There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these “brain dead”, patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I’d rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so … annoying.
As an example, I once dared to suggest that a game developer implement a mode to prevent crouched status from rendering on death cams so that players that are bothered by t-bagging could avoid it (after a match where a friend rage quit because someone just kept head shotting him – possibly with cheats – and then t-bagging). This post got tons of hate, and like -50 upvotes on reddit because of course someone should be forced to watch someone t-bag them.
Another example on a official game forum… I made a forum post suggesting Bungie use Mastodon (or really just something else being my intent)… The response I got was some positivity but mostly just “lol nobody uses that sweetie” and other patronizing comments.
Meanwhile studios themselves often seem to be filled with developers that understand this stuff is a problem, and the lack of sportsmanship (or generally civilized attitudes) does push away players. It just doesn’t make sense to me that no studio is saying “get lost” to these elements or implementing anti-toxicity features. I just want to play games with nice normal people, is that really so much to ask?
I hate to say it but many people play multiplayer games because it gives them the ability to be complete cunts to others with zero possibility of any real repercussions.
That is the draw.
Behaviours that would get you thrown out of a public space or banned from a group d&d session or punched in the face can be repeated again and again in online gaming.
The same people that like to troll spaces like this are the same people who only play multiplayer games to grief others.
It is an often repeated quote, to the point it has become trite but it is true:
Some people just want to watch the world burn
Yep. Penny arcade did a great comic on this almost 20 years ago.
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
Which was:
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Normal Person - Consequences + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Which is a perfect explanation for Twitter both before and after EM took over.
Anyway, her suggestion looked like this:
Normal Person - Consequences + Audience = Total Fuckwad
which adjusts Anonymity toward its functional result. For some reason, and I don’t know why, the notion of subtraction, of negation, is much more optimistic that our construction because it implies that you can add something and change it. The underlying assertion is that we can fix this with technology, which, again, you know, engineers. Our conversations tend to be interesting.
Very cool when it’s put like that.
That’s… depressing but I could easily see it…
Still, I find it hard to believe that’s the majority. I remember days when it wasn’t as bad as it’s gotten. Like is it so many people that it would truly hurt profits that much vs what it could bring (there was a point where my friends and I almost entirely stopped playing online games because these people were just making it an annoying experience instead of a fun one; I can’t imagine I’m in the only group of friends that experienced that/had folks that had to take a break).
I’d really love it if someone who works for one of these bigger studios (even anonymously) said why seemingly no time is spent on really trying to just expel toxic players like would be done in real life (in the various examples you gave).
Edit: My true pipedream would be that there’s some next level person (senior dev, staff software engineer, product owner) at one of these studios lurking that goes “you know what you have a point” and actually does something about this 😅
It is not the majority but:
1: The angry cunts drive away the players that just want to have fun, so they can soon dominate a space and turn a game toxic is a short time.
2: People remember the bad interactions. It you play ten games in a session and only one is filled with toxic arseholes…Guess which game you will remember the next day.
3: Once the toxic shitheads find a game that is allowing their behaviour to continue and not dropping the ban hammer on them, they will keep coming back and invite their toxic mates to join the fun.
I’m not sure I even regard this as a developer studios responsibility.
What has the game to do with how it’s players behave? Your teebagging example is great for this: You seek a technical solution for a behavioural problem of the player base? That’s a bit too far.
I’m pretty sure I know the players you describe. I’ve played against them, I’ve played with them and talked to them. I’ve let them get to me and ragequit. They are clearly cunts and bullies. Not much you can do about them.
Change what is in your control: Play in a good state of mind where this stuff does not get to you (not when you’re tired after work). Turn off voice comms. Don’t let it get to you. Worst thing you can do to a troll is ignore them.
Not much you can do about them.
Most of the games have ignore/mute. I’ve learned to automatically block anyone at the first sign of mild toxicity, so I don’t have to see the rest and have it ruin my experience. I’m never going to see the people again anyway, so there’s no reason to give them the benefit of a doubt, and by blocking them early I can play in peace and still have fun.
I’m not sure I even regard this as a developer studios responsibility.
I mean, they’re the ones running the servers and ultimately providing admittance. There always going to be “bad people” unless owners of establishments actually exclude them (or as I’ve suggested – since this is an imaginary world – just take away their ability to be a jerk in said world).
Change what is in your control: Play in a good state of mind where this stuff does not get to you (not when you’re tired after work). Turn off voice comms. Don’t let it get to you. Worst thing you can do to a troll is ignore them.
