People do need thicker skin though. So much internet drama is magnified beyond reason by people who can’t just ignore assholes. That’s not excusing the fact that they’re being assholes. Obviously if they would stop being assholes that would be the ideal solution. However, we all know that will never happen. No amount of legislation, moderation, or punishment will ever remove that tendency from people. It is fundamental human nature. Stop fighting a losing battle. Learn how to block people and move on with your life. If you stop engaging they’ll get bored and leave you alone. They thrive on your reaction so stop giving them one.
At the end of the day it’s your job to protect yourself in all aspects of life, including online. Stop trying to outsource it to software developers. They gave you all the tools you need decades ago.
Given the choice between an online community with assholes being moderated away and an online community without asshole moderation, I’m going to choose the one where assholes get warned, muted, and banned.
My favourite subreddit had a rule, “Be Civil”. I much preferred that sub over ones that didn’t have that rule (or one like it). Too many people don’t know how to behave in public forums, and those people make the internet a lot less pleasant. See Facebook and Instagram comments if you’d like some examples.
I don’t play many online games, except with friends exclusively, or where there is no chat (especially voice chat). If there were games that had moderated communities that banned assholes, then I’d be more likely to venture into that world…and maybe I’d even start turning on my mic.
A competitive gaming community is different. You want players who are invested in winning. It’s more fun when everyone is playing hard. I’d rather have someone yell at someone who threw a round than no one say anything and have that player throw more rounds.
People are so coddled these days they have all the tools at their disposal to avoid “toxic” behavior and yet they won’t mute the person and will complain as if there was nothing they could do to escape the harassment of words on a screen. If someone is taking getting to you then you can mute them.
As for your statement on toxicity preventing you from playing multiplayer doesn’t seem true. There are plenty of games where you will never see toxicity and you still don’t play any of them so that can’t be what’s stopping you.
You want players who are invested in winning.
Yes. Players who are invested in winning. Not players who have poor emotional regulation or social behaviour and are invested in being assholes.
It’s called sportsmanship. Yet some online games sound worse than middle school sports games… probably because, for years, nobody got punished for acting like a middle schooler who can’t control their emotions or behaviour.
As for your statement on toxicity preventing you from playing multiplayer doesn’t seem true. There are plenty of games where you will never see toxicity and you still don’t play any of them so that can’t be what’s stopping you.
I’m fascinated by how you know so much about the games I don’t play! Lol
You said you don’t play many online games with Randoms because there aren’t games that moderate their communities. But there are plenty of games that moderate their communities so how is that hindering you from playing? It seems you just prefer to play single player or multi-player with friends. Which is fine but you are speaking about distrastically changing the culture of a community you don’t even interact with on the slim chance that they entice you to join.
To your point on sportsman ship. Yeah I would prefer if every good player was not a dickhead but I care about teammate skill before team mate attitude. When you are playing competitive games it wastes everyone’s time to play dumb or play wrong. If someone joins a ranked cs lobby and tries to only knife they deserve to get flamed. As long as people aren’t breaking the rules regarding hate speech I don’t care how mean or rude players are in competitive play. I personally don’t flame but I don’t mind that others do it raises the stakes and puts pressure on players which is a good thing. When I get flamed and I feel it’s annoying I just mute the person and continue.
I’ve played games that overly moderate the communities speech and it leads to not one talking and it feels like playing single player as everyone may as well be a bot.
Did you click through to the actual clip?
It’s not that I entirely disagree, but it’s not a black-vs-white thing. Some ribbing is understandable, after all it’s a competitive environment. But the explicitly misogynist, hateful, threatening and illegal needs to be harshly dealt with, to make players understand that it’s an absolutely 0 tolerance police and you will fuck yourself up if you try.
No player should have to go through having to shrug off rape threats.
Learn how to block people and move on with your life.
That’s what we want the game makers to do, yes.
Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I’ve never played a game that didn’t let you block and/or mute people you’re playing with. That doesn’t make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation? Taking care of it yourself is much faster and doesn’t depend on convincing someone else that what’s happening needs to be dealt with. You can block people for having the wrong favorite color if you want to.
There’s too much inconsistency in what people perceive to be inappropriate behavior for a central authority to have the final say on the matter. Moderator action should be reserved for situations that explicitly violate the law, and even that varies significantly based on location and interpretation. It’s much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.
Again, did you click through and watch the actual clip? Rape threats are against the law in many/most jurisdictions.
I’m not a lawyer but it is my understanding of US law that something like what you see in the video does not meet the legal definition of a threat. There is no indication that the offender knows the real identity or location of the person they are speaking to, both of which are required to establish the intent necessary to define something as a threat in the legal sense of the word. Furthermore, the person speaking appears to be from another country, likely the UK or Australia, both of which have different laws than the US. Is Riot supposed to evaluate this situation based on the laws of the country in which they have their corporate HQ, the country the speaker resides in, or the country in which the listener resides? I don’t think a lawyer in any of those three countries would advise this streamer to press charges based on the content of this video alone which would indicate that this kind of behavior is not illegal. Perhaps it should be, but that’s another matter entirely.
To reiterate, none of this is meant to be interpreted as a defense of what that guy said. It’s just to illustrate the point that moderation is not a simple thing to enforce even in situations where a surface level evaluation seems like it should be. It’s much simpler to mute this guy or leave the lobby or whatever else you feel like you need to do to protect yourself. The unfortunate reality remains that people like this will always be around no matter what system is in place to minimize their impact. That’s not to say that no steps should be taken with that goal in mind, just that when all is said and done you will always bear some responsibility in protecting yourself from content or behavior you don’t want to be exposed to.
