Is it inevitable that PvP/co-op/multiplayer game communities turn toxic?

Of course. All communities are made of people. The same is valid for any other random group pushed together by some outside source.

Anonymity will always give rise to jackasses.

Yes, there are games were you can hardly find flamers. You know, I installed HoTs like a week ago and in literally all my matchups, 0 flamers.

I come back to lol and flamers everywhere.

If I had to choose between having to press the 'Mute' button myself and having a nosy nanny log every in-game chat occasionally banning innocent people for using the word 'singer' because of overly protective wilcard filters (zero tolerance on using the N-word and all that) - just give me a mute button and off you go.

I mean, there's always going to be some toxic players but I've played many multiplayer games where the communities are mostly positive. Smaller communities tend to be more positive, and the more competitive the more toxic in my experience. So ranked / ladder games are often more toxic vs casual playlists.

i used to love playing coop games and played a few mmos in the past but i really hated that people would rage if you deviated even the slightest from meta strats. like homie, i just want to play a game and enjoy it i dont need someone micromanaging my play style.

The correct answer is:

No, the supposed 'toxicity' within these game communities is overblown

I mean, maybe the overlap in target audience is not that large here, but have you ever participated in, just for example, any sports in any club/association or something? Do you really think that this is any different?

Nah, communities, start, continue and always will be toxic.

that's why single-players have always been the best games =P

A gaming community without proper moderation / penalties, is much like a garden without someone to pull the weeds. Good sportsmanship and a mindset of having a mutual laugh can spread, sure, but not nearly as fast or as resiliently as anger or frustration where mechanics are abused or the immature continue to provoke. This goes doubly so for when your rewards are tied to your teams performance.

It sounds more like you're talking about team pvp games than co-op games. Dedicated co-op games are still generally more oriented towards local play or direct connections, with any potential pick-up group options being recognized as a significantly subpar option to teaming up with someone you know [unlike in team pvp games, where personal skill can better help make up for poor teamwork, making online groups feel a bit more of a natural option].

By the time PUGs start becoming a real consideration for co-op, you're usually in the realm of MMOs, and those are fairly inclined towards putting in the effort to make such groupings work out without major issues and, typically, offer suitable controls for avoiding or managing problematic teammates.

As far as more general considerations, and especially as far as team pvp goes, you're looking at "inherently high odds of toxicity from random humans" being combined with "shoddy community management". Any game with decent community management offers controls, filters, sorts, penalties, and so forth to manage toxicity. While that never manages to avoid it entirely, it does fairly reliably change "regular occurances of extreme toxicity" to "rare occurances of passing toxicity".

In other words, it's the rather significant difference between "oh gods, this game's groupings are an awful trainwreck and the developers shold be kicked in sensitive areas" and "meh, social interactions can occasionally suck". In summary, where people are complaining about toxicity, they're almost always actually complaining about a game's poor management or, in the case of co-op, their own lack of gaming-inclined friends to rely on [in place of the strangers they're grouping up with instead].

Beyond that, it'd just be the usual "ugh, dealing with humans is a pain" that is pretty common for any form of social interaction involving humans [especially circumstances involving power dynamics or the need to rely on those other individuals in some way]. An "I don't want my games to stress me the same way my job does" mentality is pretty reasonable, though that may really just be an indication that the person complaining should be looking for a less stressful alternative for their gaming attentions.

I really haven't experienced this. maybe because i do not get personally involved. If you're playing multiplayer with random people, you don't have to chat with them.
I have PTT setup on all games and only talk necessary.

Well I play league of legends and it is pretty common to see someone wishing some other guy gets cancer or his whole family dies or threatens to kill them himself after losing a game. Also based on my experience in that game, whenever it is a loss people tend to find someone to blame it on. Unfortunately toxicity triggers more toxicity. It becomes a little better when the players are older or more mature.

In your second paragraph you did a good job explaining why companies are doing this and why they won't care about players' actions. No one would spend thousands of dollars on a single player game but people do that on multiplayer games. Even though it is completely crazy to spend so much on a game, companies know well how to push people to do so. Lords mobile is a good example for that ;)

For many years I played on a MUD with a very good community, but it was a very small community.

Play on anything with a large playerbase and you are going to run into annoying people, no way around it.

Gamers are toxic people

that's why i play SP only
although internet connection are also contribute alot :p

The only co-op titles I ever play are pve only. The idea of pvp co-op just ruins the experience along with that sucks out the joy of the game for me personally.

