It’s funny too because it totally depends on the game and how it’s monetized and set up as well. I had some of the most fun in games in my life playing quick play in the original overwatch with my buddies, even though I almost exclusively prefer offline single player open world games.
My skill increased dramatically with our constant playing, I switched between DPS, tank, heals and really learned the roster. Not that far off from playing N64 super smash with those same friends in college and switching to a new character when you felt like you had learned one pretty well.
I would get annoyed at losing, but it was whatever, I wasn’t trying to rank in competitive mode. I work hard enough in life and work, I’m not playing the game to work harder.
That being said, unless someone was a Smurf or hacking, I never got super mad at other players for simply being better than me, usually the characters felt pretty balanced and if we lost it was because of bad teamwork or lower skill. All characters were available to everyone, the only monetary value was skins.
Then I played overwatch 2, and immediately there were battle pass characters locked behind paywalls or engagement, and those characters were seriously unbalanced. The game was “free to play” and “pay to win” right off the bat and I haven’t touched it again, even though I put countless hours into the first game. And that sour taste I have now makes it so I refuse to play any game with a battle pass.
Then I played overwatch 2, and immediately there were battle pass characters locked behind paywalls or engagement, and those characters were seriously unbalanced.
Wtf they locked characters behind a paywall? They at least dont do that any more. I played OW2 for the first time last year and everything (playable) was unlocked.
I would still consider myself young but starting to adult (bday today :D). But in middle school and early highschool online FPS were the best. Overwatch, tf2 stuff like that. Now the most multiplayer games are helldivers and recently Deep rock but I also have a ton of single player games like modding Skyrim and occasionally playing Skyrim, dead cells, noita (I do in fact have a skill issue) no man’s sky and blade and sorcery
Now my most competition is among my friends rather than against them. Which is much less tilting
I still enjoy TF2. You can play seriously, or do some completely whacky stuff. even when you get steamrolled you can have fun. In TF2 i never minded having a good K/D or so. just going for hilarious kills, even if they only work one out of five times makes the game awesome.
Personally speaking, I think it's addiction to the game. I played the game Enlisted for a few years and became a veteran player. It irritated me so much when I got inexperienced players on my team and I was carrying. I insulted my team mates in the chat a fair few times out of frustration. It just wasn't enjoyable at all, yet I kept booting the game up every day.
Competitive online games really affect my mood, they make me so angry and I can't help it. It's unhealthy when a video game is actually ruining your day.
Yes. But fun is relative. When I play rocket league, I like to try my hardest. If I'm not trying hard, it's not as exiting. So it's frustrating when playing ranked and for example your teammate is not even trying . Maybe RL isn't the best example because matches are under 10 minutes, so I can just start another one, but games where you spend an hour, it's just different
IME in RL I don't get told to KMS because I'm not trying, I get told to KMS because my teammate won't rotate and I fail to defend a 2v1 while they're fucking around on the other end of the field. Or my favorite, where they'll fake rotate and then overcommit. Then I'm the one who doesn't rotate (even though I spent 80% of the match defending because "I got it! I got it! I got it!")
lots of online games are just outright badly designed, like having loads of abilities that literally just freeze you in place so you don't get to play for a few seconds.
i was into overwatch when it was still an actual game and not a storefront, and my god there was sooooo much stuff that was obviously not acceptable for a game of that size and budget. I think the most egregious was roadhog's hook that just didn't care about time and physics, you could be grabbed behind walls and whatnot and of course that resulted in instant death too, because WHY NOT!
then you compare this to something like deep rock galactic, where it's cooperative and "balance" is the player deciding how much of a challenge they want, and the devs specifically added a feature that lets you shout "rock and stone!" to build camraderie. You play that game and it's just.. fun? it's just fun, it's almost never frustrating at all, even if you get your ass kicked you just fucking try again and maybe lower the difficulty because you're not quite good enough to take on that size of horde yet.
