There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these "brain dead", patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I'd rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so ... annoying.
As an example, I once dared to suggest that a game developer implement a mode to prevent crouched status from rendering on death cams so that players that are bothered by t-bagging could avoid it (after a match where a friend rage quit because someone just kept head shotting him -- possibly with cheats -- and then t-bagging). This post got tons of hate, and like -50 upvotes on reddit because of course someone should be forced to watch someone t-bag them.
Another example on a official game forum... I made a forum post suggesting Bungie use Mastodon (or really just something else being my intent)... The response I got was some positivity but mostly just "lol nobody uses that sweetie" and other patronizing comments.
Meanwhile studios themselves often seem to be filled with developers that understand this stuff is a problem, and the lack of sportsmanship (or generally civilized attitudes) does push away players. It just doesn't make sense to me that no studio is saying "get lost" to these elements or implementing anti-toxicity features. I just want to play games with nice normal people, is that really so much to ask?
For a while now, I've been asking one simple question with a way I think could help reduce, if not eliminate, toxicity from players:
How do you gamify good sportsmanship?
If you can actually gamify and incentivize good sportsmanship in a tangible, meaningful way, it could do a lot to help with the crap commonly seen/heard in video game chats and forums.
It's the question.
Lately I've been thinking about how you'd design a racing sim that rewards and gamifies clean racing but the basic answer is that you'd have to set it in world so different from our autoracing history and technology that you'd lose 75% of your player base who are mostly interested in real cars (the same way FIFA games appeal to people who want the real players, and don't actually care about the game design of football).
On PS5 there's platform native 'Accolades' where you can rate the people you've played with, but Bruce I never play the kinds of games that they're designed for I have no idea if they're used or how they even work. The point being though even Sony were trying to approach this topic at an OS/ecosystem level.