up on top of me and started shouting. I would’ve just ignored him and left but I was in the middle of a quest, so I couldn’t move. He just kept insulting me and my parents for about 20 minutes.”
“I was playing Payday 2,” another replies. “I was playing with my cousin, and this guy kept trying to convince us to do a heist with him. He called us niggers and said we were probably illegal immigrants. We ignored him, and he eventually left.”
“I’ve had people shoot me, run me over, and kill me in pretty much every Mario Kart game,” another user shares. “But the worst has to be in Mario Kart 8, when I was racing with my wife. We had a good lead, and this dick in another car just started ramming us until we crashed, and then he sped off. We were so close to the finish line and he just wanted to target us.”
“When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I was invited to a guild,” another replies. “I joined their Ventrilo channel and they were all laughing at me and insulting me. I was so pissed off, I grabbed the nearest thing to me, which was an empty glass, and smashed it on my desk.”
“I was playing Destiny’s PvP,” another replies. “I was in a game, and a player told me I was cute. So I asked if he was into older men, and he replied ‘no, into young girls.’ I reported him and left, but that made me never want to play again.”
There are plenty of stories like this, and it’s worth taking a look through the thread yourself if you want a reminder of how toxic some parts of the gaming community can be. There are a few uplifting tales in there, too, such as the user who took revenge on a hider who was hogging experience in a PvP area in World of Warcraft.
Others discuss the prevalence of cheaters in PC GTA Online, and while they’re not technically deranged players, they certainly ruin the experience for a lot of people. Another user mentions how they were targeted by other players because they used a harmless emote in League of Legends. There’s a lot of salt in there, and it’s definitely worth treading carefully if you’re playing in ranked games.
