Has This Season's In-Game Playerbase Been More Negative Than Past Ones?
I've been playing the game since the Closed Beta in 2024 and this season, to me at least, seems to have an increasingly toxic playerbase compared to previous ones.
I'm not talking about people refusing to stay on the objective, people not wanting to play healers, or the online complaints about metas and character balancing, but the throwing of QP games because "you all suck", screaming at players on the mic channels, throwing slurs around, supports proudly saying that they're not planning on healing anyone, and people just going AFK because "the rest of the team sucks" and they don't want to get the penalty for leaving early–this kind of behavior.
I played Overwatch on launch as well, so I'm not new to the free-to-play team-shooter genre by any means, but this season has been the only one since the game launched where I got so frustrated with the childish behavior that I've had to switch to another game or just shut my PS5 off. In the past, I've also reported a lot of players for clear displays of negative behavior, and generally got messages saying action was taken, but I feel that I haven't been getting many of those this season, even with the spike in negative behavior.
Maybe I've just gotten really unlucky with the majority of games I've played this season, but has anyone else been experiencing an uptick in negative behaviors as well?
Posted Jul 6, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC