I'd just put these toxic people in a special instance together with some bots that would act as victims (without they knowing, of course).

Imagine their faces if you ever revealed the truth to them…..

Some options:

Paid accounts help a lot. Getting an account banned means they've got to pay again for another account, and the money helps you afford to police it. Some people will keep coming back and paying funds, but at least you're getting revenue from it.

Community self-moderation is helpful, but doesn't scale well. Having a group of trusted individuals who can help with moderation can work extremely well, but making sure you can trust them and having a uniform standard for community volunteers to follow can be difficult. The larger the community the more difficult it becomes.

Sorting by traits is often helpful. People who are generally offensive to others tend to not be bothered when matched with others whose behavior is generally offensive. Similarly cheaters tend not to mind other cheaters so much. Some large games with matchmaking servers will introduce hidden variables for both. While you are matched in part by ping time and skill level, you can also be matched on hidden values of player complaints and suspected cheats.

Not only do you have players in the same skill level (say a skill level ranking of around 3000 for a certain game), they would also all have similar levels of player complaints (all of them are complaint-free, or all of them have about a 20% complaint level, or all of them have a 60% complaint level), or similar level of cheat estimations. The cheat one has interesting side effects, as you don't know if a player has an 70% headshot rate because they're really skilled or because they've got an aimbot with a built-in error to help escape aimbot detection, but either way, the two get clustered together as they are effectively the same skill level.

fleabay said:

Nerf their connection bandwidth to an unenjoyable level, don't ban them. Also make their game experience miserable if they are serious about the game. Such as in an FPS make their hitbox HUGE. Just don't make anything too obvious. They will just disconnect and reconnect not knowing they are being gimped. I think this is a version of shadow banning.

This is my favorite one, thanks! I'll see what I can do!

So it isn't exactly my game, but it's a game that I'm really invested into and really want to see thrive. It's called Tank Trouble (beta.tanktrouble.com). I wanted ideas to give to the developers so that the recent toxicity could be stopped.

Honey pot approach? Put up a duplicate site and let them cannibalize each others?

I have really good relationships with some of the moderators, who have a relationship with the developers.