So rude are the elder/higher players...

[Blacktango]

I play a lot to a cooperative game on BGA and I disagree with a general toxicity about people I play with.

But it's very common to play 9 nice games, and the 10th is bad because of 1 player. And what do we conclude? All the players of this game are toxic?
Nop, just look at the average, and don't forget that 90% of the games were great!

[ChiefPointThief]

I play a lot to a cooperative game on BGA and I disagree with a general toxicity about people I play with.

But it's very common to play 9 nice games, and the 10th is bad because of 1 player. And what do we conclude? All the players of this game are toxic?
Nop, just look at the average, and don't forget that 90% of the games were great!

It would also depend on how many people you are playing with because like you said it only takes 1 bad player. So in a 4p game even if only 10% of players in a specific game are “toxic” that would be 1 out of 3 games. So the players overall may not be toxic but games are because of a select few.

[jesslc]

I recommend the talkative and friendly games group. Everyone who I've played games with via this group has been nice. Sometimes there's lots of chat in the games I've played, sometimes not a lot, but almost all the people still say hello and gg/thanks for the game even if they're not very talkative. And people sometimes post in the group that they're new to a certain game and would anyone be up for trying it with them. It's mostly turn based games though, not real time - sometimes people try to coordinate a real time game but with so many timezone differences it's quite hard to make it work.
https://boardgamearena.com/group?id=1088438

There's also the game tutors group which seems like it could be good but I haven't actually tried it myself
https://boardgamearena.com/group?id=1111129

Personally I probably wouldn't try to play co-ops with strangers here unless it was organized through one of these two groups. Unfortunately there are some players on BGA who take winning co-ops way too seriously, but it's basically impossible to identify which players are like that before you're stuck in a game with them. I doubt they're in these two groups though.