Gaming tribunals and online community management
November 12, 2015 11:24 AM   Subscribe

In an attempt to curb in-game harassment, online gaming communities have tried to develop a variety of workable solutions. One of the most prominent of these communities has been League of Legends (previously, previously), an extremely popular game that uses a virtual judiciary of gamers' peers, among other tactics, to identify problem players and mete out consequences. Two years ago, the tribunal drew public attention when it chose to expel a professional player from the game for a year (potentially ending his gaming career) for harassing other players. But is it working? Preliminary data indicates that the system is helping.
posted by sciatrix (46 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's worth noting that the LoL community is renowned even amongst other gaming communities for being incredibly toxic. Kudos to Riot for what has seemed like a neverending series of attempts to fix the issue.

I'm afraid the abuse has already defeated me; when I play any online game, the first thing I do is go in and mute all chat; text, voice, team-only, everything. It's just not worth it anymore.
posted by selfnoise at 11:30 AM on November 12, 2015 [12 favorites]


I'm not a gamer (I have a Wii, and use it almost entirely to play the early-'80s arcade classics of my youth), but a few years ago I visited a friend who played what I think was Counterstrike on his Xbox, and the constant stream of insults, abuse and vitriol was truly awful. I don't know how *anyone* puts up with it.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:47 AM on November 12, 2015


These days, mainly muting anyone who you don't trust, or using private voice comm servers.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:51 AM on November 12, 2015


I played both LOL and DotA heavI'll when my kids were born. LOL when my son was, DotA when my daughter was. The difference between the communities was pretty staggering. While both communities were ultra uptight about people making any mistakes, LOL added a far more toxic level of abuse. And it was expected that you just took it for the first 20-30 levels (about how long it took to fill out your gems/spec ). DotA provided a lot more of an ability to practice against bots, which would still not ensure competency with a character, gave you time to learn at least how to use specials.

But, I'm glad someone that sounds like an asshat was finally penalized for their behavior. More importantly, I'm glad that the punishment, while severe, was enough to make the offender realize that they were out of line and apologize to the community.
posted by Nanukthedog at 11:54 AM on November 12, 2015


I play DoTA casually (it's similar to LoL, and there is a lot of competition between the two). My friends who play much more seriously than I do have a paid-for teamspeak channel that they use, and don't speak to people outside of that unless forced.
posted by Braeburn at 11:56 AM on November 12, 2015


Every so often I resent that splatoon doesn't provide any way to communicate with your team, but then I take a step back and realize that it's honestly probably for the best.
posted by Itaxpica at 12:04 PM on November 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


That's almost certainly why they did it that way. It feels like disallowing voice / chat or at least arbitrary chat is starting to be a thing.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:06 PM on November 12, 2015


I see Splatoon omitting voice chat as a feature, not a bug.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:09 PM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yeah, Blizzard's MOBA Heroes of the Storm deliberately doesn't support voice chat and I assume it's for the exact same reason: avoiding toxicity. Sure you can still abuse over text chat but it's that much harder (and makes it harder to actually play at the same time).
posted by Wretch729 at 12:09 PM on November 12, 2015


Splatoon, which I play a lot of ranked only let's you communicate with two buttons that ping "com'on" and "booyah" while it can be really frustrating to be basically unable to communicate with your team, I kinda like the limitations exactly for this reason.
posted by KernalM at 12:12 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I pretty much stopped playing multiplayer heavily around the time VOIP became a necessity. Text chat was bad enough.
posted by Artw at 12:13 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


LoL has definitely become a lot less toxic over the past two years. You get the occasional flamer or rager but you know what, you flag them and move on. They eventually get banned. I haven't had seen anyone call myself or anyone else in my game a cunt, tell someone to kill themselves but I had someone tell another player to get cancer the game I literally just got out of but that's the first time in a while and they got a report.

