No one should have to “grow a thicker skin”: Valorant studio commit to harsh penalties for harassment
Riot games have committed to a series of new measures to curtail harassment and hate-speech in Valorant
I avoid any pvp online game exactly for this reason. if you open your mouth to call out, you just became a target. it's so normalized now that I have sworn off multiplayer games altogether unless they're co-op and I can play specifically with friends.
it really sucks.
It's hard because people are a lot smarter about how they harras you today than they used to be. It used to just be a shouting match where everyone calls each other homophonic slurs. Now they dig into your profile, follow you around, try to dox you and just generally get really creative about how to fuck you. Fuck all that.
More games should just allow you to disable chat. A friend of mine used to play with a little post-it covering the chat. It allowed him to enjoy the game.
Reliable enforcement beats harsh punishment, when changing people's behavior. I tell forum mods to hand out three-day bans like candy. It's long enough to sting and short enough to shut up and take it.
And seriously - you are game designers. Modifying people's behavior through expectations is your job. Your power is so immense that charging money inside the game should probably be illegal. Find better tools than a permanent boot in the ass.
So!!! Much!!! This!!! The blatant racism and transphobia that is endlessly spewed in all multiplayer games is simply disgusting. The racist and transphobic players need to be held accountable. Permaban them, hardware ban them, report them for hate crime. Simple as that.
I'm so happy my brain does not allow me to process the chat while I'm playing games. I really have to stop and type something.
And there I have the rule that if I don't have anything nice to say I say nothing.
Helldivers 2 allows me to help out fellow newer Helldivers using voice..
But the times I have seen examples of the vile stuff people put in chat, I just get sad.. very sad... Mostly for the people that think that stuff is anything you can say to someone else.
Though there is enough to be said about racism and homophobia, I think we should also be really careful with not overshooting in the other direction. I used to love shit talking with a small group of friends. No, I'm not a racist, I'm a minority, but we have a different kind of humor, which is not politically correct and we use it to kind of vent about real issues. I do know that we'd be banned in a heartbeat (we have been before) and for what? We never bother anyone, we never stalk or hareass anyone and typically were in our own little group.
I do think people should grow a thicker skin as yes yes a thousand times yes, racism is bad, homo/trans/bi/whatever phobia is bad, it's all bad, but these days you need to watch every word you say lest you want to get banned. Calm down, don't ban people over jokes that in your eyes are tasteless.
There is a wide gap between some shit talking and the vile hatred you see people spewing online.
Telling people to harden up when smack talking their mother or their gameplay might fly.. but idlt does not apply when people tell you to kill yourself in Ernest, Harras you outside a game.
With gaming becoming more mainstream, the tight knit communities playing on curated servers and policed by community admins have been replaced by platforms hosted by big tech and infested by the assholes that used to be too cool for gaming and the basement dwellers that used to be isolated and are now emboldened by their fellow basement dwellers, rednecks, and other generally unlovable people.
For sure, if they follow you outside the game that is a big hard red line there, but then again, I always keep things like that very separate.
Never had anyone telling me to kill myself, but in other instances where they'd get annoying I'd simply mute them and continue playing. That is what I Mena with thicker skin.
There will always be racists and bigots, I don't think you can stop it completely while the harder you try to control it, the more restrictive you become and the more you suck the fun out of it.
"No one needs to grow thicker skin... we're building a world when everyone can be big blubbering pussies, forever."
"Hardware bans"
lmao, this fucking company.
I miss the good old days where you could shit talk people and not have to worry about being banned. Just mute the other players. How hard is that.
Completely agree. People seem to have thinner and thinner skin these days. Everything is an insult, racism, attack, etc... The internet is not a friendly place, never has been and never will be. If you can't handle it then maybe you should just not use it or learn not to care so much about what random internet strangers say to you.
Parents, teach your kids to not feed the trolls.
see I don't understand this "take your lumps" mentality. "Don't use the internet if you can't handle it."
there's a difference between:
"lol you're ass, bitch. you're garbage"
and
"I'm going to rape you and I'm going to love it. cry for me. open your mouth for me, whore."
if you have difficulty understanding the distinction between "trash talk" and straight up harassment and abuse, then I think you're the one who might need to reevaluate your presence on the internet.
the behavior can be fixed and stigmatized, but voices like yours make that extremely difficult.