Definitely good advice. Part of it is genuinely just friends too though. Like this isn’t “my friend”, this is my friend (though that’s not to say I enjoy this crap either)… and sometimes it’s hard to gage their mental state, or even though they’re in a bad mood, I’d really like to do something more challenging … and of course they get t-bagged or abused on comms … and then everybody is having a bad time.
I wish I had access to these game’s source code… then the whole thing would be in my control ☺️
Bro, gaming communities are a reflection of internet communities at large.
The only common thing gaming strangers have is the game. The rest? They could be just about anybody you see on the streets. And the streets ia filled with assholes.
Yes, but the type of game and the interactions in it highly influence the way players act with each other. Look at the way Stardew Valley players and communities are, for example, and then look at the League of Legends one. Incredibly different, simply because the games focus on different things. Competition brings out the worst in people, especially online, and with young (and sometimes old) players who don’t have the tools to cope with frustration, toxicity snowballs and turns everybody sour.
For a while now, I’ve been asking one simple question with a way I think could help reduce, if not eliminate, toxicity from players:
How do you gamify good sportsmanship?
If you can actually gamify and incentivize good sportsmanship in a tangible, meaningful way, it could do a lot to help with the crap commonly seen/heard in video game chats and forums.
I think that’s a very interesting question! I don’t have a good answer. In real life, this onus is on coaches, organizers, etc… so it’s always seemed like something that moderators should just need to actually do.
What bothers me about this with video games is that I know as a programmer, programmers are capable of just shutting people down when they do obviously disrespectful things like t-bagging, and in games that have explicit taunts… they’re perfectly capable of just giving players an option to disable taunts… but they don’t.
It’s kind of like chat filters, we don’t have to sanitize it for everybody, but there should be an option.
Taunting animations and t-bagging are pretty mild and I’ve always considered them in the realm of playful trash talk in the vein of things like “you’re going down, bro!” If they’re also talking massive shit while doing it, that’s a different story.
I think it’s a bit more disrespectful than “you’re going down, bro!” But typically when I’m thinking of this, I’m thinking of situations where the person has like a 10-0 KDR vs the person and is either clearly just way better or cheating and t-bags after every kill. It’s completely classless at that point.
Like, if it’s a fairly even match and occasional … sure it’s not worse, but when it’s mixed with outright domination (or as you said talking massive shit) it’s more than that.
In either case… it’s just so unnecessary.
if youre really interested in the idea of gaminfying good sportsmanship, I think the Deep Rock Galactic community would be the best place to start. it’s not devoid of toxicity, but it has arguably the least amount of it out of any other online game. I think the devs mentioned they think a lot of it has to do with things like having a solute/celebrate button (hence why all DRG fans will communicate via yelling “ROCK AND STONE!”), although being a co-op non-vs game helps I’m sure.
I’ve generally been pretty happy with the Hunt Showdown community (part of what I think helps there is stopping to t-bag someone can easily result in you getting shot and losing a match, part of it is the dead person can’t see you t-bag, part of it is it’s an older crowd).
I also mostly stick to PvE destiny (i.e. avoid the PvP portion)… I’m largely fine, it’s just when I forget and go into one of these areas I tried to forget about I’m like “why is this still a problem? 🙃”
Programmers of AAA titles are subject to the decision of managers.
But more to your point: player upvoting/downvoting would maybe help solve this issue. The assholes will still be in the game rooms, but then you can avoid them. Like when you see a lemmy comment with -10, you just skip it.
It’s not impossible, it’s just not profitable. In most online games cosmetics are quite important. And you can easily make it that the only way to get them is by having a high community score or whatever you wanna call it. And even make it so that if your score drops, you lose access to them. There will still be assholes using the default model, sure, but I’m pretty sure most people will be going out of their way to be nice if there’s something in it for them. And after a while of forcing yourself to do something it becomes habit. And that may be a way to teach players to be nice. Dunno, just a thought
You can still profit and coax people into behaving better at the same time. Most stuff you pay for; but have some exclusive things for getting enough good sport points. And to keep up their good behaviour, they will lose points for bad behavior and can have those items taken away from them if they fall below the points needed to have them in the first place.
Or hell; even lose your paid for items. Like taking away a child’s toy if they misbehave. This is basically what a ban is anyway.
My only issue with this is that the only current and reliable way to get these points on your record would be to take the word of other players making reports. You could always get enough friends to circle jerk each other for good guy points, the same way you can bully players now with bad behavior reports.
Nah, players won’t accept the latter, as for the former, yeah, except most games I’ve played don’t give cool cosmetics for “free” like that. Cause if the free ones are just as cool as the paid ones, fewer people will pay, and they don’t like that. The most sought after ones are always the store ones or the 1% content ones
But yeah, I’d love it if a game actually did that
I don’t think a paternal mindset is a good way to approach this, personally. It usually has more to do with feeling like you are in a position of authority and providing the gratification of passing judgment on the behavior of others, while not actually resolving the issue.
