Researchers Dr. Shane Murnion, Prof. William J Buchanan, Adrian Smales, and Dr. Gordon Russell used custom-built web crawler/web spider to collect large chunk of data regarding in-game chat from WOT matches and after analyzing the data, they concluded that 63% of all cyberbullying messages occurred after the player’s death in the game.

In their research, academics offered solution to fight toxic behaviour.

„If players are prevented from engaging in in-game chat for a short duration after their death it is quite feasible that in game toxic chat would be drastically reduced“, concluded the researchers.

One more interesting result from the research was that new player do not exhibit toxic behaviour.

„Cyberbullying seems to turn up after the players have been playing for a while. This could be an indication that cyberbullying within World of Tanks is a learned behaviour from other more experienced players“, researchers claim.

This seems to support some of the ideas in other research which suggests that cyberbullying spreads through communities in a similar manner to an epidemic.

Their work is published under the title: „Machine learning and semantic analysis of in-game chat for cyberbullying“-