Sony is extremely trigger happy with suspending based on messages. I’ve gotten a few weeks suspension for ‘harassment’ because I told someone that kept messaging me I was hacking that that was ‘honestly kind of dumb’.
I've completely given up on playing with strangers. All my experiences were negative, and whenever they weren't, they were just neutral.
One time I tried playing Battlefield 2 online (usually played against bots) and played the same map for a few hours (one that didn't work with bots). First I had some trouble, but then I learned the map and how the players behaved so I could anticipate their actions a little, got more kills, and suddenly I got kicked and accused of hacking because my online profile didn't show enough hours played and I beat some of the guys with 1000h+. Sometimes I wonder how anyone gets into e-sports when "being slightly better than average" immediately means "hacking".
When I started playing Rocket League I almost immediately turned off voice and text chats. Made the game 100x better.
Recently I tried playing a co-op game, thinking there should at least be some more friendly attitudes there. Accidentally hit a teammate (didn't die), who immediately lost his shit over voice chat and proceeded to murder me shortly after.
The only thing that could have made these things worse would have been some service suspending me on top of getting harrassed, which is apparently Sony's solution.
To be honest, I don't see an easy solution to this, or even a difficult one without creating the equivalent of the judicial system of a medium-sized nation. Banning bad words won't ban bad behavior. Automated bans can be easily used for blackmail. Cheating/hacking prevention seems to be impossible even for extremely successful games (e.g. GTA V), plus it doesn't seem to deter players, so there's not much incentive anyway.
Maybe blacklisting is the wrong approach. Maybe we need better whitelisting schemes instead.
I do have an MMO I play often(Planetside 2) but I go through frequent periods of disillusionment since the game has its fair share of cheaters and toxicity. (An MMO with FPS gameplay = quite a wide open space for cheating). The only thing keeping me in it is the fact that it's super unique and it has so many tools for outwitting the average "just good no hacks" bot user.
To wit, I can nearly maintain a 1 K/D after a thousand hours of play; the real problem with having bot users, even if they're on both teams, is that they vacuum up all the oxygen, and being an MMO, there is no matchmaking - you fight the population that shows up to that zone, independent of skill level. Nobody really knows how they're performing when 90% of their encounters are with an opponent that instantly three-taps their head. So to achieve a 1 K/D I have to find the rare fights not populated by those players or devise a way of farming them despite losing nearly every direct gun battle. It is mostly possible. As I said before, the game gives you a lot of tools to let you not take a direct confrontation or literally bring a tank to a gunfight.
Tonight was quite bad, though, with the late night server population eventually dwindling until the only opposition was a gang of blatant cheaters who knew the tricks and were all cooperating. If they stay in a group it's extremely hard to catch them unawares - thus, I ended with a 0.6 session K/D. The entire holiday break has made the game harder since that's when cheating intensifies.
But to generalize - gaming as a whole seems poisoned by consumer entitlement. People get sold these games where you imagine you are the hero. Then they get blasted and blame everyone but themselves for it, then run off and find a cheat so that they can prove something to someone. People who play combat sports aren't like this(apart from cranks that show up suddenly at local tournaments and do illegal moves in the first round) - the training is of similar or greater importance to the winning, and there's real risk to the bullshit if it hurts someone.
Hearthstone has exactly this system (only friends can chat with each other). What happens quite often after some matches:
1. You receive a friend request from your opponent
2. If you accept it, they probably are going to send you a bunch of insults and then unfriend you.
In my case with my son, the guy who blackmailed him to give gifts was a friend of a friend of a friend. So usually you have only 2,3 people you know in real life, then each one will have other 2,3 and they will bring them into a group to play together. I never bought Fortnite shit for my son so he had no stuff to give and he got reported multiple times, probably some shitty employee that is super bored will randomly click some buttons to empty his queue.
