The first time I played League of Legends against other people, I had no idea what I was doing. I don't remember what champion I played, but I do remember how my team reacted: "Fuckin' noob. Kill yourself."

Earlier this year, Ubisoft said it would be implementing stricter moderation in Rainbow Six Siege to find and sanction players using hate speech. Recently, players have started noticing an uptick in bans being issued and have been discussing it on the game’s subreddit. A few even took to Twitter to complain.

According to developer Creative Assembly’s Grace Carroll, the Total War series’ Steam community was, until very recently, a mess. Largely left to their own devices, forums became “toxic” and “an awful place to be”. Instead of letting the trash fire burn, though, the developer decided to dedicate resources to putting it out.

Overwatch players needed something to incentivise good sportsmanship and, yesterday, they got it. Blizzard's latest Overwatch patch is toning down the hierarchy of skill and introducing a hierarchy of decency.

Toxic interactions have long been a problem in Rainbow Six Siege. As the game has grown in popularity, so has the amount of trolling and harassment. As part of an ongoing effort to try to clean up this aspect of the game, today Ubisoft laid out some new changes coming to the game in year three.

Despite arriving too late to prevent what some might call a full-blown crisis, Overwatch's anti-toxicity efforts seem to be bearing fruit. The next step in the battle, says game director Jeff Kaplan, might be having computers, not humans, find the bad actors.

For years now, gaming companies such as Riot, Blizzard and Twitch have been fighting online abuse and harassment in their own ways, to mixed results. Now they're trying something different: Working together.

Heroes of the Storm's game director says Blizzard is looking into one of the game's streamers frivolously reporting teammates after losing a match.

Starting this week, Ubisoft plans to issue permanent bans for Rainbow Six Siege's most toxic players, according to a recent announcement on the game's subreddit.

Overwatch, a team-based shooter about working together, isn't always the friendliest of places. From random quitters to that one guy who won't stop calling me a cuck, players often find ways to be toxic. To combat the issue, Blizzard is now banning players misbehaving on social media.

Reports in three separate French outlets depict a pattern of inappropriate behaviour, sexist and homophobic jokes, and an overall toxic environment at Quantic Dream, something the video game studio's executives strongly deny.

These days, it's hard to talk about Overwatch without mentioning its ongoing struggles with sexism, racism, griefing, match throwing and worse. At BlizzCon, game director Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku that fighting toxicity is now more of a priority than ever, to the point that Blizzard has formed a "strike team" to do so.

How many of the people who make games fear some of the people who play them? That question drove conversations last week among quite a few game developers, and over the weekend, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan offered his own take: A lots.

Lately, I've been hearing a lot more "Great ult!" and "Thanks for switching!" in Overwatch than "Get wrecked, you useless piece of s***." After toxicity in Overwatch's competitive mode reached critical saturation last season, this season, which began September 1st, has felt markedly more positive.

Video game enthusiasts often muse about the secrecy surrounding game development, which is at times treated as if it were operated by the NSA. Over the weekend, one developer offered an interesting take: Game developers are secretive because being open can lead to too much toxicity.

A year after release, Overwatch players on PS4 and Xbox One now have recourse for the trash Mei who won't stop icing her teammates into the spawn point.

Snipers have a bad reputation: The class is infamous for standing back and picking off kills, all without contributing to the match objective. In Overwatch, that sniper stigma means that players consider heroes like Widowmaker and Hanzo to be nonviable competitively. For some players, straying from that norm often turns ugly.

Briefly: Here's an interesting League of Legends statistic: Riot's lead social systems designer Jeffrey "Lyte" Lin told Polygon in a story posted today that games that had a "role conflict or a position conflict in champion select" were 15 per cent more toxic "no matter what happened in the game itself". Glad they're addressing that!

A whole lot of ink has been spilt talking about talking about how "toxic" League of Legends is. Little to none of this coverage has actually tried to show what an in-game altercation actually looks, sounds, and feels like to those involved when a game goes to shit. I'm going to walk you through the blow-by-blow of one such game.