And stun abilities? you can have tons of them, because the enemies are NPCs and thus don't care, and the enemies only have a select few stun abilities that can either be actively broken out of or teammates can help you out of them, plus you're given so much warning that getting stunned is very clearly your own fault.
Back when I still played ranked in online games, I always felt like if I didn't have Don't Stop Me Now by Queen playing in the back of my head... I just wasn't in the right mood to play.
Unpopular opinion but games with community-driven multiplier (i.e. people hosting their own servers) is infinitely better than matchmaking multiplayer running on the dev/publisher's servers if only for the sole reason that players have a choice of what kinds of communities they want to build and what things other players should be allowed to do instead of being forced into a sterilized commercial monoculture. I should be able to say "KYS KYS" in game if the people I'm playing with are okay with it.
That and it's easier to make genuine connections with regulars. Nowadays for that you have to go out of your way to join a community discord or similar because nearly all multiplayer games are built to play with your existing friends.
I so miss þe playful abuse between strangers in game via voice. Nostalgia for a certain time this world may never feel again, expressed on a platform that is so anti casual-confrontation most won't understand or enjoy that time.
Meh. Just mute people. That's what I used to do when I played online. I understand emotions run high and people get frustrated, I'm not gonna let my sensibility and their bouts of idiocy (especially when the solution is so simple!) ruin their experience forever. And honestly, they're probably just actual kids... I'm patient like that but I understand some people take things more to heart and whatnot.
Didn't know that the offended wine moms of America got linked this post, sad that as an adult you can't control your feelings when someone makes jokes on a video game
Paint.NET (note: not their URL sadly) is simple and will get the job done for 99% of your meme needs. I find Krita and alternatives are harder to use for simple edits because they're designed for more complex tasks.
I’ve had voice chat disabled since forever. I will not listen to the tools I play against. Racist and political trolls along with just general assholery. Not worth it. The only time VoIP is worth it these days is of you’re playing with a known group that polices its chat.
i so dearly wish more games were like deep rock galactic, just have a button that lets you ping whatever you're looking at, with special voicelines for important things.
in DRG it's a faux pas to use the voice chat, half the fun of the game is communicating solely through pinging stuff and furious head and body movement.
I'm in genuine fucking awe at how awful Blizzard chat is. It's so so bad I'm actually sorta impressed at how bad it is. They don't even filter spam.
It's so insanely wildly impressively bad it doesn't even belong in the last decade, and that's before you even get into the rancid garbage the non-bots are saying.
It would be nice if they were that explicit about what they don't want said. Instead it's more like, "Don't say stuff we might not like. No, you can't have a list and when we ban you we won't tell you why."
What else do you expect, giving up your freedom of speech to faceless corporation and their bureaucratic corporations ?
Really at this point it's a choice. No one is forcing you to interact with these totalitocrats.
Play on your own terms, or just don't play at all. Reject convenience, K Y S
Let me put it in terms a normie can understand. You show up to a game of pick up basketball (local league) and one person is wearing high heels (off meta) the second person shows up late, and the third person doesn't know how to block a simple pass. How is that not gonna upset you?
What world do you live in where more people play basketball than online video games?
Even then, I don't think there's a way someone on my team could be so bad that I even raise my voice at them, much less verbally belittle them. Whenever I have a useless teammate I think "Damn, they must be new. I don't think we're winning this one." And then I do my best and I have fun.
Did I say raise my voice? That's how you'd react. Not I'm saying when people show up not ready ro play Damn right I'm going to let them know that's inappropriate.
Nah but calmly muting them and playing better is your own option. Listen you don't want try hard DONT PLAY RANKED. That's like me going to a burger shop and getting mad that they freak out when you ask for a salad.
This is easily the bougiest comment I've read in a while. What world might they live in, where more people play IRL sports than more expensive online games?
