Being Toxic about games

[CreativeMod1]

Hey everyone, so I wanted to get a thread going talking about the way I've seen mods are treated in games, and this is purely from my own perspective as a spectator or reading through games after they've finished, god knows what else goes on in private messages.
I see people get extremely salty when things don't go their way in a game and I personally feel like the way they react is just unfair and toxic towards the moderators.

I'm not going to talk about any specific instances of this happening and likewise I don't want comments in this thread of it happening, I want to make this thread for 4 things, 1) Education on what goes in to making a game, 2) How we as a community can do more for our mods and appreciate their hard work, 3) Understanding why people get salty and giving some general responses to that and 4) How we can put a stop to the negativity that's happening.

1) I feel like a lot of people don't quite know or understand just how much effort goes in to creating a game, I personally am about to run my first game, and there's so much to do in creating the game. Coming up with a set of challenges, writing and testing them, creating spreadsheets to record results, creating the board, setting permissions, creating all boards and confessionals, creating every single account, making avatars, challenge banners, various other graphics, Google forms, organised spreadsheets, idiot proofing rules, genius proofing rules, coming up with twists, checking that everything is fair, reading and rereading everything, find a listmod, find a reviewer, have the reviewer check everything and make changes where needed. And this is all before the game even starts and I'm sure there's lots I've missed.
I invite mods to add more to this section, really tell the players what it's like to mod a game.

2) From what I've seen and what I'm sure I'm about to experience, modding can be stressful, there are things that can go wrong in games and challenges, I think as a community we should do more to support mods, tell them things that you enjoy about the game. It's super easy to complain about something but for some reason it's super hard to give praise.
At an IRL werewolf group I play with, at the end of every game there's a round of applause for the mods, a little bit of praise goes a long way.

3) Most players get salty over game mechanics or mod decisions that don't go their way.
In terms of game mechanics, keep in mind that with all the mods, reviewers and listmods, there's a big team that signed off on every twist and each twist is well thought out, there will be players who gain from twists and players who lose from twists, just because you're part of the latter doesn't make it a bad or unfair twist.
As for mod decisions during the game, whilst creating Zelda I've noticed myself checking and rechecking everything over and over and like I said before, there's a team of people that check things over but yet we can't account for absolutely every possibility, there will be issues that happen in games which aren't planned for and so as such mods will need to come up with a solution to fix those issues, again these might not go the way you want them to but mods will always try to be as fair as possible and this won't just be a quick decision, it'll be discussed with other mods. Remember, you might not know the full details of why a decision has been made.

4) Whilst I hope that this post is enough to educate players into thinking twice before getting salty to the moderators, I think it's worth us having some more actionable systems in place to discourage players from getting salty, I would like to encourage us to use the listmods as a tool here and report players who have crossed the line from being frustrated to being toxic about the game.

Last couple of points, there are some games that are completely unique, they don't follow Survivor or Big Brother rules, they are made entirely by the mods, if you're signing up for one of these games then you must be open and understanding that it's a new format and that it hasn't been playtested.
Finally, I think it's important to note that there's nothing wrong with constructive criticism, or being frustrated about getting eliminated from a game, giving hate to the game and the mods or being toxic about it is not the way to go about this.

If you've gotten this far, thank you very much for reading, I know there was a lot but I'm sure you'll appreciate that it's quite important.

[CreativeMod1]

Writing extra rules for those who try to outsmart the rules haha