Of course, this is going to be relative, as there isn’t a formal definition out there for toxicity, but in the real world, most can agree on what’s toxic most of the time. For the purposes of this article, we’ll call being toxic the following: If you’re in a game where you consistently see unprovoked personal attacks, the use of slurs, or players throwing games to mess with you, that’s a toxic game. By this definition, we can safely call Call of Duty toxic or League of Legends toxic, because you will routinely see that kind of behavior from the players in those games. And for the curious, why only unprovoked personal attacks, and who decides what’s throwing? Well, if someone is coming at you, over and over, while you aren’t doing or saying anything to them, most people would consider you returning a similar kind of energy to be a very different thing from randomly calling somebody out. As far as throwing goes, as long as you’re trying, whether or not you’re any good, that’s not throwing. Then, of course, there’s the distinction between toxicity and talking trash. Talking trash may not be the nice, friendly move, but even so, there is a distinction. Athletes and gamers across the world will tell you that trash-talking is just a part of competition. Of course, this can go too far and become toxic, but whether you’re personally a fan or not, this is very much so an established tradition that’s been around forever. So, the question becomes, is Overwatch 2 actually toxic, or are people just trash-talking? Are there horrible things going on in Overwatch games? Keep reading, because the answer might just surprise you. First off, in Overwatch 2, the vast and overwhelming majority of players won’t use either voice or text chat. Most of the time, nobody’s saying anything. You might see a comment after a round ends in text chat every few games, but that’s about it. Finding someone with a mic is generally a rare, special occurrence. This dynamic starkly contrasts something like Call of Duty, where if you load into a Search lobby, chances are most people on both teams will be on the mic and there’s an extremely high chance that at least a couple of slurs get tossed out. Ironically, Overwatch relies much more heavily on teamwork, so you’d expect more communication, but the fact of the matter is that you’re not going to interact much on Overwatch. Beyond the likelihood of actually interacting with someone in Overwatch, the worst you’re likely to see in text chat is along the lines of “Ez” or “DPS diff” or something similar, while on voice chat, if you’re lucky enough to get someone on the mic, if your team is losing and you aren’t at the top of the leaderboard, someone might just insult your performance and talk all kinds of trash about your healing, damage, kills, or the like. That’s…about it. You probably won’t ever hear a slur on Overwatch, and if you do, it’ll be exceptionally rare, and unlike Call of Duty, you’re not going to hear, for example, a girl get on the mic and then a slew of “Get back to the kitchen, fatty” type comments, either. In general, Overwatch doesn’t approach the toxicity of other mainstream online games, like Call of Duty, League of Legends, Rust, ARK, or any other number of games. In some sense, you could argue that those other games just have more of a problem with toxicity than Overwatch does, which can sound fair enough, but there’s generally a little more going on than that simple observation. Different games attract different kinds of gamers, and beyond that, different games come with different kinds and levels of toxicity. If you play Animal Crossing, you won’t see any toxicity, not really, but if you play a competitive FPS like Rust where you can spend dozens if not hundreds of hours working on something to have it stolen or destroyed by other players just for fun, that kind of gameplay loop lends itself much more to players being toxic. Overwatch 2 isn’t like that, and nor do you really see that much toxicity when playing. Folks will always be salty when they lose, and that’s just part of the human condition. Thankfully, if you spot someone in Overwatch being rude or even toxic, you can mute them and ignore their comments pretty easily, and you won’t feel much pressure to turn on the mic or even communicate, considering how few do, either. All told, while fair to point out bad behavior, especially in a free-to-play game where you’ll run into kids, Overwatch is far and away not half as bad as many, many other hugely popular, influential games that have been around for years and years.