I can play a lot of my games on a computer that cost me less than $100, plus peripherals. Gaming is cheap nowadays as long as you're not gunning for the newest crap, and it lasts a long while. Meanwhile, playing basketball regularly requires you either have reliable access to a car (I don't) or live in an area where there's a publically available basketball court, AND enough people to play. Yeah, you could set up hoops in the street or something, but literal cars run through there. And people need to back out of their driveway. If you can't do it in your neighborhood, then you have to spend time that a lot of low-income folks don't have traveling to and from somewhere that does have the requisite things. Not impossible, but not at as convenient as an old business laptop from 2017 off Ebay with Steam on it.
Let's put it in my terms: you're in a hostile takeover, you snatch us up for some green mail, but you're not expecting some poison pill to be running around the building, am I right?
Honestly, I’m not a fan of that sort of censorship.
I grew up in the Time Before Internet, and played all of the earliest online games. Trash talk is simply part of the experience as far as I’m concerned. On Team Fortress Classic, you had to abuse a motherfucker through text chat. And we loved it: everyone was enjoying that novel experience.
Back in the day of early COD on Xbox Live, lobbies were wild. Heck, even Uno subjected you to everything from ‘teach me slurs in your language’ to ‘random dude masturbating on camera while smoking a joint’.
I still play the occasional online game, but they’re boring and soulless. Very few people are on comms, as most seem afraid to actually talk. And with good reason; any sort of mildly spicy talk would get you banned on games. So instead of fostering a friendly atmosphere, from my perspective it ended up killing the entire vibe.
Let folks talk trash. Give as good as you get. And if that’s not for you? There’s other games to play.
i fucking hate the "that's how it is, go do smth else if you don't like it" attitude. can we please acknowledge that online gaming would be overall more fun for everyone if people stopped being toxic towards each other?
that league example is the exception and not the rule. most games have horrible measures against sexism and racism and whatnot. the issue with league's system is that it's ai-based and ai makes mistakes all the time, not the fact that it's trying to stop toxicity.
It's not trash talk at all though. And even ignoring the language itself, trash talk is towards your opponents (where still most people don't get how to do it in a non-obnoxious way, i.e. someone spamming ez after they win a game isn't trash talk it's being annoying). Most of the really bad flame happens towards teammates because everyone needs to blame someone else.
Irl sports get by just fine without people constantly being pieces of shit, I dunno why it's so hard to apply that to online games.
The problem starts with these companies feeling obligated to police what you can say over chat. Just to be clear it's advertisers and payment services that necessitate that. The whole thing about trying to force a "non-toxic community" is a gaslight.
I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000's. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes. A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.
A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.
No doubt, but I don't think microsoft spends money on that because they altruistically care about your online safety, I think they do it because they are pressured by monetary reasons.
I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000's. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes.
I appreciate your perspective, thank you for sharing your experience.
One thing I don't understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.
I was never on XBL really, but I've been a PC users on counterstrike and league of legends since their inceptions. I can't say if one service is worse than another but I did watch the efforts to stamp down toxicity over time. I don't know how successful these efforts were, it seemed futile at best.
Would you share if you feel the current efforts from services like this are effective in making you feel like it's a safer place for you to game?
One thing I don’t understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.
These tools have improved immensely over the years. It was particularly bad in those days because there was no option for private or party voice chat and a lot of games came with 3-day trial cards for Xbox Live which allowed people to make tons of sock puppet accounts to evade blocking.
I don't really play FPS's any more and I haven't turned on an Xbox in about 7 years. I just play on PC now, almost exclusively with a gaming community on discord comprised of online and IRL friends. My experience is very curated now and the games I play either have minimal social interaction or are well known for their welcoming communities (eg Warframe). It felt a little bit like admitting defeat, but shutting off the public mic and just sticking to private VCs and servers has been a good way of dealing with it. I certainly don't get rape and death threats with a side of doxxing these days.