The best indicator is that most of my complaints about people these days is that occasionally they're massive Debbies and "gg ff20" at the first mistake by our team. If your biggest complaint is that people are depressing it's a dramatic improvement.
posted by Talez at 12:13 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


The punishment isn't particularly severe, in the context of gaming. Wizards of the Coast (Magic the Gathering) sometimes banishes people, paying customers, for life from their games. They're not trying to start an e-sports league, but year-long bans happen in MtG tournaments frequently.
posted by bonehead at 12:22 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Well you immediately get two weeks off for using racial or sexual epithets now. Like if you use n-r in a game and someone reports you for it you'll get handed a two week ban only ten minutes later.
posted by Talez at 12:25 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


when I play any online game, the first thing I do is go in and mute all chat; text, voice, team-only, everything. It's just not worth it anymore.

yeah. LoL is better than it used to be, but it IS still as bad as (for instance) Call of Duty or other popular games where 13 year olds are shitty. It's just not far far worse than those anymore.

Dota 2 is still the worst online chat experience you can have, though. Holy cats, they're just... I stopped playing for a year just because I couldn't deal with it any more.

This happened the other day (note this was entirely in voice chat, not text):

Teammate: AND WINTER WYVERN JUST COST US THE GAME RIGHT THERE.
Me: Wait, what? Why?
T: You used your ult before Shadow Fiend's ult.
Me: What's the problem?
T: Ok, I guess I can understand if you don't know your hero's powers that well, but if you go and look at what your ult actually does (note, this is all extremely snottily said), you'll see where it says it gives the enemy caught in it 70% damage resistance.
Me: ... ok yeah.
T: So we couldn't kill their team, and now we're all dead.
Me: ...
T: Do you remember when I told you not to ult until after Shadow Fiend ulted?
Me: ... yeah.
T: That's why and now we're all fucking dead.
Me: ... well shit. lesson learned I guess.

At the end of that discussion, I thought: man, that guy was actually pretty civil.
posted by shmegegge at 12:47 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's fascinating to read this alongside the bat flip article.
posted by Sauce Trough at 12:48 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, Blizzard's MOBA Heroes of the Storm deliberately doesn't support voice chat

With their trading card game Hearthstone they don't even allow text chat, just emotes. Also presumably for the same reason. If you really want to talk to someone you have to friend them and then talk on BNET chat. (Which is integrated in all of their games)

The harassers have literally ruined it for all of us.
posted by mayonnaises at 12:48 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bonehead, if you get repeatedly banned in LoL, there's a system in place for escalating up to a permanent ban of the account. There have been a handful of high-profile players banned for life, although it could be debated whether Riot has a bias against doing that (c.f. steroid testing dilemma).
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:49 PM on November 12, 2015


This is one of the reasons that I don't intent to pick up Star Wars: Battlefront for a good while.

I really liked Battlefield 3 (BF3) as a slightly slower paced version of CoD and I eventually became an admin on one of the servers that I played on most often. Once that happened, I played on those servers exclusively since it was pretty easy for me to boot anyone that got abusive. When BF4 came out, we rented a couple of servers and all everything was fine. I work from home so I would often have the admin tool up in the corner of a screen so I could keep an eye on the activity in chat and players generally got used to the idea that an admin could be watching at any time and people could get booted for being abusive at any time. So, while the server wasn't totally free of abuse and greifing, we were pretty well on top of it. Every once in a while I would boot someone and I'd see a comment like, "That is why I play here, these admins don't let people get away with stuff like that." I eventually got bored with the game and moved on but I stayed on as an admin because there aren't a lot of places in the world that I can wield absolute power and use it to smack down bigots (or indeed many places where such is necessary), but this was one of them.

So I was really excited for Battlefront. Star Wars is an integral part of my childhood and I already like the Battlefield series so it's win-win. But, they're not going to support private servers which means no player-admins. So, I'd have to count on whatever bureaucracy Dice sets up to deal with the abuse that will inevitably happen. I do not have faith in Dice's ability to do that to my standards.

The game I moved on too was Mechwarrior Online (MWO). It's an older IP that was never as popular as Star Wars so the player base skews older and I think that helps a lot. A few months ago they added in-game VOIP and a lot of players were really excited because being able to co-ordinate the twelve players on your team is a HUGE advantage. But it kind of rarely gets used. You can almost hear the tension from people who want to say something to contribute but are worried that some a-hole is going to jump all over them so most games in the public queue are still silent. In the group queue (where you form a 2-12 person group and teams are then composed of one or more groups to fill out the 12-person teams) most people only talk to their group via external VOIP (usually teamspeak) and not any of the other groups on your team.

