Toxicity Is Not the Price of Good Play

There's an idea almost nobody questions: if a server grows big enough, sooner or later it fills up with toxic people, as if it were the weather. It isn't. A server doesn't become toxic because people are bad by nature, but because nobody actively designed the opposite, and the easiest habit to settle into that vacuum is humiliating others to feel superior.

The real cost isn't the bad atmosphere itself. It's that the people who don't fit into that atmosphere simply leave, with no public complaint, never coming back, never bringing anyone else. A server can take years to notice it's emptying for a reason it never bothered to fix.

Competing and humiliating aren't the same thing, even though they almost always travel together. You can play to win with full intensity without winning meaning making the loser feel bad — the difference lies in what the design of the place celebrates. Hoping there won't be toxicity and actively designing against it are two different things, and only the second one works.