Idk, the rules of the Internet say women don't exist so from here on, you shall be treated as a man instead. Suffer the terrible existence of menfolk, featuring highlights such as: people believing you, male defaultism and so on.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with me! I'm sorry those things happened to you and that it had an effect on the way you play in the end.
I think it's important for people to recognize the toxic effects of general misogyny and phenomena like Gamer Gate have on gaming communities. To this day, I see plenty of cis-male and trans-femme gamers wonder about why there are so few cis-women in gaming spaces without recognition of what gaming communities are like towards young women and girls who express interest. Nothing quashes your desire to join a community quite like incessant harassment, abuse, rape/death threats, and doxxing.
(To be clear, I am not insinuating that trans-femme folks have an easy time of things, but I can say they outnumber cis-women in gaming communities like Arma by a factor to 2 to 1 or greater. There are 3 trans-women in my Arma group and I'm the only cis-woman there.)
I will never understand why the hell people tilt so hard for an online game. Aren't free time activities supposed to be fun?
Offline games are mostly chill
But online games, even though people play it for fun but after sometime it gets too frustrating when you don't get the kills
That's why I left playing online shooting games, those made me more angry
It’s funny too because it totally depends on the game and how it’s monetized and set up as well. I had some of the most fun in games in my life playing quick play in the original overwatch with my buddies, even though I almost exclusively prefer offline single player open world games.
My skill increased dramatically with our constant playing, I switched between DPS, tank, heals and really learned the roster. Not that far off from playing N64 super smash with those same friends in college and switching to a new character when you felt like you had learned one pretty well.
I would get annoyed at losing, but it was whatever, I wasn’t trying to rank in competitive mode. I work hard enough in life and work, I’m not playing the game to work harder.
That being said, unless someone was a Smurf or hacking, I never got super mad at other players for simply being better than me, usually the characters felt pretty balanced and if we lost it was because of bad teamwork or lower skill. All characters were available to everyone, the only monetary value was skins.
Then I played overwatch 2, and immediately there were battle pass characters locked behind paywalls or engagement, and those characters were seriously unbalanced. The game was “free to play” and “pay to win” right off the bat and I haven’t touched it again, even though I put countless hours into the first game. And that sour taste I have now makes it so I refuse to play any game with a battle pass.
Wtf they locked characters behind a paywall? They at least dont do that any more. I played OW2 for the first time last year and everything (playable) was unlocked.
Yeah I think that change came after a ton of player backlash and people just no longer playing it so they changed the whole battle pass setup
Real
I would still consider myself young but starting to adult (bday today :D). But in middle school and early highschool online FPS were the best. Overwatch, tf2 stuff like that. Now the most multiplayer games are helldivers and recently Deep rock but I also have a ton of single player games like modding Skyrim and occasionally playing Skyrim, dead cells, noita (I do in fact have a skill issue) no man’s sky and blade and sorcery
Now my most competition is among my friends rather than against them. Which is much less tilting
I still enjoy TF2. You can play seriously, or do some completely whacky stuff. even when you get steamrolled you can have fun. In TF2 i never minded having a good K/D or so. just going for hilarious kills, even if they only work one out of five times makes the game awesome.
Tf2 certainly was a wacky game but my account got compromised and I lost all my items around the same stop I stopped playing
Personally speaking, I think it's addiction to the game. I played the game Enlisted for a few years and became a veteran player. It irritated me so much when I got inexperienced players on my team and I was carrying. I insulted my team mates in the chat a fair few times out of frustration. It just wasn't enjoyable at all, yet I kept booting the game up every day.
Competitive online games really affect my mood, they make me so angry and I can't help it. It's unhealthy when a video game is actually ruining your day.
I just stick to singleplayer games now.
It’s the same as parents going full tilt against the ref of a kids league soccer match.
