Why did M+ players become so toxic with BFA?

[Jaewalk]

I joined a +12 WM pug today. Everything went smoothly but when we got to the last boss we were 2% short because the tank didn’t pull enough trash because teaming calculation was off. The healer who didn’t say a word the whole run goes off on the tank calling him an idiot, trash tanking etc I forget all the expletives, and then leaves the group with 5ish minutes left on the timer to down the boss and get 2%.

I have been running keys up to level 23 by the end of legion and I have never seen the levels of elitism and raging among random groups like I do now. We are barely past the first month of mythic+ being out and you will get criticized so hard if you don’t know the exact pulls/routes/skips/interrupt/dispel/fear pathing/aggro range/charm/cc without any voice or pre-planning. Some groups do things totally different.

For example I did a +14 TAD last week and I had never seen T-Rex boss tanked by the stairs and didn’t know to run under them during fear so I spawned some raptors going to where I normally have. I got lit up so hard and called a brain dead tart jabrony among other things... oh it’s not like we even wiped either.

I have never seen such a level of insults/toxicity/rage quitting over even minor events in dungeons. I got my raider.io to 1123 so far on my own... but I’m starting to not have fun anymore and am starting to think it’s not worth it to try and push further. I feel like you have to walk on eggshells, be absolutely perfect and pray the way you know to do things is the same as the groups or else it’s a bust. And in B4 run with a guild group or make your own- because of the times I play I’m not able to keep a consistent m+ team together.

I don’t remember legion being anywhere close to this bad. Has the MDI and focus on raider.io causes this or have toxic players just driven most reasonable people out? M+ was my favorite part of the game coming out of legion and I was so excited for all the new dungeons and comps going into BFA... I’m feel very salty now.

So back to the title..

[Updates] Based on responses

1. No. Nowhere did I say that M+ during legion was free or void of Toxic people, I am pointing out that based on my experience playing multiple characters in BFA that it seems noticeably more -frequent/extreme/rampant than in legion. Anecdotal I know, but there is no other way to measure this. Most other people are observing similar patterns it seems.

2. I have a raider.io score above 1k. Getting groups is super easy for me and I'm not having any challenges in that department. I am pointing out how its becoming not fun and people seem much more toxic than when I was running 20+ keys back in legion. I am starting to lose interest. I'm not trying to get "carried".

3. No, not all people in pugs are toxic. I do have a friends list with good people I have met doing them but they: Might not be online, playing an alt, running with other people, raiding, pet battles, farming. So access isn't always there.

4. I am in a mythic raiding guild and we tend to do keys after raid that go way better then pugs. However that is only 2 days a week and please refer back to how I cite that it was my favorite activity so on off days I do resort to pugging.



I think the best responses I've seen as to why it has become so toxic is the following:

A: At the beginning of legion not many people did keystones
B: At the beginning of legion people mostly did+3 as that was the most efficient way to farm legos
C: At the beginning of legion there was no MDI, no raider.io, no reason to go above a +10.
D: With the focus on raider.io if they invite you because of your score they expect you to be perfect
E: With the MDI becoming so popular there is an increase of people who treat every run like they are in the MDI
F: M+ is just the perfect ambient to cultivate a toxic combination of Elitism and Speedrunning. Douchebags feed from it.

Will add more as I see good ones, thanks for the constructive responses.

[Th3Scourge]

I joined a +12 WM pug today. Everything went smoothly but when we got to the last boss we were 2% short because the tank didn’t pull enough trash because teaming calculation was off. The healer who didn’t say a word the whole run goes off on the tank calling him an idiot, trash tanking etc I forget all the expletives, and then leaves the group with 5ish minutes left on the timer to down the boss and get 2%.

I have been running keys up to level 23 by the end of legion and I have never seen the levels of elitism and raging among random groups like I do now. We are barely past the first month of mythic+ being out and you will get criticized so hard if you don’t know the exact pulls/routes/skips/interrupt/dispel/fear pathing/aggro range/charm/cc without any voice or pre-planning. Some groups do things totally different.

For example I did a +14 TAD last week and I had never seen T-Rex boss tanked by the stairs and didn’t know to run under them during fear so I spawned some raptors going to where I normally have. I got lit up so hard and called a brain dead tart jabrony among other things... oh it’s not like we even wiped either.

