Why is the community for SSB so toxic?

I don't think anyone's saying that all of the SSB community are terrible. I wouldn't even say that of the League of Legends community. But the environment of a community can be "toxic". In other words, leaning toward being unpleasant over leaning toward being welcoming. Or, in the context of a discussion, toxic may mean that a subject leans toward inspiring troubled or bad conversation vs a subject that is more easily talked about.

For example, I wouldn't consider Giant Bomb to be a toxic community, but I can acknowledge areas of the environment which are toxic to discussion. That's based on observed trends over time and aspects of those who make the majority of comments. Even the moderators appear to have singled in on "toxic" topics which are weaknesses within the larger community. Obviously, a lot of people won't contribute to something being problematic, but a big part of it has to do with who engages in the conversation. Who sets the tone of the environment. Most Giant Bomb members are cool folks, but what sets the tone of Giant Bomb is within those who regularly make threads, comment in threads, and the over-arching influence of the staff. So, even if most people are fine, there can be trends in the kinds of discussions and outcomes we actually have with those who are most active and most cultivate the environment around here.

The same is true for the SSB community or practically any other. A lot of conduct is based on expectation and fitting in. So, if people observe that the norm is one way, there are more inclined to embrace that persona. It's like how you may act differently around different people. You may be more formal with a parent, more shy with a stranger, or more outgoing with a close friend. You may go to a club and be far more crude when hanging around more casual friends than if you were just having a nice dinner in a restaurant. People are people, but a large part of people is their environment and how they adapt to it.

If the SSB pro community appears relatively toxic to someone, that usually speaks to a larger, more pervasive issue of the environment they've cultivated than just a few folks. There are those who set tone and those who enable it, and they are all part of maintaining a community's strengths and weaknesses.

As for the SSB pro community's root cause for this, I imagine it's because they have had to put so much effort into getting anyone to take their preferred game seriously that they prickle a bit at newcomers who may not take it as seriously as they do. That's similar to a problem within the larger gamer community, where many gamers have had to try to defend and justify their favored hobby for years, and while that has helped protect and grow gaming, that same zeal is at times preventing some gamers from accepting any legitimate criticism of the hobby or community they have defended so passionately.

I don't think it's a case of the Smash community necessarily being any worse than others. What does stand out is the vociferousness and viciousness of members of the competitive Smash community, particularly when it comes to their defense of Smash as a competitive fighting game and not just a game for people to gather around and have fun. That these people also tend to have "my way or the highway" interactions with others, in that they insist on playing by competitive rules that restrict much of what the game has to offer, even while in supposedly casual settings, only exacerbates that notion. These are the people that complain that Sakurai removed the wavedashing glitch from Brawl and threw in an unavoidable random element in tripping, cursing Brawl's existence all the while as they praise Project M for "correcting" it.

Also...

THIS. ALL OF THIS. I was in the same boat back in my days doing temp QA at NOA. During lunch, a display GameCube running Melee would be crowded with guys playing No items/Final Destination matches, and I actually got dirty looks for having the gall to start a match with items turned on. These people insisted on having fun their way and were incredibly off-putting and exclusionary when it came to interacting with anyone that didn't have that NI/FD mindset.

On the one hand, I'm happy that the next Smash Bros. will have distinct For Fun and For Glory modes. But I can't help but feel that these modes are in their own way trolling on Sakurai's part, as it restricts the competitive side to No Items/Final Destination while the other side is called "Fun".

With a taste of your lips

I’m on a ride

You're toxic

I'm slipping under

With a taste of a poison paradise

I’m addicted to you

Don’t you know that you’re toxic

And I love what you do

Don’t you know that you’re toxic

I can't say much about the community surrounding SSB, but when I watched it on EVO streams I quickly became pretty bored after the 15th match of Peach vs. Fox/Falco.

Let me guess!

Fanboys + internet.

So was your local Smash community mean to you? Or are you basing this off of a few people on the internet and saying that everyone in the community is like that? I've met nice Smash players locally, and for internet forums the NeoGAF Smash community is one of the nicest places on the internet.

Some assholes doesn't mean a community on the whole is "toxic." I't would be like calling the Giant Bomb community toxic just because some users like @mariachimacabre are assholes.

@darthorange said:

"Toxic" has become a codeword for "people I don't like to be around". Many of the people who use the term "toxic" to describe a vibrant subculture are often the same people who get butthurt when anything colours outside the lines of their standards. A bit sad, really.