Yes. But fun is relative. When I play rocket league, I like to try my hardest. If I'm not trying hard, it's not as exiting. So it's frustrating when playing ranked and for example your teammate is not even trying . Maybe RL isn't the best example because matches are under 10 minutes, so I can just start another one, but games where you spend an hour, it's just different
IME in RL I don't get told to KMS because I'm not trying, I get told to KMS because my teammate won't rotate and I fail to defend a 2v1 while they're fucking around on the other end of the field. Or my favorite, where they'll fake rotate and then overcommit. Then I'm the one who doesn't rotate (even though I spent 80% of the match defending because "I got it! I got it! I got it!")
My favourite message to give on Rocket League:
IndiBrony: [TEAM] All yours...
No. It's not mature. If you play it like a sport, then being a gentleman is very important for your fun and growth both.
Oh. No. I don't curse. But I understand the anger a frustration
lots of online games are just outright badly designed, like having loads of abilities that literally just freeze you in place so you don't get to play for a few seconds.
i was into overwatch when it was still an actual game and not a storefront, and my god there was sooooo much stuff that was obviously not acceptable for a game of that size and budget. I think the most egregious was roadhog's hook that just didn't care about time and physics, you could be grabbed behind walls and whatnot and of course that resulted in instant death too, because WHY NOT!
then you compare this to something like deep rock galactic, where it's cooperative and "balance" is the player deciding how much of a challenge they want, and the devs specifically added a feature that lets you shout "rock and stone!" to build camraderie. You play that game and it's just.. fun? it's just fun, it's almost never frustrating at all, even if you get your ass kicked you just fucking try again and maybe lower the difficulty because you're not quite good enough to take on that size of horde yet.
And stun abilities? you can have tons of them, because the enemies are NPCs and thus don't care, and the enemies only have a select few stun abilities that can either be actively broken out of or teammates can help you out of them, plus you're given so much warning that getting stunned is very clearly your own fault.
Gamers aren't well adjusted people
Sports.
Back when I still played ranked in online games, I always felt like if I didn't have Don't Stop Me Now by Queen playing in the back of my head... I just wasn't in the right mood to play.
Reminds me of that time when it felt like having Epix Sax Guy playing in the background helped out with Hearthstone RNG.
'Fun' and 'chill' are not the same concept. Fun things can be irritating, can make you excited and go through various emotions.
I never will buy an online game for 60 bucks.
True, $70+ is becoming the new standard...
Only if you want the peasant option, the RealGamer™ edition starts at 100 plus dlc.
Luckily I'm just a lowly fake gamer so I don't gotta worry about clout...
Ooh look, shiny skin!
Yes
A weapon skin for my goonerbait crpg female skin to use
Maybe spending 600 bucks on microtransactions?
neither, just play the game
But silly squid game fun... 🐙🥺
At least my game doesn't have micro transactions!
Yet...Nintendopleasedon'tWhy would you spend any money on one, let alone play it?
Because people enjoy playing games with their friends?
Your friends are randomly-assigned ten-year-olds?
Most competent multiplayer games let you form lobbies with your real life friends? Or you can make the occasional friend online?
It's getting real hard to not make assumptions about your social life with all this, man.
There's plenty of coöp games that don't make you beholden to server content rules.
And thanks for the beginning of an insult, but I do tend to spend more time with friends while we're actually in the same room.
'Kys' simply means 'kisses' in Danish. I refuse to read it as any other meaning.
"Gentlemen, you can't kiss in here! This is a war game!"
Boy have I got some news to share about what goes on during wars!
I know how to French kiss, but not Danish kiss. Thanks for teaching me, stranger.
Danish kiss is when you squirt cheese or fruit into their mouth beforehand
what about bavarian creme?
Only if you buy them dinner first
Is that where you do two in the pink, one in the stink?
Unpopular opinion but games with community-driven multiplier (i.e. people hosting their own servers) is infinitely better than matchmaking multiplayer running on the dev/publisher's servers if only for the sole reason that players have a choice of what kinds of communities they want to build and what things other players should be allowed to do instead of being forced into a sterilized commercial monoculture. I should be able to say "KYS KYS" in game if the people I'm playing with are okay with it.