I have never seen such a level of insults/toxicity/rage quitting over even minor events in dungeons. I got my raider.io to 1123 so far on my own... but I’m starting to not have fun anymore and am starting to think it’s not worth it to try and push further. I feel like you have to walk on eggshells, be absolutely perfect and pray the way you know to do things is the same as the groups or else it’s a bust. And in B4 run with a guild group or make your own- because of the times I play I’m not able to keep a consistent m+ team together.

I don’t remember legion being anywhere close to this bad. Has the MDI and focus on raider.io causes this or have toxic players just driven most reasonable people out?

So back to the title..

I’m ranked in the top 20 for DK tanks for my realm by forming or joining good groups using discord and building relationships with good players but I still run into disgustingly toxic players from time to time. Thankfully, I’ve built up enough of a friends list base or guild mates to mitigate this problem

[The7]

Mythic+ players were always toxic, nothing has changed.

[Varolyn]

Raider IO probably has a role in it. I have no issue with Raider IO myself and it's nice to something like that to serve both as a tool and to give some players something to work for, but things like that can really inflate egos.

[A Chozo]

with BfA? This problem is as old as online games, dude.

M+ is just the perfect ambient to cultivate a toxic combination of Elitism and Speedrunning. Douchebags feed from it.

[Marrilaife]

Pugs are filled with "better than thou" players who can't do anything except tunnel dps but will criticize others for the run not going fast enough. Had a rogue who never sapped the infested and did total of 10 interrupts in the whole dungeon (while others were at 25+) whine that we depleted the timer. But ofc none of his fault in it, right?

Best thing you can do is keep fishing for like-minded players and develop a robust friendlist of people who play at your specific times, if usual guild timetables don't work for you.

Tbh I had my fair share of ragequitters in legion m+ even in cases where there weren't wipes and the timer wasn't depleted, so if I can avoid it, I run with guild / friends.

[SirCowdog]

My guess would be that it has a lot to do with the overall disappointment with BfA at a general level. People who are unhappy with the state of the game are more likely to lash out or spew bile because of this.

It's just one more facet of how people vent. You see the same sort of increased complaints and anger on the forums lately.

[MoanaLisa]

with BfA? This problem is as old as online games, dude.

This. It's not unique to World of Warcraft, BfA, or any other online game nor is it particularly more frequent than usual. There have been threads much like this popping up at a rate of a few a week since I've been here. Play with people you know, either in your guild or community. Friends, friends of friends, etc.

Dipping into the pool of random people will eventually turn something like this up regardless of expansion or patch. Nothing new here.

[Dakara]

with BfA? This problem is as old as online games, dude.

M+ is just the perfect ambient to cultivate a toxic combination of Elitism and Speedrunning. Douchebags feed from it.

This.

M+ is basically those petri dishes you grew bacteria in back at High School. It concentrates all the toxicity of the WOW playerbase and gives it the perfect environment to grow.

I've never been one to speculate on the "Death of WOW", but if raids were ever replaced by M+, that just might do it. I know a lot of very good players (raiders, PvPers) who flat out refuse to touch M+ unless it's with RL friends or well known guildies.

If you don't know every single pull, especially as a Tank, "You're trash and should kill yourself IRL" (apparently).

[MoanaLisa]

I know a lot of very good players (raiders, PvPers) who flat out refuse to touch M+ unless it's with RL friends or well known guildies.

I'm not a great player. I don't even know if I'm all that good any longer. Gotten older and less of a twitch player as time goes along and I will absolutely refuse to play with random strangers. It's only people from the guild, friends, family (3 in our extended family play), friends of friends or people I know from communities.

It's no longer worth the hassle to get involved with all of that. It's been that way since before Warlords. Not really a BfA thing specifically. I'm on to have a good time and some fun. I'm not on to be yelled at by someone I've never met before. That's nuts.

[ONCHEhap]

m+ is just the worst kind of content when it comes to toxicity,it's because of its very nature that it's that way

Now add m+ score from raider.io,and you can multiply the toxicity problem a thousand fold

Now add the fact that blizzard slowly built a strong inaction policy against toxicity while allowing people to be anonymous and to get away with being assholes thanks to some features they added to the game.

All together,it's why m+ very quickly grew into a festering putrescent growth on the community,it was just going to happen as soon as m+ or any similar content got added to the game.I'm not saying m+ as a form of content is bad,but it creating so much toxicity was just not avoidable

[Dakara]

I'm not a great player. I don't even know if I'm all that good any longer. Gotten older and less of a twitch player as time goes along and I will absolutely refuse to play with random strangers. It's only people from the guild, friends, family (3 in our extended family play), friends of friends or people I know from communities.

