Popular Twitch Streamer Makes An Example Of Her Harassers
91 replies, posted
I think it's interesting that when you introduce divisions, such as men and women, and stratification, such as the influence of money and publicity creating a separate class of gamers (streamers), you get more clamor for policing
there's a sociological insight in here somewhere
I also think people fail to realise that at it's worst the harassment can have a tangible impact on gameplay. I remember playing wow with my girlfriend, and we decided to level up some alliance alts after the allied races were added in patch 7.3.5.
Once we hit top level we started raiding with people we didn't really know at all, because all of our other characters were on the Horde. These people insisted we join their discord anyway for ~raid cohesion~. From the moment they heard she was a girl they started laying into her for the sake of ~banter~, but they were also incredibly quick to berate her for the smallest of mistakes, despite male players fucking up way worse- some even killing other players with their stupidity- but somehow avoiding any kind of comment.
I told them to fuck off and received some long winded rant about how SJWs like me are killing gaming, and that no matter how hard I white-knighted ~the slut will never fuck a guy like me~ (remember this is my girlfriend lmao.).
We had already committed like an hour and a half to the raid and were reluctant to be forced out, so we just muted half the players in the chat, and tried to press on. We got pretty far despite having to deal with shit like people demanding her loot whenever she got any, opening trade windows over and over despite being told to piss off, and deliberately fucking up mechanics in an attempt to kill her (boss casts an AOE on one of them, you are supposed to avoid other players, instead they make themselves temporarily invulnerable and try their hardest to stand on her as the damage procs).
Then we hit our first wipe, and they unanimously agreed to remove her from the group because it was all the dumb bitches' fault, despite the tank being at fault, and her racking up more DPS than most of them anyway, myself included.
You can't even argue that they would have done the same had she been male because they didn't try to kick me at all, despite the fact I was being way more verbally combative with them, and performing worse than her.
It stops being ~just words lmao how is it real just turn off the computer nigga hahaha~ when you sit down to enjoy a hobby you are passionate about, and have people mark you out as a target for constant griefing because you dared to reveal your gender.
I tend to find that the more competitive games are, the shittier the people behave. Just recently had a guy on my Discord start calling be an idiot and retard because he didn't know a CS:GO map. Literally kept asking for direction (which isn't a problem) and kept disregarding it, died, threw a vocal fit throwing vitriol at his team. I'm like "dude, what are you? 12?" All his team did to tick him off was give him directions he asked for and help him nail spots. I don't get that behavior. His tone of voice and level of communication just irked me from the start too. It's like it's a certain type.
Absolutely.
I played competitive CS:GO for a while. It was a real shitshow, unfortunately.
It still seemed less vitriolic than MOBAs, though.
I heard her get told this once or twice a match while she was playing with her competitive team. They deliberately fucked shit up and socially ganged up on her. She always just took the blame. I just cannot fathom these people. It's like people don't know how to deal with women, so they just immediately put them down.
Used to be one of those types of people in that video of hers, and I can't for the life of me understand why or how I was like that.
Can't understand why people are still like that either, it's not hard to not be a shithead.
I agree with you... until it turns into community harassment.
One guy being a dickhead is whatever.
Everyone else agreeing with that dickhead is a much bigger problem.
Some of you forget that from time on time Kotaku pulls out decent articles, like the one who explained what happened to that Star Wars FPS which got cancelled. We should just analyze it per article and consider if is well written or if is just clickbait like other times. Is so simple.
Bystander syndrome is a very real thing, unfortunately.
Also, some people just have absolutely no idea how to communicate in a pleasant or socially acceptable way. That, or they don't care because it's 'just a game' or whatever other doublethink excuse they choose to use.
Unfortunately, your gf was probably able to shrug it off because in a lot of people's experience, it's way, way better than the alternative.