I really feel for the female gamer out there. I joined a small unit in MWO and we were a pretty relaxed, mature group. We worked really hard to recruit a player that we thought would be a good addition to the unit. We found out that it was a 16-year-old girl. It took us a while, but we eventually convinced her to use our teamspeak server. After a month of convincing and reassuring, she tried it out but refused to use her mic. So we could talk to her and she would respond via text. After a few months of that, she finally felt comfortable enough to actually talk to us. I still had to take one of our members aside and tell him, "Look, I know that you're just trying to be extra inclusive but everyone is going to be more comfortable if don't treat any differently that you would any other person."

And, other than being a little careful about our language (because she is 16 and asked us to), we treat her just like anyone else and it works out fine.

And that is, I think, the really frustrating part about it all. If everyone was more courteous and respectful, people would be a lot more likely to use to the in-game VOIP options more effectively and female gamers wouldn't feel like they need to stay in the shadows. There would be more competitive play which is more fun, you'd meet more people and it would be easier to make friends, and it would be easier to meet women (or men, for that matter).

posted by VTX at 12:56 PM on November 12, 2015 [7 favorites]


This sort of thing is why I stick to playing classic strategy and simulation games. Nobody yells insults at me when I play RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.
posted by SansPoint at 1:01 PM on November 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


My son is up to Level 35 on Splatoon and it's fascinating to watch him silently coordinate with 3 other players in a tower or rainmaker battle.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:02 PM on November 12, 2015


This is why I only do multiplayer with lady gamers that I already know from other places online or IRL. On the off chance we need a rando to make up a team we just lock down group chat. Yeah, it's occasionally annoying trying to figure out how to schedule stuff when we're spread across 5 timezones but the alternative is literally hell on earth.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:11 PM on November 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


Welcome to team sports. Building "character" -- one hazing at a time.
posted by smidgen at 1:11 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Hearing that Splatoon didn't have voice chat was one of my favourite bit of news. All it takes is one person to ruin an experience for a whole ton of people just trying to have a good time and voice chat is so easily abused. And people LOVE doing it. There's no voice chat in Battlefront either, thankfully. Honestly, it's sort of interesting how necessary voice chat seems to be for people, every time there's an announcement you can expect hundreds of comments lamenting the omission of it.

Obviously some games, those that really rely on teamwork, need that communication but for something like Battlefront, Splatoon, I don't see it enhancing the experience. I'm also a huge fan of how other games allow you to communicate. Using only gestures or emojis is fantastic but my favourite are the Souls games with the generated messages. Only now it seems that people are just making poems with them, but that's cool too.
posted by Neronomius at 1:23 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Nobody yells insults at me when I play RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.

And when guests begin fuming and saying that they hate your theme park, you can always pick them up and drop them in a lake.
posted by lunch at 1:32 PM on November 12, 2015 [8 favorites]


Voice chat doesn't make you more effective in every game but when you're doing it with the right people, it does make games more fun. I mean, we're talking about multiplayer games, they're supposed to be played with other people in addition to against them.

There is an MWO player who calls himself "Sean Lang" and is famous in the community. He is famous both because he is pretty good at the game and because he covers the game for a website and has a lot of access to the devs. He interviews the company president for town hall meetings, often gets early access to new content that he can show off to the players. He also steams every match so you know that if you make an ass of yourself, a larger than normal number of people are going to see it.

When Sean Lang is on your team, you can count on it being a clean match (no verbal abuse, greifing, etc.). And, since he is used to broadcasting already, he never hesitates to use voice chat. Those two things make those matches feel nearly as fun as running around with people I already know but it's still just twelve random people that the system put together.

If something like the LoL system ends up being effective enough that verbal abuse is rare, dealt with swiftly and harshly, I think just about every match would feel like a "Sean Lang match" and something that makes every match in your game more fun must be better for business.
posted by VTX at 1:47 PM on November 12, 2015


I pretty much stopped playing multiplayer heavily around the time VOIP became a necessity. Text chat was bad enough.

It was really frustrating how I'd be getting along fine in a guild on WoW until they pushed me into the group voice chat, at which point they found out I was a girl, at which point I started getting gross solicitations and sexist remarks all the time.

Lost 3 good guilds that way before giving up. I don't play WoW anymore but for other stuff 'sorry I don't have a mic' gets less believable every day.
posted by nogoodverybad at 1:48 PM on November 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


With their trading card game Hearthstone they don't even allow text chat, just emotes.

Assholes always find a way, though. "I'm sorry" and "thank you," with sufficient implied sarcasm, can be just as infuriating as calling somebody a %&$# or suggesting you had intimate relations with their mother!
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:18 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I tried LoL three years ago and quit after just a few games because of the unrelentingly toxic environment. For people who haven't tried it the stories always sound like exaggerations or hyperbole, but they aren't. In literally literally, not figuratively literally, every single game I played at least one, and often multiple, players would have tantrums at anyone who made the slightest mistake. They'd yell through the mic if they were on voice chat, or type insults, and they'd abuse the map system to spam pings on the player they were mad at.

Every. Single. Game.

I quit.

I tried DotA, and while it is often bad I found that it wasn't as consistently, relentlessly, aggressively, toxic as LoL was. But still, after playing fairly intensively for six months or so I quit DotA too because, basically, too many of the people playing it were total assholes. Since surrendering isn't an option in DotA there were a number of people who would either disconnect if anything didn't go perfectly or simply leave their character back at the start and do nothing the whole game in a sulk.

Plus, of course, constant demands from the assholes that we report anyone who screwed up even a little. Typically they'd find a target, harass them the entire game, and a few minutes before the end start spamming /all with requests for others to report their victim. And, on a few occasions, I saw someone from the other team, possibly a fellow bully, agree to do so.

What interests me is how some games don't particularly have a toxic environment despite having a well developed and integrated voice chat.

Take, for example, Team Fortress 2. It's a team multiplayer game, and while there's the occasional asshole they're quite uncommon and mostly people are civil.

Or, better example, Planetside 2. It has the best integrated voice chat I've ever encountered. You not only have squad and platoon level voice chat, you also have "local" voice chat so you can talk to anyone within a few meters of your character's position. Useful if you're in a tank with someone and they don't notice the enemy behind them.

All of that seems like it'd produce a perfect environment for a horribly toxic environment.

And yet I almost never encounter anyone being a jerk on Planetside 2. Hell, sometimes people use the /shout command to genuinely congratulate the other team after they win a hard fight and defeat our team.

I suspect the fact that neither TF2 nor PS2 are ranked in the way LoL or DotA are might be related, and likewise the fact that turnarounds are easier in TF2 and PS2 so that a single screw up isn't as important.

Possibly with TF2 there's a generational issue, it is an older game. But PS2 is new and still manages to avoid having its voice chat dominated by the scum of the universe.
posted by sotonohito at 2:48 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


This happened the other day (note this was entirely in voice chat, not text):
Teammate: AND WINTER WYVERN JUST COST US THE GAME RIGHT THERE.
posted by shmegegge


I fundamentally disagree with statements like that from trolls online - from my perspective of having played several MOBAs at a fairly high level of proficiency - top 0.2% worldwide for HOTS and top 2% in DOTA2, and I've played with most of the Blizzcon regional finalists in regular matchmaking....

The matchmaking system tries to find fair matches for both teams. It will rate you at the level of proficiency you can play at - the combined total of your level of knowledge, your mechanical skill, your reflexes. If I'm matched with a low rated player, I expect them to play like a low rated player - the match was constructed fairly with that as a base assumption. There's probably a weak player as well on the enemy team, or someone unusually strong on your team to compensate.

If the teams are imbalanced in terms of skill, that's fine too, because the rating gain / loss also reflects that. If your team is weaker than the enemy, and the system rates you as having only a 20% chance to win, if you lose as predicted you will lose very few rating points, if you win, you win a lot.