I'd say comments like this are the reason.

It's one thing to not understand something, but it's another to dismiss it entirely and call it "boring as fuck" when clearly, by the competetive scene existing at all, some people don't see it that way.

There is a huge presence of people with extremely dismissive attitudes about competitive SSB play. I don't think that excuses any terrible behavior, but having the majority of people talk about your passion in such a derisive way makes it very easy to start off a conversation ready to fucking go, you know?

That bit never gets old. Amazing bit of radio.

I don't think that it's stupid to play Smash Bros. competitively, but I do think that the people that do need to keep in mind the perspective of the audience the game was made for. They need to realize that a lot of people, I would suspect the majority, just play the game for fun, don't care about the tournament scene, and have no interest in playing by those rules. When people question why they choose to play in a way that seems so inhibiting, the answer isn't to screech defensively. It should be enough to say that competitive rules evolved that encourage their style of play and that it's not for everyone. There are polite ways to go about it, and I have rarely witnessed that politeness from competitive Smash players.

You say that Melee has depth and dynamism, but how? When the competitive scene is predicated on the removal of content and the highest levels are dominated almost exclusively by Fox and Falco, where does that depth and that dynamism exist? That is something that no Smash player has ever been able to take the time to explain to me without hissing and backing away the moment I challenge their reasoning.

I go to a college filled with Smash enthusiasts, and I'm not allowed to play with the main group anymore due to my suggestion that I use items or play on Warioware, Inc or play R.O.B. So I'm not saying that the community isn't made worse by people who discriminate against them, but they're certainly already pretty damn exclusionary. I'm all for "playing your way" and shit, but if you can't even stand the thought of somebody becoming Warioman and motorcycling you off the stage, then I'm going to pass a bit of judgment.

Fuck. Beat me to it.

The worst times I had playing SSB with other people was when they insisted on no items, limited lives, and Final Destination. The best times were when we turn items up to max, set the time to 5-8 minutes or so, and play on some dumb stage like the Game and Watch one. Running around as Warios farting on each other or facefucking with Diddy Kong is hilarious, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Smash Bros started out as a fun party game, and I hope it continues to be so. I want it to be big, bombastic, chaotic, and completely un-fucking-balanced. Give me hammers, bob-ombs, warp stars, explosions everywhere. Give me dumb characters like G&W or R.O.B. I'm gonna play as Bowser and Donkey Kong and Mario and whoever the fuck else. There's a billion other "competitive" games that aggressive, self-entitled, and loud assholes have tried to spoil everywhere else in the world of video games, and I'm glad that Sakurai seems to resist that as much as possible.

So that community might be hostile etc, I wouldn't know, I don't play the game. The anecdotes in this thread do support them at least being exclusionary. But there is also quite a bit of hostility in this thread towards people that play competitive smash. With one side saying it's not a proper fighting game and the other telling them the way they play isn't fun, I can sort of see why they would be defensive/hostile/whatever.

I'll just put this out there though. Honing a skill or craft can be fun and rewarding. Trying to find depth beyond the chaos in a series like smash, regardless of Sakurai's intentions, might not make you a joyless asshole. If you watched a smash stream and were bored, that doesn't mean everyone else shares that view.

By the same token, enjoying the items or preferring Brawl over Melee doesn't make you wrong either, but I feel the need to play Devil's advocate, since there aren't as many voices defending competitive play in here. Obviously, way more people play Smash as a party game, so I don't see the need to be quite so protective of it that way. The thing is that the two schools of thought on Smash make it a COMPLETELY different game. There's not really anything else like it. Most fighting games don't have anything restricted etc for tournament play and the few that do, it's something small like not being allowed to use an overpowered secret boss character or something. If there are guys playing smash no items etc and you want to join in and enable everything, pick a crazy stage etc, and you end up being excluded, sure, that sucks. But at the same time, it'd basically be like if you walked in to a room of people playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo and said "Ooh, I want to play!" and then took that game out and put in Rainbow edition. Nobody is wrong for having whatever tastes, but it's not the game they were playing, so either way, people are going to end up unhappy. And that's a problem with Smash. I can play Street Fighter with people that aren't super in to it and we're all playing the same game. I sandbag, because it obviously wouldn't be satisfying for anybody if I played super competitively against people who don't play the game that way, but it's still the same game that I understand and there are still moments where I can apply those skills that I've tried to hone. Both parties can engage with the game in the way they want. I can still try to make reads or bait things or notice player tendencies or whatever while refraining from landing the biggest punishes on everything that I can etc. Smash does not facilitate that nearly as well because the game is so drastically different.

