Is TF2 Toxic?

agunwieldingcat:

I had a very interesting match yesterday. I feel like what I saw doesn’t just reflect on TF2, but somewhat on gaming as whole.

I’ll keep it short to get to my point without too much preamble – basically someone took it upon himself to be as unpleasant as possible to me, calling me every slur he could think of and consistently claiming that he sincerely hated my guts. I’m fairly used to this, so luckily I wasn’t too bothered.

He used the mic for an entire round, and was then autobalanced so he started typing it out instead. (He was almost bottom scoring because he spent so much of his time typing.) He had a couple of friends that joined in with him, and although two people told him to calm down a bit, no-one really said anything.

I said nothing to him throughout all of this, apart from a couple of jokes – when he was autobalanced I said ‘I’ll miss you’, but nothing too sarcastic. I still gave call outs and thanked my medics.

After about 15 minutes, he left the server, calling me a few more names just for good measure.

Instantly, about five people on my team started telling me that I was ‘such a nice player’, ‘I wish there were people like you in Dota’, ‘You’re the best’, someone went medic just to heal me, and someone just straight up said they loved me. The change was.. Astounding. 

For the next two matches there was a massive atmosphere of positivity. “I genuinely love this team”, “I wish I could friend all of you!” We all started properly working as a team, and I think we did much better because of it. Just from one person being positive, as soon as these players feel like they don’t have to be unpleasant, they stop.

TL;DR especially in a game like TF2, people are scared to say what they really think. At heart most of us are good people, and that’s equally true in-game. I love this community, it’s brought me so much joy, and I’d happily sit through any amount of bs for it. 

Apologies for how cheesy this is but I’m still slightly feels-y, it was just so sweet