Blaming bad players for playing badly seems a terrible tautology.

Despite being rated in the top 0.2% worldwide I get called a bad player on a fairly regular basis =P My usual response to that is to tell them "if you were actually better than me, you wouldn't be getting matched into my game in the first place".
posted by xdvesper at 2:52 PM on November 12, 2015 [5 favorites]


I play a lot of LoL. The community is still bad, but it is better. Riot and particularly Jeffrey Lin (aka RiotLyte) have been doing remarkably good management work. Some of the best data and science driven social engineering work I've seen anywhere. They're fairly chatty about what they're doing too, and collaborating with some academic groups. Lots of good research being done.

One of my favorite results to come out of their work is that only 1% of players are toxic, and are only responsible for 5% of toxic behavior in LoL games. Fully 77% of toxic behavior comes from players who are normally good but are having a bad day. They have further data that shows toxicity is contagious; one rude player can set off other rude players who are rude in later games, spreading through the community. Once they understood that it's given them some new tools to better manage the community, in particular instant chat bans from an automated system if necessary.

On voice chat, RiotLyte has said a few things about that: see my links in this Ask Metafilter discussion. Long story short they're going carefully explicitly because voice chat tends to create bad environments in many ways, among other things against women.
posted by Nelson at 4:28 PM on November 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Oh, it is absolutely not about the facts about who did, or did not lose the game for the team. It's not at all about facts, it's about externalizing the blame for the loss to protect their own ego.

A lot of people play these games as a way to fulfill their own subconscious power fantasy. When their team wins, it's because they are better and more skilled. The win merely demonstrates that they are, in fact, a better person than everyone else. If they lose, it must be someone else's fault since they are a more skilled player/better person and the more skilled person always wins, it has to be someone or something else's fault.

The same thing is usually going on when someone cites "lag" as the reason they died in an FPS and why insults often follow someone getting killed. "Only n00bs use !", "Hacker!", and the more vitriolic stuff.

For people who haven't tried it the stories always sound like exaggerations or hyperbole, but they aren't.

I can personally attest to this. I have banned multiple players for forcing discussions where they claim that the holocaust never happened. We had an auto-kick script built into out BF3 and BF4 servers that would warn a player on first offense, ban on the second if they used common racist words and every variation that we could think of that people might use to try and circumvent the filter. I championed an effort to add a similar feature for anti-gay hate speech but was shot down with the reasoning that it would ban too large a portion of our player-base, the servers would empty and die since out group no longer had enough members to fill up the servers on our own.

I'd regularly get called on by the players to come deal with a player who did nothing but stay in their own base blowing up their team's vehicles and anyone that got in them. Or, once they realized that we had automated system that would kick and/or ban them for killing too many of their own teammates, they would shoot each of their teammates to wound them but not kill them, putting them at a disadvantage facing a real enemy. Or they'd jump in front of their own teammates as they were driving a vehicle to get run over and killed. The automated system then gives them the option to "punish" the player that team-killed you by killing them.

Most of the players that I warned for using hate-speech would either claim some sort of stupid nonesense like "gay means happy" or "f----t is just a bundle of sticks!", claim that I was infringing on their 1st amendment rights, or double-down on their flavor of hate (usually anti-gay, antisemitic, anti-black, or more rarely anti-hispanic) knowing full well that I was in the process of banning them as soon as they did.

I just stopped engaging with them and would just warn them politely but firmly to knock it off and give them a chance to stop being an a-hole, almost no one took that chance. I still don't really understand it.

posted by VTX at 4:37 PM on November 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Dota 2 is still the worst online chat experience you can have, though. [...] At the end of that discussion, I thought: man, that guy was actually pretty civil.

That wasn't one of the bad experience, was it? I always appreciate it when someone factually corrects a mistake I made if I wasn't aware of it. It's only annoying if they're actually wrong or I was already aware.
posted by The arrows are too fast at 4:55 PM on November 12, 2015


For those who aren't aware that it is a thing, one of the reasons MefightClub exists (as a sort-of satellite community of Metafilter, though it has over the years become more of its own thing) is to have a pool of people to play games with that are reasonable human beings, so you can chat away in-game (or sing happy birthday to someone and crash the server from all the voice traffic, which has happened) without having to deal with the horrors, or at least having a crew with you on public servers to buffer the worst of it, a bit.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:07 PM on November 12, 2015 [9 favorites]


Assholes always find a way, though. "I'm sorry" and "thank you," with sufficient implied sarcasm, can be just as infuriating as calling somebody a %&$# or suggesting you had intimate relations with their mother!

