While I heard that the "toxicity" issue in Overwatch was reportedly apolitical at least initially and tends to revolve around things such as character selection, I was wondering if any regressive style moderation practices they implemented allegedly in response to this made things worse?
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Did the movement against "toxicity" help any game so far? I remember they were screeching about it in lol and wow, did they fix it?
I seriously doubt it.
I figured that they did not really do anything to actually fight dickish behavior and simply used it as an excuse to promote regressive leftist corruption in the community, which could have easily made things worse.
They weren't intended to "help." They were intended to shove Marxism down people's throats. They did exactly what they were intended to do.
You cannot "fix" toxicity in a competitive environment.
They gave into the screaming and actually toxic fans by enforcing meta picks as an actual requirement instead of just letting the community govern itself. Even going as far as to famously ban a guy for picking Torb on attack because it was against the meta, despite it being his best character and him doing quite well with it.
That transcends moderation, and goes right into injecting it into the community directly.
I heard about this, and that the mod abuse was alleged to have been motivated by political reasons.
I mean, its Blizzard so there is no doubt about it.
But proving mod abuse like that is always shaky at best, and when you have no need to do so because there is overt retarded actions they outright showed you its not needed to waste time thinking on it.
Its Blizzard, always assume the mods are limp wristed Leftists. In my experience in WoW at least half were women, and in 2021 its probably 100% women with 3/4th of that being "women." Which means there is zero expectation you should have of fairness or objectivity.
First of all, when you target your game to attract a bunch of mentally ill people, then you're going to get them and all the problems that come along with them.
Secondly, when you attempt to alleviate "toxicity" by bearing down on the community and micromanaging the inherent competitive nature of a game, you're simply going to get MORE of it, because either someone is going to go unpunished who someone else feels should have been punished, or others will be punished unduly for causing some kind of "microaggression" for the aforementioned mentally ill group.
What ends up happening is you compound the problems and create more problems, because the more you try to micro-manage, the more some aggrieved party feels that their aggressors aren't being micro-managed enough, or the people being micro-managed feel like they're being moderated too much. You simply cannot win.
It's why older games let you mute/block people you didn't want to play with and call it a day. Or you could add servers to a blocklist if they were ran by an admin you didn't like. Or if you were an admin you could add players to a ban list if they were hackers/cheaters/trolls/etc.
Simple tools work best. As for restricting players from picking duplicate characters... well, does that solve any problems? No. Some games let the host pick the restrictions, so if someone hosting doesn't want dupes they could turn the restriction on. That solves all those problems. Games like Smash Bros., is more of an anything goes, and so you get what you get.
However, aggressive moderation works about as well in video games as it does in real life. Do Communistic/Authoritarian tactics really increase societal happiness, comfort, and satisfaction? Well, what did we learn from all those aggressive lockdowns in 2020? Same thing.
When I played overwatch, I didnt see any toxcicity from the players, but I also never used voice chat. The only toxicity I noticed was the chemicals they were putting in the water to turn the fricken soldier 76s gay.
voice chat was 90% toxic, text was maybe 10%
It’s not really even blizzard anymore. Anyone involved in any leadership or major design role has left the company.
Its hilarious. They implemented role queue so you had 2 dps, 2 healers and 2 tanks on each side. So its 6v6. In overwatch 2, its gonna be 5v5. They going to remove 1 tank role.
They doing it because not many tank players, everyone wants to be dps. So they failed to make tanks more indicing to play, they just got rid of one lol.
When in reality making them do a crap ton more damage would have been a better solution. Players get kills so they play tanks. Tanks are major threats so players focus tanks first. Problem solved.
It's full of the worst kind of Tumblr trash who make lesbian fanfic of the characters.
I hope it never dies, it's a great containment facility.
I saw a great post the other day about why forced match making is awful for all involved. Even beyond killing off a sense of community built through repeated use of a singular server, the stoners are forced to play vs try hards, the trolls are kicked out by the normies, the competitive players are flooded by shitters, and no o e is happy.
I’m not sure if any regressive moves to combat toxicity but one thing they did ad was a community rating with positive feedback like “shot caller” “good teammate” and “sportsmanship” and tie that to a ranking system and the higher up it is they give you bonus loot boxes. So that kind of encourages players not to be a jerk.
Does it really though?
At what point are loot boxes still of interest?
Depends on the person. someone new to the game would probably welcome every free box. Experienced players probably just expect duplicates, stickers or player icons