Simple way to reduce toxicity: More tertiary objectives!

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For clarity, I define Primary Objectives as gens, exit gates, hatch, chases & killer interactions, The things that must be managed every match to achieve victory. Secondary Objectives are things like hexes, totems, chests, and killer objects/items. Things you don't need to deal with necessarily to win, but can be helpful in dealing with Primary Objectives.

I propose the term Tertiary Objectives, to refer to the over-arching goals you have that run across matches. Things like achievements, archives, rift progress, daily challenges, everything on the bloodweb, currency management and unlocking cosmetics.

How can these be used to mitigate toxicity/frustration?

SYMPTOM: People get highly frustrated by negative interactions that prevent them from succeeding in their objectives, most especially, if they feel as if they didn't have a reasonable amount of time or information or control over the scenario that would allow them a fair chance to react.

ANALYSIS: I've observed in myself that even really bad games don't sting nearly as much if I'm working on 1 or 2 dailies and an archive, because performing the primary objective of that individual match (escaping/kills), isn't the ONLY thing I'm most concerned with.

While yes, much still comes down to balancing the game and making solo survivors more consistent/comparable to SWF, and buffing/nerfing killers/perks to perform at a consistent level accordingly; I think the reason why people get really easily frustrated with these interactions is because in absence of enough meaningful and engaging Tertiary Objectives, all they have left to focus on are their Primary Objectives, with precious little to insulate them from whether or not their success or failure in this 1 vector is a cause for happiness or frustration.

DIAGNOSIS: This is ultimately an issue of framing and mindset. Most people have difficulty maintaining a positive mindset, framing or re-framing things in a positive manner.

PROPOSED SOLUTION: I believe there are 2 strong ways to address this:

1. The first and easiest of which would be to give players more Tertiary Objectives.
2. Comprehensively redesign the UI/UX to encourage the positive framings/mindsets you wish to flourish.

A. For Tertiary Objectives, one daily challenge that can be done in just one or two matches isn't nearly enough, imagine if there were 3-6 or so of these mini-challenges every day, and one or 2 weekly challenges? Let players work on multiple at once, let them see their progress in these easily. Make all the interactions around them as simple and cleanly responsive as possible. You want these to be easily accessible and as highly encouraged/meaningfully rewarded as you can possibly make them.

Dailies could just be BP, maybe have Weeklies give much larger BP payoffs or also give some Iridescent Shards? Or, maybe have a very simple temporary cosmetic effect players can enable if they have completed all of their dailies, and a better version of the same effect for ones that have completed their weekly challenge? etc etc

B. There are many, many more creative and in-depth ways this can be addressed through UI/UX, through juicy sound effects, through postgame match summary screens, through measurement and tracking of stats, and how well integrated the Tertiary Objectives are within the interface. Achievements are already something people can do, but you could encourage them even further by including them in the game's menus/interfaces rather than them existing purely externally through w/e platform is being used. Maybe have a little side menu players can pop out that shows what achievements they could attempt with this character? The goal is to make player engagement with Tertiary Objectives as easy as possible.

However, a word of warning:

The challenge isn't just in how to do these things effectively, but to also be careful in regards to how what you do or do not focus on could cause other issues. In Blizzard's game Overwatch for example, they strive to prevent players from being toxic towards one another through the statistics they track within the game. They don't show anyone their number of deaths, how much damage they've taken, and anyone who contributes any amount of damage to an opponent is rewarded with an "Elimination" upon that opponent's death regardless of who actually did most of the work or was responsible for confirming the kill. Not only that, but everyone slowly gains the ability to use their ultimate over time, regardless of whether or not they do anything to charge it themselves, so even low-skill players get to use the big strong abilities.

All of that sounds good on paper, but in reality, the total lack of accountability for failure combined with the guarantee of credit & use of one's strongest abilities without any requirement to earn them; leads to massive amounts of player entitlement and overly inflated egos. A recipe for toxicity if ever there was one. Something that can be confirmed by anyone who has spent any amount of time playing Overwatch.

The moral of that story being, don't hide useful information from players just because it might hurt their feelings. It deprives them of chances to grow, and often what does not grow, festers. It's in everyone's best interest that they are encouraged to manage their own emotions.