If you can play from say the UK, and you pay money for the game or access to it’s Internet or components, they are doing business in the UK, and hence their business, business interactions and everything are subject to UK laws.
Seriously, we let companies get away with too much. If you provide public spaces, you are responsible for some degree of safety in/on them, and that includes certain personal safety, protection from libel, slander and threats. Likewise if you do business in a country and can make money from customers there, you are responsible for adhering to those countries laws. Want to do business in >200 countries? Yeah, you now have to adhere to >200 sets of laws.
Now you could say “But it’d suck if so many companies no longer release their products globally!”. Sure. OTOH, it sucks much more that companies shirk responsibilities constantly. Companies are supposed to be like persons. So like a person, require them to adhere to local laws and show at least some degree of decency.
And no, it’s ridiculous to assume someone should take steps to protect themselves. It’s a failure of society that we have to do that for something as deranged as online rape or death threats. Because we let both the aggressor and the conductor get away with it, exactly in the way you do, by immediately putting the onus onto the victim.
Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I’ve never played a game that didn’t let you block and/or mute people you’re playing with. That doesn’t make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation?
Because the devs/mods have the power to at least attempt to remove the person from the game before anyone else has to suffer their comments.
It’s much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.
It’s pretty simple to enable mod actions, too. Game devs make a list of rules about what you can and can’t say. You agree to those rules when you start playing the game. Breaking the rules earns you a punishment. If you don’t like it, you don’t play the game. If the rules are unfairly restrictive then people won’t play the game and it will fail. This is how internet moderation has worked since forever.
Yes that is how moderation has worked in some places in the past. It’s also been historically unpaid volunteer work and not particularly effective, especially at large scales. Most of the people here have at least one story about bad moderation on reddit precisely because that kind of moderation is inefficient and heavily influenced by the personal bias of the moderator reviewing a report. You still needed to block people on a regular basis if you wanted to both participate and avoid harassment from a subset of users. That’s how it is all over the internet and there is nothing that can be done to completely remove that element of online activity. Hence the need for thicker skin.
nature. Stop fighting a losing battle. Learn how to block people and move on with your life. If you stop engaging they’ll get bored and leave you alone. They thrive on your reaction so stop giving them one.
The problem for developers is that the easiest way to stop engaging is to not play their games. They care about moderation because they want people to continue to play their game.
I don’t know that that’s true. Some games may be worse than others but I don’t think there are any specific games, or for that matter places online in general, where some form of harassment is not an issue. If you want to avoid it entirely then you need to avoid people entirely and that’s not really a teneble solution.
I only play online games with friends because I don’t feel like dealing with fuckheads in my spare time. That does mean there are a lot of games which are probably cool but I won’t play because they are meant to be played in lobbies.
You don’t know what is true? That people can’t stop playing a game? That developers care about players quitting their game? It’s trivially easy to play video games and avoid trolls. There are single player games. You can play only with friends or family. You can play live service with lots of solo-oriented content and mute the chat. It’s not a hyperbolic choice between playing video games or avoiding all social interaction in life period - that’s a very “terminally online” kind of perspective. Normal people reduce toxic interactions where they can, they don’t think, “Welp, I either put up with constant bigotry and rape threats in this totally optional entertainment or I have to move out to a shack in the woods.”
For most people gaming is a social activity. The popularity and prevalence of multiplayer games vs single player games bears this out. Playing single player games is not a viable solution to avoiding harassment for people who are interested in the social and/or multiplayer aspects of gaming. Muting people who are dicks is a viable solution and that’s exactly what I’ve been advocating for in this discussion. Many others seem to think they shouldn’t need to be involved in the process and game devs or other communication platforms should do all the work for them. I don’t think that’s a realistic suggestion.
What is your source on multiplayer games being more popular and prevalent than single player? Because a cursory search only turns up the opposite preference. You’re ignoring the parts of my argument that don’t suit you as well, like playing only with friends, so I don’t think you’re really being an honest interlocutor. That leads me to believe you are probably a player that bullies other players, which is why you’re so strongly anti-moderation.
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https://www.statista.com/statistics/259577/us-single-player-vs-multiplayer-frequency-among-gamers “According to an October 2022 survey of PC and console gamers in the United States, over half of respondents stated that they spent about 75 to 100 percent of their gaming time playing alone.”
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https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/single-player-vs-multiplayer-a-generational-changing-of-the-guards-or-a-bifurcation-of-gamer-behaviours “57% of gamers prefer single-player over multiplayer games, compared to 22% who prefer multiplayer games. While the overall preference for the single player mode holds true across all age segments, the degree to which the single player mode is preferred differs significantly with age.”
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I cannot get behind the sentiment of “online communication is awful so we shouldn’t even attempt to do anything about it.” Yeah at some point you have to learn to shake it off to protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make any effort to moderate online spaces as well. Don’t give assholes quarter in your game if you want to retain your community.
You can’t remove the suck from people, but you can remove the people from your community.
I didn’t say no attempts should be made to improve things. In fact in one of my comments I explicitly said the opposite. I’m saying people need to be both realistic in their expectations of what any moderation policy can achieve and proactive in the pursuit of their own online safety. Moderators will never be able to fully eliminate this problem because it is an inherent part of the behavior of a subset of humanity and humans are involved in the activities where this harassment takes place.
If you expect every person you meet, online or in person, to respect the rules you are going to be disappointed. By all means, make suggestions for improvement. But understand any solution will be imperfect and accept your role in dealing with those imperfections. To put the sentiment in a more succint form, get thicker skin.
It would be even better if they commited to not installing rootkits on your PC.
Maybe focus on banning cheaters rather than having a pissing contest with some dude
It seems like a toxic community surrounds Riot’s games worse than they do other games.