That and it's easier to make genuine connections with regulars. Nowadays for that you have to go out of your way to join a community discord or similar because nearly all multiplayer games are built to play with your existing friends.
i miss the days of shit talking in COD lobbies for hours. so funny hearing people cry about my perfect grenade throws ruining their killstreaks
Classic pre-game lobbies
So unpopular...
unpopular opinion but i like food
If a low stakes game makes you so furious that you wish for someone to die, you should not be allowed to play these games.
Agreed, they need to improve their skills enough to make it happen instead of merely passively hoping that the world improves itself.
On a side note I shouldn't be getting comm banned for swearing on a game that's not only rated M but also has swearing in the game.
I agree but just to clarify "kys" isn't swearing it's bullying
That's why it's a side note. Tangential but relevant.
I miss when we’d get French players on Xbox Live voice chat and playfully abuse in other in our own languages (I know enough French of that sort).
I used to love getting foreigners who've only learned English for weapons/vehicles that don't translate for some reason and swear words.
You'd get "eusbdheu sjot8fb skxbfh LE SNIPER RIFLE eudbdisn fjfbdbdju kshdbdbr LE ROCKET LAUNCHER fidndjdb skejfb behdhcui SHIT BASTARD FUCK BASTARD FUCK FUCK BASTARD SHIT"
I so miss þe playful abuse between strangers in game via voice. Nostalgia for a certain time this world may never feel again, expressed on a platform that is so anti casual-confrontation most won't understand or enjoy that time.
Only thing I dont miss is being called the n word. Odk that's the go to for suburban kids.
Yeah, that was too much to be called by a 13 year old sqeaker.
All I said was gg 5 times
[Chat disabled for 3 seconds]
The problem wasn't the gg, it was the two letters before and after...
Come to think about it, I haven't been called that online in a long time.
EZ GG EZ
It took me a minute, but I just realized that your description could actually apply to two completely different slurs.
completely unfair ban, they said it three times the rule only had it twice, how could they have know?
Good thing I checked the comments before posting the Uhm Ackshually
Chat disabled for 5 seconds
A bit weird to use soyjak in this one, most mic munchers don't nor can have beards as they don't have fully developed balls yet
Meh. Just mute people. That's what I used to do when I played online. I understand emotions run high and people get frustrated, I'm not gonna let my sensibility and their bouts of idiocy (especially when the solution is so simple!) ruin their experience forever. And honestly, they're probably just actual kids... I'm patient like that but I understand some people take things more to heart and whatnot.
I've always seen chat filters as a test in creativity. Telling someone they "misclicked when they hit install" or to "Go 0-1 irl" is way better
Or tell them the way to reset bugs in the game is Alt+F4
I mean usually that’s true tho
It's more that it's exhausting than anything else
I don't want to play a game where people keep telling slurs or being toxic towards others. It just ruins the whole experience
Didn't know that the offended wine moms of America got linked this post, sad that as an adult you can't control your feelings when someone makes jokes on a video game
Too fucking funny, banned!
Who makes fake kissing sounds in online games?! And why is it a bannable offence?
Use Krita
Paint.NET (note: not their URL sadly) is simple and will get the job done for 99% of your meme needs. I find Krita and alternatives are harder to use for simple edits because they're designed for more complex tasks.
https://getpaint.net/
the linux equivalent is Pinta but it is not nearly as powerful
I didn't make this particular one, but I usually just bash it out in a minute using Paint.
Like the material or the program?
(This was funnier in my head.)
Just play EA games. You can say anything.
Fuck EA.
