The Hostility of Online Gaming - AKA: It's Only a Game, Why You Haef 2 B Mad

[It's HK-47]

I'm old enough to remember some of the original communities in games like Everquest and Diablo, or even Star Wars Galaxies, where-in even though the general community and the average player weren't necessarily overtly helpful or even particularly friendly, they were at least neutral and not overwhelmingly, instantaneously hostile. It really wasn't that uncommon to stumble across someone else making the run from Qeynos to Freeport who'd help you out along the way, or to spend most of your night in Diablo grinding through run after run with a complete stranger.

Heck, even in Star Wars Galaxies most all of the "hardcore" PVPers on the opposing team weren't all that mean, they just wanted to rough everyone up and meet back at the cantina afterwards to just shoot the breeze. Communities in older games felt like legitimate communities to such an extent that most players came to know one-another after long enough, and it certainly never felt like you were just diving into a sea of openly hostile strangers.

Somewhere along the way something started to slip, though, and I've never been able to put my finger on exactly what it was that started driving this problem forwards. An easy mark would be to blame Warcraft for popularizing online gaming, but even during the original game the community was largely very patient. You could spend an hour setting up a Blackrock run and then three hours aimlessly running around in the dungeon trying to figure out what in the Hell you were even supposed to do, and very seldom would anyone so much as bat an eye.

That certainly didn't last, and with every expansion you could almost see the changes taking place in the online community. With every improvement, with every automatic dungeon queue and timed event and incentive to move faster and faster, the community in WoW grew increasingly impatient and intensely hostile. I've tried going back to the game a handful of times in recent years, and I can't even recognize it anymore. Everyone just seems angry.

It's not remotely limited to MMOs, either. Any game with an online community is nearly unbearable now, from League of Legends to Warframe to Vermintide to... Anything with a multiplayer component, really. After awhile it hit a point where I just stopped playing multiplayer games altogether, because nobody seemed like they were having fun anymore. It all became a never-ending stream of hostility, a drive to make it as far as you can, as fast as you can, and with as little communication as humanly possible.

There are so many games on the market right now that I would love to play with people, things like ARK or Payday 2, but I just can't bring myself to sit there for hours on end hearing nothing but a stream of profanity blaring out of my headphones and spamming through the in-game chat, and to have every single group I join or game I start end up falling apart in fifteen seconds because ___ didn't immediately happen.

I've never been able to acclimate to how much the online community has changed compared to what it was, before. When did everyone stop taking their time to just have fun and play the game, and instead convert the entire hobby into such a hyper-competitive mess that it sucks all the fun out of every, single multiplayer element? What in the world happened that brought the bar down this far?

 

[Piss Clam]

It's the same story.

In the 80's and then in the early 90's the 'internet' was dial up access (for those who didn't work or be associated with .gov/.edu/.com). Then the RFC for HTTP got finalized and it was at that point everything went to shit, because companies could actually make wads of money now.

So instead of having a small circle of people that were in the know, it expanded into everyones soapbox to shitpost.

The gaming community was never going to be immune to that.

Hundreds of Millions now shitpost in a world with billions of people and devices.

You never had a chance.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

"I No Socialize Online" - CWC

Maybe Chris was onto something there?

 

[Bussy Catalog]

Maybe Nintendo was on to something when they made voice chat a separate app on Switch instead of having it in-game. Some of the most fun I've had online was fragging peeps in Doom without having to listen to them moan every time I got the BFG.

 

[skiddlez]

I think the problem is online gaming becoming more available and appealing to a larger audience, which in turn attracts a lower common denominator and younger, less mature people. In fact, it seems like literally everyone plays online games now, so it's really attracting the absolute lowest common denominator who seem to shit up the experience for people who just want to have a good time. And since these communities are such garbage, the better, more respectable players often find themselves quitting or only playing the game with certain groups of friends.

Some games just naturally attract a crowd of shrieking children (shit like Gmod and Minecraft), some games attract teenage Russians screaming "CYKA BLYAT" (like mobas and CS:GO), but sometimes you can find games where the remaining online crowd is pretty good. Look for games that have communities that are smaller and pretty stagnant. Older/classic games are often great places to find nicer and more mature communities.

 

[Ntwadumela]

The biggest issue is when people take the game so seriously, as if it’s a life or death matter. They’re really just games, and rarely (if ever) have I had this problem.

 

[Jerry_ smith56]

Half of these cases are just kids who are allowed do whatever they want without repercussions and the other half are grown ups who were allowed do whatever they want without repercussions when they were kids. Too many parents are just spinelessly giving into their kids.

 

[Derbydollar]

Games are competitive. Most of the hostility you're talking about can usually be chalked up to banter.

I play DOTA pretty often and people's nerves can kind of go a bit wacky if the game goes bad, but I would say that the vast majority of games people are pretty pleasant as long as you're nice to them. Personally, I'd rather be called a lixo blyat by some peruvian street rat than have everyone give me smiley faces over all chat It's part of the fun, though I guess that might be slightly different in MMOs.

 

[Dr. Kaufman]

I think it's just a change in society in general; with the rise of the internet, people have become more cynical and dissatisfied, and with the lack of accountability present on the internet, people realise that they can use it as a place to vent without many repercussions. It's especially noticeable in gaming because gaming communities are very interactive, and people become jaded from experiencing the same things over and over again. You'll have the patience to deal with a newbie the first time, but for the 255th time, not so much.