"Well played" from someone as they lands the killer blow on you without you having caused them any damage whatsoever.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:11 PM on November 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


"Well played" from someone as they lands the killer blow on you without you having caused them any damage whatsoever.

People can be obnoxious in Hearthstone, but it's not that common, and there's a very low upper limit to how vicious people can get.
posted by aubilenon at 5:37 PM on November 12, 2015


"Well played" from someone as they lands the killer blow on you without you having caused them any damage whatsoever."

People do that in Bloodborne; after they totally wreck you in PVP , before you land a blow, they break out the 'applause' gesture. or, even worse; They throw coins.

I mean, really, it is just a bit troll-y, to pull your chain. And it could be a lot worse. But it does burn sometimes :)
posted by das_2099 at 7:48 PM on November 12, 2015


I have to say, I love the new method Dota 2 uses for punishing people who get too many reports.

You go into Low Priority and get matched up with all the other trolls and you have to win 3 games.

Not play. Win.

That means the worst of the worst have to find a way to act like humans beings long enough to come together and make something happen. If they get more reports, they get more games they must win. Abandon? More games added.

It's like Satan crowd-sourced hell.
posted by Reyturner at 9:59 PM on November 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Honestly, I don't feel LoL's tribunal/reporting system makes a difference - at least not on my server. Players openly taunt and mock you when you say you will report them for offensive/racist/sexist language, because they know they've been reported many times and nothing has ever happened to them. Just the other day I was in game with a player named "Adolf Jew Slayer", and that player was one of many with outright offensive/suggestive names. You meet players with these names in almost every game. On top of this, many players engage in all sorts of insults and harassment - profanity directed at other players is used liberally, and crosses all kinds of lines (the "n" word is thrown around with ease, as are homophobic slurs and all sorts of derogatory references to female anatomy).

At this point, I'm not sure the reporting system actually functions for anything more than to make the victims/people reporting feel slightly better in the moment (as if clicking on the "report" button and typing a report, and believing it might help would actually help). I can see why most people just block other players instead of reporting nowadays - because at least blocking guarantees you won't see their chat, whereas reporting just seems vanish into the ether with no result. Lots of talk about how they have a tribunal system, and a fancy reporting interface with checkboxes for different types of offenses, but no real outcome or consequences for the majority of players that aren't a high-profile player.
posted by aielen at 4:31 AM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


My roommate is one of the nicest people I've ever met - it's why I chose to room with him. He goes out of his way to encourage people (to wit, me) when they're down, has a huge entourage of friends for whom he is an endless source of positivity, and is generally a wonderfully cheerful counterpart to my usually dry personality.

He plays LoL with friends from back home two nights a week, and when he does, no matter how loud I blast music in my headphones on the other side of the apartment, I can hear the insults flying fast and furious from his mouth, particularly since he and his friends only make up four of a five-man team and so they have to find a random player to fill their fifth slot. In his defense, this is all on a private TeamSpeak channel between himself and his friends - the stranger who rounds out the team hears none of this.

We've had vicious Halo multiplayer parties - none of that. We spent the better part of a weekend running a Street Fighter II tournament out of our living room - he was gracious regardless of winning or losing. It's something very MOBA-specific, and that's strange to me.

He bought me a character starter set a while back and invited me to be their fifth, but I've been terrified to play anything but bot matches. He says the specific style of insult is just "part of the culture," but I think that's as bankrupt an excuse as Aris Bakhtanians' "if you remove [sexual harrassment] from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community" line from a couple of years ago.