@generic_username: well, I would say that the entire genre of fighting games is quite boring so I don't know if you should be quoting me to make a point.

we are a very welcoming community we just warn you what your getting into first. a lot of sacrifices on what you consider good.

also whats the fun of playing smash without a bunch of characters and items. boring.

All I will say is that: all competitive game (Fighting Games, MOBAs, & Online FPS) communities will have some sort of toxicity towards newer players, unskilled players, and those who criticize their game of choice. It's a sad fact humanity harbors in the need to belong to an exclusive social group. *insert sad-face emoji of choice here*

@truthtellah said:

I don't think anyone's saying that all of the SSB community are terrible. I wouldn't even say that of the League of Legends community. But the environment of a community can be "toxic". In other words, leaning toward being unpleasant over leaning toward being welcoming. Or, in the context of a discussion, toxic may mean that a subject leans toward inspiring troubled or bad conversation vs a subject that is more easily talked about

Oh I don't think anybody here in this conversation actually means it as the entire SSB fandom is toxic. I took OP's comments to be one of those things where people tend to take shortcuts with language which lead to potentially hurtful generalizations. I'm as guilty as anyone else of getting lazy with my language sometimes.

That being said I do run into people who do absolutely mean it in that context when they say "X community is toxic" etc. Usually tossed off as an excuse for poor play right before they permanently give up on a game. So I do believe there are people out there who honestly do think the entire SSB competitive scene is toxic etc.

And that would not be unusual behavior for people, we like to make shortcut judgments. It's fast, easy and decisive way to do things. It gets us into trouble a lot as it can lead to some really wrong conclusions or worse stereotypes. e.g, Yelp is full of super polarized reviews for restaurants based on 1-2 bad (or good) experiences that characterize an entire company's customer service as good or bad usually based off the actions of one employee one time. That's kinda crazy if you think about it, given how many customers a typical restaurant probably serves daily. But yeah there some people who do make sweeping character judgments of a population/group based off an extremely small sample set all the time.

@truthtellah said:

For example, I wouldn't consider Giant Bomb to be a toxic community, but I can acknowledge areas of the environment which are toxic to discussion. That's based on observed trends over time and aspects of those who make the majority of comments. Even the moderators appear to have singled in on "toxic" topics which are weaknesses within the larger community. Obviously, a lot of people won't contribute to something being problematic, but a big part of it has to do with who engages in the conversation. Who sets the tone of the environment. Most Giant Bomb members are cool folks, but what sets the tone of Giant Bomb is within those who regularly make threads, comment in threads, and the over-arching influence of the staff. So, even if most people are fine, there can be trends in the kinds of discussions and outcomes we actually have with those who are most active and most cultivate the environment around here.

Totally agree, you're absolutely right about that. The best forums I've participated in, always seem to have strong leadership, even if it's only leadership by example. It doesn't take many bad voices to make a place feel unwelcoming, especially if the bad voices are prolific posters.

@truthtellah said:

The same is true for the SSB community or practically any other. A lot of conduct is based on expectation and fitting in. So, if people observe that the norm is one way, there are more inclined to embrace that persona. It's like how you may act differently around different people. You may be more formal with a parent, more shy with a stranger, or more outgoing with a close friend. You may go to a club and be far more crude when hanging around more casual friends than if you were just having a nice dinner in a restaurant. People are people, but a large part of people is their environment and how they adapt to it.

If the SSB pro community appears relatively toxic to someone, that usually speaks to a larger, more pervasive issue of the environment they've cultivated than just a few folks. There are those who set tone and those who enable it, and they are all part of maintaining a community's strengths and weaknesses.

So in your opinion toxic atmospheres are more due to a leadership void than a critical mass of toxic people? Which then leads to a culture that's permissive of and encouraging to abusive behavior?

I could buy that if that's your argument. e.g. The StarCraft 2 competitive community seems like one of the more civil ones out there, perhaps that's because the Korean players set the tone in the right way. When you look at the pro gaming world, a lot of those players seem to carry themselves with a professionalism and sportsmanship that isn't as obvious in other game communities. That would be consistent to your what you are saying.