 

[Power Armor]

you can't expect good behavior if every game out there overtly rewards shitty attitudes and terrible behavior. +25 points isn't really incentive for caring about the people around you.

 

[skiddlez]

you can't expect good behavior if every game out there overtly rewards shitty attitudes and terrible behavior.

I don't necessarily think that shitheads are rewarded for their behavior, I think it's a problem with how they go unpunished. I remember, not even that long ago, when shitheads would enter your game and fuck everything up, you could just voteban them. The communities took care of the problems just by voting them out.

edit: I also know that "clans" were pretty cringey looking back, but they were a surprisingly good way to meet respectable people in whatever game it was you played. Also you could easily get games with no pub morons, just people in the clan who were much more respectful and helpful than dumb pubbies.

 

[JE 765]

Half of these cases are just kids who are allowed do whatever they want without repercussions and the other half are grown ups who were allowed do whatever they want without repercussions when they were kids. Too many parents are just spinelessly giving into their kids.

I think it's just a change in society in general; with the rise of the internet, people have become more cynical and dissatisfied, and with the lack of accountability present on the internet, people realise that they can use it as a place to vent without many repercussions.

you can't expect good behavior if every game out there overtly rewards shitty attitudes and terrible behavior. +25 points isn't really incentive for caring about the people around you.

We've come to an age where parents no longer want to raise their kids, and instead use the computer/internet to do the job for them. The rest of us have to suffer for it.

 

[Coconut Gun]

Have you tried gitting gud?

 

[It's HK-47]

Games are competitive. Most of the hostility you're talking about can usually be chalked up to banter.

I'm not even talking about casual insults or teabagging your friends for the sake of annoying them a little, I mean that absolutely every game I wander into these days is loaded to the gills with outright unpleasant, impatient people who have no interest at all in being anything even remotely approaching courteous. It's just a constant stream of people screaming and pitching fits whenever the slightest thing goes wrong and it feels like all the multiplayer communities have developed this massive rift between super casuals and people who like to think they're metagamers, but are nearly as bad as the casuals anyways.

It's not even really so much that they're competitive, because plenty of the older games that had a highly-competitive atmosphere like Warcraft 2 or Quake or Jedi Knight had their share of smack-talking, but it was by-and-large good-natured and I don't remember it ever devolving into a barrage of 10 year-olds shrieking about the quantity of coitus they'd inflicted upon my mother. That sort of friendly, competitive atmosphere just seems like it's all but entirely dead, now, and it's been replaced by nothing but jackasses who want to sprint for the finish line and scream about how everyone except them is utterly horrible at the game. Even if they're losing.

 

[MrTroll]

When I was an obsessive Counter-strike player in the early 2000's most of the players were shit-talking hyper-competitive pricks. The vast majority of them would have fit right into any modern 'toxic' community.

The kind of people who are drawn to multiplayer games, and the way they interact with each other, hasn't really changed. We've changed. You're probably 30-something and have a much lower tolerance threshold for screaming teenagers. That's just part of getting older. If you give people anonymity and put them into a highly competitive environment you're going to get this stuff. That was as true in 1997 or 2005 as it is today.

 

[Strange Looking Dog]

I, for one, like how aggressively stupid the vidya community is. It is as it should be.

 

[It's HK-47]

I, for one, like how aggressively stupid the vidya community is. It is as it should be.

I suppose the silver lining is that we acquired lots and lots and lots of videos where people are shrieking like banshees and smashing their keyboards into plastic sawdust. Those are always good for a laugh, so it hasn't been a total loss.

 

[Derbydollar]

I'm not even talking about casual insults or teabagging your friends for the sake of annoying them a little, I mean that absolutely every game I wander into these days is loaded to the gills with outright unpleasant, impatient people who have no interest at all in being anything even remotely approaching courteous. It's just a constant stream of people screaming and pitching fits whenever the slightest thing goes wrong and it feels like all the multiplayer communities have developed this massive rift between super casuals and people who like to think they're metagamers, but are nearly as bad as the casuals anyways.

It's not even really so much that they're competitive, because plenty of the older games that had a highly-competitive atmosphere like DOOM or Quake or Jedi Knight had their share of smack-talking, but it was by-and-large good-natured and I don't remember it ever devolving into a barrage of 10 year-olds shrieking about the quantity of coitus they'd inflicted upon my mother. That sort of friendly, competitive atmosphere just seems like it's all but entirely dead, now, and it's been replaced by nothing but jackasses who want to sprint for the finish line and scream about how everyone except them is utterly horrible at the game. Even if they're losing.

I guess we just don't play the same games, since I haven't noticed this at all. Every once in a while you get someone who probably eats his own shoelaces yelling at you or a teammate, but most of the time everyone is either completely quiet or trying to work together to win the game. Maybe I should move on from MOBAs though, because having little kids use their best elementary school bad boy vocabulary to insult me sounds pretty funny

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

The thing I hate about this is that merely addressing this hogshit is merit enough to summon a tsunami of raging assholes down upon you for not "getting the culture", as if my vidya is that important.

 

[gobbogobb]

Easy access to competitive multiayer and voice chat.

Esports

Relative lack of coop multiplayer games (even those are focused on individual performance)

You never saw this back in the wc2 days. We were just happy to finish a game without mom picking up the phone and dropping us offline.