It's a shame, because I'm weirdly interested in the concept of MOBAs, and LoL looks like the dominant force. (I love some of the lore and character concepts, too: how cool is Kindred?) The playerbase, though, still feels like a very strong argument against playing. I hope the tribunal system makes (or continues to make) positive changes in that community.
posted by Kortney at 6:50 AM on November 13, 2015


The article linked in the lifeandlaw link (on expelling Christian Rivera) was a pretty amazing read too.
posted by appleses at 7:21 AM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


It is just part of the culture. Because that culture has driven away a lot of the people that dislike it.

I do think LoL has improved in the recent times that I've played it, after I stopped playing 3 years ago. At least people now criticize your game mechanics instead of delving into personal insults. Still, the constant bickering is exhausting.
posted by halifix at 7:43 AM on November 13, 2015


From appleses link:

And then there were what I’ll call the technolibertarians. For them, MUD rapists were of course assholes, but the presence of assholes on the system was a technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best dealt with not through repressive social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely deployment of defensive software tools. Some asshole blasting violent, graphic language at you? Don’t whine to the authorities about it — hit the @gag command and said asshole’s statements will be blocked from your screen (and only yours). It’s simple, it’s effective, and it censors no one.

Ugh. This reminds me of some recent discussion around muting and reporting. Often, the response to people complaining about player behavior is that you just need to mute the assholes. That's often the opinion of people who have not had to deal with repeated, unavoidable harassment in other channels. Yes, muting works personally, but only after the fact. It needs to be used together with punishments. Community management is a factor that a lot of game players ignore, due to the ease of access, and traditional online gaming culture. It's so easy for people to go "What's the big deal? It's always been like this."

I think part of what colors my reaction to PvP games is that I mostly play golfing games... where people are often older, more gender diverse, and fairly chill. Looking back, although the ogling of costumes in a specific game was sort of creepy, it was a lot better about personal insults back in 2007 than LoL is now.
posted by halifix at 7:56 AM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


But that isn't to say that you shouldn't mute them. Sometimes it's the only tool you have. I think the censorship angle is just silly. You have the right to free-speech, not consequence free speech, but the mechanisms for dealing with those a-holes can take some time. I generally follow these guidelines:

1. Don't engage, don't try to engage them. They're troll, an obstacle to be overcome and forgotten about, not a member of civilization.

2. Solve the problem for yourself first and for the community second.

So it's basically a version of "flag it and move on". I don't even tell them I'm going to report them or that I'll report them if they don't stop. I just mute them, report them, and forget about them.

Whether or not something happens to them is out of my hands so once I've reported them, that is everything that I can do so I'm not going to waste effort thinking about that person again. If there is an opportunity to make my voice heard that might drive change to a better system to deal with trolls, I'll certainly take it, but otherwise I just try to minimize the problem as much as I'm able. The main thing a trolls wants is to know that they've gotten under your skin and I just refuse to engage with them.

Being able to do that does depend somewhat on the game. MWO now makes it really easy to report people (hold tab, right-click on the player name and select report) and it's just as easy to mute them. So with a key-press and about five clicks, I'm done with them and there just aren't that many incidents. If the community were worse and/or the reporting system were less convenient, I don't know if I'd be able to keep that up. With some gaming communities, your only option might be to stop playing the game. With a free-to-play or subscription based game, that's okay because at least you can vote with your wallet. When it comes to game like CoD where you buy the software and then you play, they've already got your money so the incentive for the developers to police the community is a lot less direct (you might be less likely to buy expansions or sequels).
posted by VTX at 8:44 AM on November 13, 2015


And this is why I think all games should have single player. The only games I've played online lately are Duels of the Planeswalkers (Magic 2015, Magic Origins) and Hearthstone. Hearthstone only allows emotes, so the worst I've gotten is a sarcastic "Good Move" which I can tolerate, and most players race to give a good game after the last blow. Origins doesn't even have that much. 2015 has full chat, but I never had a problem with people not being polite, even though I'm REALLY bad at Magic. Met some friendly people with deck advice, which I was NOT expecting.
posted by Canageek at 10:29 AM on November 13, 2015


I just signed up for MefightClub! Sweet! I indeed had no idea it was a Thing. :)
posted by culfinglin at 11:10 AM on November 13, 2015


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