No one should have to “grow a thicker skin”: Valorant studio commit to harsh penalties for harassment
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
Now if only they didn't use kernel level anticheat and got it working on Linux, cause I ain't going back to Windows for one game
It seems like a toxic community surrounds Riot's games worse than they do other games.
Yeah the common factor in all their games having fucked up communities is them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I've been playing games online for 20 years and never before have I seen this level of passive-aggressive douchebaggery. Rules limiting what you can say must have some influence on this trend. I just mute my mic and chat in pug matches now.
Riot Games is incredibly good at generating asshole players and incredibly bad at doing anything about them. I've never had players on my own team intentionally try to throw the game as hard as i had in Riot's games. It's not only the low level players, either.
It would be even better if they commited to not installing rootkits on your PC.
The sheer fact that this shit is still going on is exactly why I won't get into ANYTHING that Riot puts out. Their playerbase is fucking Vile, even in comparison to fuckin Valve's playerbase; and they've been talking about FOR YEARS trying to detoxify their playerbase. It never works. It categorically never fucking takes; the people Riot bans will come back on a new smurf, and then just start only stacking up in discord calls so they can still be as shitty and vile as they always were, just now it's under a log that Riot can't police.
It's not worth how bad the problem has gotten. They could've nipped this shit in the bud all the way back during Season 2 of League ranked; and they didn't, and Riot player toxicity has been metastasizing into this ever since.
but can they commit to not putting rootkits on your pc?
Geezus fucking hell, why did I watch the clip?
That's disgusting. I would argue two things need to happen across the board:
- Companies need to collect IRL data if you want to have access to text/voice chat, verify them, and in situations such as these, hand them to the authorities. Yeah it's a tricky data protection problem, but these would be legally actionable threats IRL, they should not be let off the hook just because it was done online.
- More importantly, companies themselves should be on the hook for failing to act. That is, if you want to provice text or voice chat or something, but also do not want to invest enough money to moderate these spaces, then you should be legally liable under the same logic as why the cases should be given to the police in the first place, you're aiding and abetting such threats. I suspect we'll very very quickly either see way stricter moderation (good) or the end of text/voice chat in many games (not ideal, but if they cannot be moderated, then so be it).
Yeahhhhh, I don't want a company which itself previously settled for a hundred million dollars in a gender discrimination suit to have every persons intimate personal data.
Yeah fair enough. Good point. Legal consequences for online activity are always a tricky subject because of privacy issues. Can't trust the very companies I would like to be on the hook for not taking safety serious to in turn take safety of data serious.
(And of course too many people think "it's like the high seas", ignoring that those have more laws than many countries and hence why you need marine lawyers if you do shipping 😅)
I understand your passion, but I cannot trust any entity to use that amount of personal data responsibly.
I totally missed the clip you were shocked by at first (I guess the Twitter embed didn't load the first time). Just went back to watch it and I don't understand how someone can be ok with saying that. Yeah I've heard sexist things and weird sexual harassment comments in games like valorant, overwatch, etc but that was absolutely disgusting. His casual tone says so much about him too. He's not even laughing where you could at least say "that's a stupid shitty joke". He has such a real tone to it that it's truly disturbing.
I agree with all of your points. It's unfortunate but I think we've gotten to the point that people need to be properly held accountable. Don't just ban them from the game, ban them from the entire platform and report them to local authorities for that. Hell, when someone is this nasty someone on the community team should send it to their employer. It's clearly a threat even if he has no way to see it through. This isn't just calling someone trash, or telling a woman to "go back to the kitchen". These people need to learn what real consequences are. It's truly disgusting behavior.