I'll play multiplayer if none of the players has the opportunity to communicate, because as soon as 80% of the gaming community opens its mouth and spews forth bullshit, you start to regret even playing the fucking game.

Other than that, single player all the way for me.

Mind you, MiiVerse on Wii U has brought forth some pretty interesting and surprisingly civil and light-hearted banter, but then, people tend to talk about the games, not about competition, co-op or what system is best there.

This right here is why game developers need to take the problem seriously. It affects how people view their playerbase, it affects how people view them and as a result can affect their ability to make profit. These sorts of people are toxic to gaming communities.

I don't bother with online PVP at all thanks to crap like this. I get my PVP fix in martial arts, where talking like that ends with getting the taste slapped out of your mouth. Happily enough I almost never come across that type of person thanks to this.

Well, Kingdom of Loathing has the right idea.

Here I thought this was going to be a thread about my porn addiction. Oh, well back to the porn sluts.

Better to be somewhere assholes have free reign than somewhere with moderators. Moderators for online multiplayer games? That is insane. It invites abuse of power and favoritism. Think about it....assholes with free reign...what is the worst they can do to you? Insult you? Troll you? Rage at you? Shoot you in the back in the game? Corrupted moderators can do much worse like BAN people for life. Truth is, most people can't handle power very well like the blues here. After most people get some power, it always ends up like the third episode from Star Trek The Original Series, Season 1 or the story of Caligula...

Most online multiplayer games I've played give you the option to mute other players.

They do, but a lot of players use voice chat/text chat to communicate tactics and strategy. Muting everyone isn't really helpful.

I've rarely encountered an issue with being harassed by quality players. Once about a year and a half ago me and 4 buddies were playing multiplayer Halo:Reach just for shits and giggles (we were all at one friends apartment playing split screen). The opportunity for us all to hang out was rare. We ran into a group of players that were a clan of so called "pro gamers". When we started playing we immediately got a ton of grief over chat. Which was shocking. I'd like to say at this point in the story we totally pWned them, but we lost most of the matches. That being said, one of my friends one with us was a pro comedian (he gets his act at bars and small venues) and he gave an equivalent of a verbal beat down to the clan leader. It was to the point his own clanmates were laughing at him from the jokes (he didn't bag on the other players since they pretty much dropped the 3rd grader intimidation tactics after laughing at a few jokes my friend made). We may have lost the matches, but that clan leader is going to get shit from his clanmates for weeks on those jokes (I can almost bet he still hears it to this day). It all felt odd since the 4 of us playing online weren't really a clan. So getting athlete level smack talk was a bit shocking.

That being said the real pro gamers I've had to deal with on a common basis tend to give you hints on how to up your game. They want a challenge that can elevate their play as well. Not bag on n00bs (that won't get you any bread)

This is the main reason I don't play online much, and especially not shooters or DotA-like games.

However, I've found that most of the immature assholes who like to insult others for no reason play the popular games and the actual griefers do as well since they have more potential victims there.
So as long as you stay away from shooters, MoBa and popular MMOs with a focus on PvP, you should be mostly safe.

In a few years of MMOs (mostly D&D Online, but also a few others), I've yet to play with someone who was really rude. There were still a few obnoxious players, but nothing that the block list couldn't fix.

If all else fails, you can always start a thread here or in other forums with a more mature crowd to try and find people to play with you in the games you're interested in. I've joined a few multiplayer games that way, and it was always fun, especially the current Blood Bowl league.

[Ques up Seinfield music]

You just never know who your going to run into online. I stopped playing xblives "Uno" game since one could stream video instead of using just a basic player pic. So a 4th of the people I encountered online looked like they came from the set of "The Wicker Man" (not kidding, the people had the animal masks and never spoke with candles in he background). Random people making out. I'll never forget when a non streamer asked one player to stop making out with his girlfriend at which point the guy got angry and just began displaying himself and his gf online. Another third just looked plain crazy. No real pro players, but it was the biggest cesspool of smack talk I ever saw. I think it was worse on a daily basis in Uno then the clan on Halo Reach. I mean people were taking wild draw 4's like you just killed their family members.

I didn't have that problem with TFC on public servers, but maybe it is because it was already an aging online game with a dedicated group of people playing it.

Sure there were sometimes jokers who tried to make their team mates life miserable because they felt that was fun, or maybe even some cheaters, but the a-hole ratio stayed quite low especially on those servers where there was a ban voting system. So if some joker kept pissing other people off, he would be voted off the server. And stay out!

Then again, I think I got banned (not voted) out of a few servers because someone with a banning power felt I played wrong. Like once I was accused of "ammo room whoring", because I was an engineer who had built the defending sentry gun near an ammo room so that I could replenish and fix the sentry gun continuously. One enemy scout/medic got fed up by not being able to run past it alone anymore, even when changing to a demoman (because then I would kill him with my emp grenade). So I was banned by him from the server. Oh well, I guess I defended my base too well.

Another time I got banned by another (enemy) admin because I had built a sentry gun inside the enemy base. The admin felt I should stay inside my own base if I was playing an engineer class. Funny, I didn't recall reading about that kind of rule when I entered the server. Frankly, I think he just came up with that rule right there because it affected him.

Third case, I wasn't banned but I got lots of complaints from a couple of players because I shot at them while they were running towards my base, and I was running towards theirs. They apparently felt that the area between the bases was neutral zone where you were not supposed to fight the enemy, only inside the bases. Again, another rule I had completely missed, and frankly disagreed with.

I stopped playing multiplayer with this as one of the reasons, I'm not as fast as I used to be and getting abuse hurled at you for not being elite enough just puts you off. I was getting this on Battlefield Bad Company 2, even the PC versions of games seem to be getting more and more obnoxious mouthy kids.

Must admit though, about a year ago I was playing Homefront Multiplayer a fair bit and there was no smack talking and it was just fun to play on random servers. Fire it up occasionally still and there aren't many people playing it anymore but you always get a decent game.

That made my day :)

This is why making groups with friends or from places like GOG or other forums you frequent and know are friendly is so important nowadays. That way, you can play with nice people, mute everyone else, and have some really good fun. I used to play in the hellish miasma of Xbox Live, but I learned that I should almost never, ever play without at least a friend (we had a cool party of 4 and we played Left 4 Dead 2 all the time, and it was always fun and funny even when we lost, for example). That way we joined a party of at least two, so we would only hear each other chatting and everything else didn't really matter. Our fuck-ups (which could be usual) were mostly incredibly funny to us; I mean, we always tried to play well, but there are times when you're just going to throw the only molotov in the team at a tank that is moving around, splashing some stupid little irrelevant corner with fire. :)

I strongly believe that many gamers play these things so competitively out of a need to prove themselves to themselves, and so spout all this shit at others because that's exactly the way they think of themselves in a wider context of life, as complete losers and assholes, and as such, they're aching to see someone doing worse. So when you get together with people who don't need that illusory, ephemeral boost of self-esteem, multiplayer is a wonderful thing, because you're basically enjoying each other's presences in a situation where spontaneity is everything, making banter and conversations flow in different ways than how they would normally develop when just hanging around. For me, videogame multiplayer is a perfect setting for play, but it's too bad that our peers are just so consumed by this ideology of the 'winner'. When you're amongst friends, though, I think it's amazing. :)