I’ve had voice chat disabled since forever. I will not listen to the tools I play against. Racist and political trolls along with just general assholery. Not worth it. The only time VoIP is worth it these days is of you’re playing with a known group that polices its chat.
i so dearly wish more games were like deep rock galactic, just have a button that lets you ping whatever you're looking at, with special voicelines for important things.
in DRG it's a faux pas to use the voice chat, half the fun of the game is communicating solely through pinging stuff and furious head and body movement.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dnGFylrdKxI
Sis, yeah, fuck EA. EA not spending money on caring one way or the other checks out.
Blizzard game chat is horrid lol
I'm in genuine fucking awe at how awful Blizzard chat is. It's so so bad I'm actually sorta impressed at how bad it is. They don't even filter spam.
It's so insanely wildly impressively bad it doesn't even belong in the last decade, and that's before you even get into the rancid garbage the non-bots are saying.
It's funny because one of the first pc games I really got into was Wc3 and I swear the chat wasn't like that
It would be nice if they were that explicit about what they don't want said. Instead it's more like, "Don't say stuff we might not like. No, you can't have a list and when we ban you we won't tell you why."
😘😘😘
Yeah, the answer is to just not play those games or give them your money in the first place.
What else do you expect, giving up your freedom of speech to faceless corporation and their bureaucratic corporations ? Really at this point it's a choice. No one is forcing you to interact with these totalitocrats.
Play on your own terms, or just don't play at all. Reject convenience, K Y S
Let me put it in terms a normie can understand. You show up to a game of pick up basketball (local league) and one person is wearing high heels (off meta) the second person shows up late, and the third person doesn't know how to block a simple pass. How is that not gonna upset you?
What world do you live in where more people play basketball than online video games?
Even then, I don't think there's a way someone on my team could be so bad that I even raise my voice at them, much less verbally belittle them. Whenever I have a useless teammate I think "Damn, they must be new. I don't think we're winning this one." And then I do my best and I have fun.
Did I say raise my voice? That's how you'd react. Not I'm saying when people show up not ready ro play Damn right I'm going to let them know that's inappropriate.
So, what you won't raise your voice and just calmly ask them to kill themselves? What?
Nah but calmly muting them and playing better is your own option. Listen you don't want try hard DONT PLAY RANKED. That's like me going to a burger shop and getting mad that they freak out when you ask for a salad.
Ya don't get banned for saying "hey, I think you should try to prepare better."
This is easily the bougiest comment I've read in a while. What world might they live in, where more people play IRL sports than more expensive online games?
I can play a lot of my games on a computer that cost me less than $100, plus peripherals. Gaming is cheap nowadays as long as you're not gunning for the newest crap, and it lasts a long while. Meanwhile, playing basketball regularly requires you either have reliable access to a car (I don't) or live in an area where there's a publically available basketball court, AND enough people to play. Yeah, you could set up hoops in the street or something, but literal cars run through there. And people need to back out of their driveway. If you can't do it in your neighborhood, then you have to spend time that a lot of low-income folks don't have traveling to and from somewhere that does have the requisite things. Not impossible, but not at as convenient as an old business laptop from 2017 off Ebay with Steam on it.
Wow alts that's sad. Anyways that's why you're defending your poor game play.
Okay you show up to a Sunday league amateur soccer match. You scream KYS to the ref, they red card you. Why you surprised?
Why isn't the ref stopping the guy in high heels and a thong?
Let's put it in my terms: you're in a hostile takeover, you snatch us up for some green mail, but you're not expecting some poison pill to be running around the building, am I right?
Aren't you playing games to have fun?
Honestly, I’m not a fan of that sort of censorship.
I grew up in the Time Before Internet, and played all of the earliest online games. Trash talk is simply part of the experience as far as I’m concerned. On Team Fortress Classic, you had to abuse a motherfucker through text chat. And we loved it: everyone was enjoying that novel experience.
Back in the day of early COD on Xbox Live, lobbies were wild. Heck, even Uno subjected you to everything from ‘teach me slurs in your language’ to ‘random dude masturbating on camera while smoking a joint’.