I play to have fun, not to git gud.

In my experience, the toxicity is overblown. I usually play single player games, but at times I have played MMOs, online mobile games, and various coop games online.

For MMOs, it really just depends on what kind of guild / group you join. If you join one that's passionate about being competitive in guild rankings / whatever, then there's probably going to be toxicity. But if you join some middling guild where people just want to have fun, everyone is usually very supportive, tolerant of mistakes, and friendly. This is basically the same on mobile games. When I've played MMOs, I've always had the most fun exploring, helping people newer than myself, and doing things very inefficiently.

For general coop games, it depends on how competitive it is, like other people say. There are plenty of laid-back people playing minecraft, terraria, don't starve together, etc., but far fewer playing rocket league, fortnite, overwatch, and other MOBA games. It's part of the culture, I guess. Even if you are playing "unranked" games in something like rocket league, people are still very judgemental / cruel to each other.

One game that I loved years ago was Worms Armageddon, and the online community was all about roping vs. traditional play. If you enjoyed playing with the ninja rope, the community was almost never toxic, even if you weren't very good. But, if you didn't know that using the rope was the expectation, people would often get hostile or impatient. It's all about the culture and expectation of the community, ultimately. By far, most of my experiences have not been toxic in online games.

P.S.: If you want to play local or "couch" co-op games online, Parsec is pretty nice, as long as your network connection is good enough.

You didn't have toxicity to nearly the same extent when private dedicated servers were the norm, as admins could simply kick/ban users who were being assmunches. Not to mention the grace required to maintain a good standing in a reliable server with good ping, rotation and players. Then Xbox Live happened opening the multiplayer world to swarms of angry, horny 11 year olds and their headsets, who couldn't be policed because of the inherent dev/pub-owned or P2P nature of the MP ecosystem that persists to this day because muh live services. Yes some games allow the players to vote to kick obnoxious players but that itself often becomes an abusive tool, and for some games it actually breaks the game (DOTA, anyone?). And players simply will not be as motivated or as effective as an admin. I haven't played any competitive MP games with randos in a while, the latest I remember being TF2 and Bad Company 2. My experiences there were that assholes were extremely rare and temporary exceptions rather than the norm. In fact, I met many good friends and regular game buddies on particularly well managed servers.

The efforts of the likes of Riot and Blizzard to detoxify their player bases are all for fucking nought because their entire multiplayer model precludes effective asshole management and rehabilitation. Toxicity isn't a global problem for a game, it's a recurrence of many smaller localized problems. Localized problems require localized solutions. Bring back private servers ffs.

Oh and by the way private servers are a solution to many more problems than just obnoxious players. It allows a game to survive past developer capability/interest, allows game availability to naturally distribute to where the players actually are globally (I feel your pain Aussies), allows modding (which, lest we forget, are where CS and DOTA originally came from), allows true grassroots competitive scenes, and with technology available these days may not even require a master server to use (blockchain?). Oh, and it allows short-circuiting the live service bullshit. When hats came out for TF2 there quickly were servers that allowed players to select and wear them without actually having acquired the things, and it was all the better for it because players were focused on expressing themselves while playing the fucking game instead of collecting virtual garbage.

Don't play with a lot of strangers and/or block/report the ones that don't know normal behavior.
How much you can do depends on the game you play.
A good game, in my view, do something against "bad behavior", a bad game don't.
And i reward good games with my money and bad games not. Easy solution.

too many kids with anonymity will grant you toxicity.
but the smaller communities tend to be nice and helpful.
also having an entry barrier and report mechanics helps, if a kid can create a new account/act freely then he won't care about penalties.

It's not inevitable, as long as the community polices itself a bit. An example of this that I encountered was Ultima Online, which had a decently sized community built around the server I was on, the level of toxic behaviour was rather low. Not saying that there were never any toxic people around, but most of the time, the toxic people ended up being rather lonely quite quickly, and would quit.

Certain games are far worse than others when it comes to toxic behaviour. Competitive games with long matches tend to be a lot worse than ones with shorter matches, for an example. When I played DOTA 2 I encountered toxic players far more often than in HOTS. Also a low barrier to entry tend to result in more toxic behaviour.

There are many more nice people playing online games than toxic people. Toxic people are just more vocal, that's all.

Until the Korean model becomes worldwide, yes. Until people have to register their ID number for a web service, meaning a ban means they are out for life for real, they will feel empowered to act like assholes.