The racism, homophobia and sexism in MMOs is appalling. I have no idea how to fix it but my sympathies.

People are relatively mature. Though there can be some irritating newb questions. HELLO HOW DO I SELL THINGS IN AH I DON’T KNOW.

But we were all there :).

I was thinking the same thing! When I do see f*g or any of those other lovely slurs it’s really shocking. And I only realized reading this article that it’s so rare in LOTRO. Even in my kin, it’s really friendly and not patronizing. Just chatting. I only play on the non-RP servers too.

Here’s my experience of some others:

As Michelle said in the comment above, LotRO is a very polite MMO.
City of Heroes has been good as well – those are two most mature playerbases I’ve found.
Guild Wars was fine.

World of Warcraft was mixed, but that’s because everyone plays it, and it depended on the server – some of them were full of terrible abuse (and interesting to note how the spelling goes downhill in parallel to the willingness to yell insults).

I think the PVP element is what swings it: when you add competitiveness to an idealised version of yourself, and put in the anonymity and distance that the internet provides, people go hyper-aggressive very quickly.

I would really say don’t be put off social gaming by this – there are bad servers out there, but a lot of games are better. But OUCH that space-sim story is depressing. I’ve started calling people out every time I see something like it, and they generally do improve.

The general trend seems to be the more PvP-based the online game is (I don’t play FPS games because I’m awful at them but I hear they have similar problems), the more likely it is to have incredibly horrible trash-talk on chat. Games that are based around co-operation instead for the most part will tend to have slightly less horrible chat environments.