I still play the occasional online game, but they’re boring and soulless. Very few people are on comms, as most seem afraid to actually talk. And with good reason; any sort of mildly spicy talk would get you banned on games. So instead of fostering a friendly atmosphere, from my perspective it ended up killing the entire vibe.
Let folks talk trash. Give as good as you get. And if that’s not for you? There’s other games to play.
Trash talk is still acceptable.
Telling someone to kill themselves isn't trash talk. Nor is using racial slurs, misogynistic, misandristic, homophobic or transphobic language.
If you can't creatively tell your opponents how bad they are without any of the above: You're not talking trash, you're being a toxic cunt.
i fucking hate the "that's how it is, go do smth else if you don't like it" attitude. can we please acknowledge that online gaming would be overall more fun for everyone if people stopped being toxic towards each other?
that league example is the exception and not the rule. most games have horrible measures against sexism and racism and whatnot. the issue with league's system is that it's ai-based and ai makes mistakes all the time, not the fact that it's trying to stop toxicity.
It's not trash talk at all though. And even ignoring the language itself, trash talk is towards your opponents (where still most people don't get how to do it in a non-obnoxious way, i.e. someone spamming ez after they win a game isn't trash talk it's being annoying). Most of the really bad flame happens towards teammates because everyone needs to blame someone else.
Irl sports get by just fine without people constantly being pieces of shit, I dunno why it's so hard to apply that to online games.
The problem starts with these companies feeling obligated to police what you can say over chat. Just to be clear it's advertisers and payment services that necessitate that. The whole thing about trying to force a "non-toxic community" is a gaslight.
I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000's. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes. A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.
No doubt, but I don't think microsoft spends money on that because they altruistically care about your online safety, I think they do it because they are pressured by monetary reasons.
I appreciate your perspective, thank you for sharing your experience.
One thing I don't understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.
I was never on XBL really, but I've been a PC users on counterstrike and league of legends since their inceptions. I can't say if one service is worse than another but I did watch the efforts to stamp down toxicity over time. I don't know how successful these efforts were, it seemed futile at best.
Would you share if you feel the current efforts from services like this are effective in making you feel like it's a safer place for you to game?
These tools have improved immensely over the years. It was particularly bad in those days because there was no option for private or party voice chat and a lot of games came with 3-day trial cards for Xbox Live which allowed people to make tons of sock puppet accounts to evade blocking.
I don't really play FPS's any more and I haven't turned on an Xbox in about 7 years. I just play on PC now, almost exclusively with a gaming community on discord comprised of online and IRL friends. My experience is very curated now and the games I play either have minimal social interaction or are well known for their welcoming communities (eg Warframe). It felt a little bit like admitting defeat, but shutting off the public mic and just sticking to private VCs and servers has been a good way of dealing with it. I certainly don't get rape and death threats with a side of doxxing these days.
lol who downvotes someone’s factual personal account?
Welcome to being a woman on the internet.
Idk, the rules of the Internet say women don't exist so from here on, you shall be treated as a man instead. Suffer the terrible existence of menfolk, featuring highlights such as: people believing you, male defaultism and so on.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with me! I'm sorry those things happened to you and that it had an effect on the way you play in the end.
I think it's important for people to recognize the toxic effects of general misogyny and phenomena like Gamer Gate have on gaming communities. To this day, I see plenty of cis-male and trans-femme gamers wonder about why there are so few cis-women in gaming spaces without recognition of what gaming communities are like towards young women and girls who express interest. Nothing quashes your desire to join a community quite like incessant harassment, abuse, rape/death threats, and doxxing.
(To be clear, I am not insinuating that trans-femme folks have an easy time of things, but I can say they outnumber cis-women in gaming communities like Arma by a factor to 2 to 1 or greater. There are 3 trans-women in my Arma group and I'm the only cis-woman there.)
2 things can be true at the same time.