The angle I was coming from was one that was influenced by the reading I've been doing about creating and maintaining mixed income neighborhoods lately. There seems to be a common wisdom in urban planning that there is a "tipping point" in terms of % of low income residents where once exceeded middle and high income residents tend to flee the neighborhood at an alarming rate. Which starts a negative feedback cycle of lower property values, which becomes very difficult to stop once started. All of which puts tremendous stress on city services as well making it difficult for families to lift themselves out of poverty. This tipping point tends to vary from city to city as well over time. Tipping Point theory I've heard it called, More or less a variant of Thomas Schelling's work on the dynamics of how American neighborhoods become racially segregated over time.

I suppose both ideas could be consistent with each other though in terms of self selecting hobbyist communities like a gaming community. Maybe it might play out something like... Leadership void cultivates an abusive vocal small minority, whose presence once large enough initially drives out casuals, which increases the abusive vocal minority's share of the culture, which then drives more people, which further increases the abusive vocal minority's share etc., etc. etc.

If your idea is right (it certainly sounds very plausible to me), I think you answered the OP better than anyone else has so far.

@truthtellah said:

As for the SSB pro community's root cause for this, I imagine it's because they have had to put so much effort into getting anyone to take their preferred game seriously that they prickle a bit at newcomers who may not take it as seriously as they do. That's similar to a problem within the larger gamer community, where many gamers have had to try to defend and justify their favored hobby for years, and while that has helped protect and grow gaming, that same zeal is at times preventing some gamers from accepting any legitimate criticism of the hobby or community they have defended so passionately.

That is what I suspect as well. I'd have to imagine it's frustrating when you treat something like SSB as a craft to have the mainstream not only be totally be disinterested but also be dismissive of what you do. I've had friends practice really hard at fighting games etc, and were almost starved for social validation of what they accomplished. It almost seemed like when they play somebody who didn't take the game seriously, they found that to be especially demeaning to what they've accomplished. I'd imagine that might doubly frustrating for a competitive community like SSB's which is for a game that has a kid friendly and strong casual appeal.

I don't think that's a good attitude to have, but I can sympathize with their frustration.

I often wonder why you don't see this attitude the same way in other diversions like pickup sports (which when they are intimidating to new players are so in a different manner), my best guess is because American society as a whole values Athleticism far more. There are perceived valuable career paths in football, basketball etc, so you don't need to prove to a non player that what you are doing is respected if you are worried about what they think.

Words hurt, Darth. Words hurt.

:D

Because SSB is for children.

I like both ways of playing, but some people are assholes.

@itwongo: This 100% this its just for me everyone who has ever been a dick about smash has been a competitive player. Ipso facto competitive smash players are jerks in my experience.

Wait is this tournament scene? or just message boards comments?

I have a few friends who felt the need to comment on Samus' new high heels and then they just got harassed for even bringing it up. I wouldn't claim its the "smash community" who did that, I felt it was more the weird circle that is the internet itself. Every article on the new Smash game is generating interest, and it brings in all kinds of people to comment on it.

Not really sure, but all it takes is one asshole to shit in the pool and suddenly everyone there notices the floating turd.

That's a beautiful analogy. It really paints a picture.

Has anyone here seen the fan-made documentary "The Smash Brothers"? I found it to be super interesting, and a really cool window in to the Smash competitive scene. I always thought all of the "Fox, No Items, Final Destination" rules were stupid, but this gave me a new degree of respect for that stuff.

Maybe I've just got thin skin, but I think online gaming just needs to be treated with the same human decency as most in-person interactions. Don't gang up on someone because they are losing, don't ignore everything and everyone, and maybe take the time to say something positive. A hostile environment can be perceived or imagined so quickly and by such subtle actions. But with a little effort, both passionate seasoned players and new ones can be mature together. It may be a bit idealistic of me, but so long as sportsmanship is shown, players with varying skill sets can enjoy matches. Sad thing is, it seems most people on this board are probably the ones who are already making an effort to play nicely. What we need is some really good players that are so amazingly nice (and loud about it), to lead the way for the online environment! (I'm a pretty darn positive person, but I'm not great at smash, just passionate.. oh well.) So leaders, rise up!

" I've seen communities hate on others like fighting game players and their less than stellar views on women, the level of hatred thrown at new players in league of legends, and the general level of discourse on Xbox live are among the worst humanity has to offer"

I mean this with respect but I must play it straight here... if you think that is the worst humanity has to offer, then I really think you need to expand your knowledge on world history... and even what is out there currently all over the world. You really need to get some better perspective on that through some study. This may sound rude through the ambiguity of text but I mean it with all kindness and just trying to be helpful.