That sounds very interesting! Any concrete ideas what that might be or even implemented examples?
The toughest thing is getting reliable feedback. Steam and CSGO both have a system where you can give accolades to other players, which is a good base. But it’s not ideal, imo, because it can be abused just like reporting bad behavior can. Personally I can’t think of any way to automate giving rewards for good behaviour, because other than AI and with dubious privacy issues, there isn’t a good way to gauge good behavior, since most of it is simply how people talk to each other, and not necessarily how they play the game.
Now I recall League of Legends, which I quit playing a year ago or so. I think after each match, you were prompted to give a positive rating about another player. The player with the most approvals got highlighted in the post-match screen, and maybe there was like a special player border for the loading screen of the next match.
Maybe that’s a good idea; don’t focus on detecting bad behaviour, but give ways to reward good behaviour.
Not saying LoL’s approach is the way to go. It was mostly focused on game-relevant deeds, and only partially on social behaviour.
It’s the question.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how you’d design a racing sim that rewards and gamifies clean racing but the basic answer is that you’d have to set it in world so different from our autoracing history and technology that you’d lose 75% of your player base who are mostly interested in real cars (the same way FIFA games appeal to people who want the real players, and don’t actually care about the game design of football).
On PS5 there’s platform native ‘Accolades’ where you can rate the people you’ve played with, but Bruce I never play the kinds of games that they’re designed for I have no idea if they’re used or how they even work. The point being though even Sony were trying to approach this topic at an OS/ecosystem level.
That will never happen. How do you gamify YouTube comments?
I think a rating system would work better - sort of upvotes, but for gamers or game match rooms.
“Should I join this game? Oy, -7 points. Nope. What about this one? 4 points. Hm, maybe. Let’s see the list of players. There are three with less than -5. Those are cunts. Nope. And this one? 57 points! Players above 2 points. Let’s go!”
One obvious solution is to do what competitive sports do: hire a referee. I could imagine hardcore players paying a little extra per match to hire a referee and essentially guarantee fair play. Some players might want to make a little extra cash while still being involved in a game they enjoy.
Might be a tough proposition though, since it would be hard to scale to large online communities. Maybe with good enough tools, refs could manage multiple matches at a time.
The cheaper solution that some games already do is allow players to report toxic behavior and then a moderator will play back the logs and see if the report is legitimate.
Meh. Restarted a rant three times now.
I’ll leave it at this.
Online sportsmanship is dead. There’s zero consequence for being a direct cunt online. And reporting systems rarely report back if any action is taken against a player you reported.
Doing a mythic+3 in WoW? Get kicked over your spec because it’s not the best one, even though the two friends you’re bringing cleared all +15s.
Lost a clutch game? “Ggez” from the enemy team
Ruining it for the other team is part of the game and I think that’s horrible.
I’d there’s no “society”/community to give consequences to your actions, there’s no incentive to get them to stop
It’s a direct consequence of matchmaking (and in League of Legends specifically also of terrible game design). If you were to play with the same, smaller set of people every time this behavior wouldn’t happen as often because people would simply start telling you you’re a dick. In matchmaking there are no consequences as the chance you’ll ever play the same opponent again before they forgot about you is minimal.
You’re playing competitive games with primarily teenagers and young adults. They are always gonna be toxic and very few companies are willing to dedicate a ton of resources towards content moderation. There are big games that do, like Overwatch, so if it’s a problem for you then you should either only play those games, or play games that don’t attract the young toxic crowds as much.
And honestly asking for a feature to hide your delicate eyes from teabagging in an FPS is a bit much.
I found game communities on reeedit to be fairly annoying for similar reasons. Even for games where the community at large is fairly positive, there was a lot of random downvoting of topics and comments for no reason but bitterness or disapproval. A sizable and vocal minority seemed to come to the subs just to complain about the game, like “game is dead!” or “this update sucks!” or “they’re going to close the servers, nobody plays!”. There was one person who started really annoying me with their constant doom and bitterness in every single thread every day - like, we LIKE this game, stop trying to make us feel bad about it - so I googled their name. Like, do they play other games? Stream on Twitch? I found their public Steam profile with the same distinctive name as the reddit account. According to the achievements they hadn’t even played the game they complained about every day long enough to get the most basic achievments (reach level 20…). I pointed that out on the sub and someone told me I was “STALKING”. Yeah, one google search and looking at a public Steam profile… that’s stalking.