It's no longer worth the hassle to get involved with all of that. It's been that way since before Warlords. Not really a BfA thing specifically. I'm on to have a good time and some fun. I'm not on to be yelled at by someone I've never met before. That's nuts.

I can definitely relate to that.

I remember when I first played Counterstrike... from memory, it started as a free, 3rd party Mod for Half-Life. Anyway, was great fun and my buddies and I were fairly decent at it.

Today? Put me (us) in any competitive online game and we just get wrecked. Much like M+ in WOW, if you're not an expert on day one you're trash. (Many) Gamers really are horrible people tbh. Probably why I've held off getting my kids into it.

[msdos]

This was only a problem when you could deplete a key and even then, if you were a tank or healer, it was never a problem since you could leave any group at a moments notice and then rebound into another one immediately.

If people want to rage, I don't really sweat it. Either find a different group or try again some other day.

[Nospmas]

I actually think a big part of what is bringing this out more is that the less chance of titan forgeing has less and less people needing the gear from the dungeons and most are only trying to get fast times for their raider io score.

I know I've got 1 person in our guild that when he's in pugs if the group is not making the time he'll just leave the group, which I think is a very douchey move. Maybe if there was a Karma button like wowprogress has on raider io, where you could downvote someone for douchey-ness and maybe have it affect their raider io score (not alot but a little bit) it would curb some of this.

[Doctor Funkenstein]

Mythic+ players were always toxic, nothing has changed.

This.

When Blizzard caters to the elitist assholes in the game, guess who shows up? I'll give you a hint: It's the elitist assholes.

[Th3Scourge]

This ^

Mythic give people a sense of elitism because they feel based on the difficulty (rather than group coordination) it makes the above the normal players. The internet then adds the ability to talk shit to people you don't know without recourse. Last expansion I didn't really run into it that bad but like Th3Scourge stated I have surrounded myself with good people who play the game well. We aren't mythic 1st raiders and won't be but we do heroic raiding, some mythic and do high level mythic + instances well. We require discord for all and normally have very little problems with the instances we run. We also talk shit constantly to each other but in good humor. Maybe its an age thing, not sure.

I don't get a consistent time to raid during the week so almost all my gearing has been exlcusively from M+ but I absolutely agree that the pace and gameplay of M+ lends itself to elitists jerks. I ran a 12+ ML the other day with this Arms warrior that would just go nuts on his AoE as soon as I pulled a pack. He must have died about 10 times throughout the run and only at the end (after I had to solo the last phase of the final boss) starts being abusive for not holding aggro. If he had piped up at the start I probably would've just killed the key and left

[hulkgor]

Who knew there will be bad apples in a pool of hundreds of thousands of players running m+s?

*gasp*

Join a guild, add players you have good runs with to the friends list, create solid\regular teams... those usually help.

[darkfire979]

When you have a system like M+ and combine it with system like raider.io that is catered to people who thrived on exclusiveness and elitism, the people tend to end up turning on each other because it's nature of such system.
Basically when you are in a group of people whose focus is being 'good' but everyone in the group is already 'good', you need to push someone in that group down to be 'not good' to be consider 'good' in that group.

That's why many people prefer to run M+ with friends and guild and just totally ignore the M+ pugging/raider io scene.

[Turtel]

It's not just in mythic difficulty. I've met extremely toxic players on normal/heroic dungeons and in LFR this expansion. Some people are just extremely narrow minded, have very short tempers and massively over inflated opinions of themselves. They fly into a fit of rage whenever something happens differently to what they were expecting, even when they were the ones doing the mechanics incorrectly. For example, in the first week of the expansion, someone was kicked from a Waycrest Manor because they went the 'wrong way' when in fact it was just that the layout of the dungeon had changed. I personally was kicked from a normal Tol Dagor by a warrior who insisted on personally melee attacking the mobs during the cannon gauntlet section of the dungeon and got pissed off when he was knocked back by the cannons (despite not taking any noticeable damage from them). I endured an extremely vile and hateful response from the warrior when I tried to explain that his damage was negligible when compared to the damage of the cannons (I was called a cunt, a retard, told to fuck off, and that he didn't play this game to have someone else do all the damage).

It's probably just bad luck, but my experience in dungeons this expansion has also been the worst I've ever experienced. I've definitely lost a lot of my will to play the game, and I'm not sure if it's because of these terrible dungeon experiences, or if it's just because I've got bored of the game in general.

[dawawe]

I joined a +3(super high) got kicked 3 trash pulls in for using my voidwalker on trash and was whispered this little gem