First time i blew up while playing CS on discord was my cousin and his friend being loudmouth dickholes. We're in our 20s and they were talking shit to each other and the rest of the team for every minute mistake. It's just not conductive to a positive/constructive gaming environment and it doesn't do anything to better whatever performance shortcoming that ticked them off. I also knew i wouldn't like my cousin's friend the instant i heard his speaking cadence. I am REALLY starting to subscribe to the idea that there's a certain type of brawny, loud "elephant in a porcelain shop" type of assertiveness to these people. Like people who instantly call you a "fucking retard" when you make mistakes. Just immediately gets loud and bloats up their social presence... I also felt exhausted by the interaction afterwards. These people take up a lot of presence.
she told me several times over a period of a year to just let it go. I just repeatedly saw things where i was like "we should have words!" I had several points where i was ready to confront the issue head on, show them how their behavior made them look, tell them what i think of it. But she was right, it's usually a waste of energy and it's not your job to better other people's slights anyway. I just can't take people who socialize by huffing and puffing. At all. People should be able to communicate as adults... or as adults ideally should communicate.
Perma IP bans for this type of behavior is the only way these assholes will learn IMO.
Yup. You hit the nail on the head.
Personally, I just tune someone out the second that they insult me as a person, in every context. Of course, I'm not talking about critique, but if someone is calling you a dickhead flat-out, they probably aren't going to ever want to talk to you in a reasonable fashion. I seriously don't get why some people get that heated over video games, of all things. Getting mad at your teammates makes you have a shit time, it makes your teammates have a shit time, and it makes you lose, which often will make the people that are being angry pricks get even angrier.
It's pretty sad, but some people just don't actually have the desire to communicate. They don't care about what the truth is or about the 'right' thing to do, they care about what makes them feel good in that moment with a complete and blatant disregard for how they affect those around them.
With just one of these people, change is possible. But the second that they start clumping together and forming toxic communities is where it becomes essentially impossible to change the behavior, and it becomes completely impossible if it's one person being pounded on vs ~3. I mean, you can even see this on FP, with certain debate topics. On particularly spicy issues, you get chunks of people that sit in a circle and pat each other's backs on the topic long after after everyone else has left.
I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. Unsure what sort of raid leader allows idiots to take comms and flame a specific player without getting a kick. Doubly so if it's normal/heroic since there's not a huge loss for a dps to go.
Tbh I've played in platinum and diamond in overwatch. Platinum was nasty as fuck. Diamond though was pleasant as fuck, I really doubt ranks even lower than plat are gonna be any better.
It's ranked play.
It is basically still an attempt to throw the game by tilting your teammates, which usually is p. bannable. He fucking teamkilled her too lmao. Also communication is pretty crucial, especially at their rank. Having to mute eachother is basically placing a massive handicap on yourself, which falls under what I said before (throwing.)
Maybe in normals/unranked you could say "just mute him/quit" but when we're talking ranked people like him deserve to be removed.
kotaku sometimes hires people to write comprehensive stories. there was a great one they did on silicon knights a while ago . Kotaku is isn't perfect but writing them off completely feels like passing the buck and turning off your brain.
Literally copy/paste the text and put it in notepad, read it with no mention or thoughts of Kotaku. I can 100% guarantee you won't be able to tell this was written by Kotaku.
Shit source or not, read the damn article before assuming its some heavy left wing politicized shit.
IP bans are universally awful. I've got a dynamic IP and it's great finding out I got randomly assigned an IP someone else had been banned on previously after needing to restart my modem.
"Gamers are dead and they don't have to be your audience!"
Competitive games in general are usually filled with salty basement nerds who have nothing better to do than rage about video games. I personally just either play only casual or avoid games with excessively toxic communities like MOBAs or CSGO.
Reports in games suffer from the same problem youtube has when it comes to copyright strikes. They don't have enough people to actually sit there and go through every report so it's probably based on some bullshit algorithm that barely works and only catches the absolute worst people.
Just hire a bunch of people who's job it is to sit there and sift through that shit and actually ban people.
And I mean really it's not impossible to try to get both worlds, do most through an algorithm, and mark some cases (especially with players getting reported multiple times in different matches) for manual review. I'm pretty sure this is how dota does it actually, they also limit the amount of times per week you can report people.
the idea that exposing harassers is as bad as harassment serves only to protect harassers. it's dogshit
They also suffer from the user not knowing the impact of their reports, which encourages apathy. When it's unlikely you'll ever get put against that person by the matchmaking system again and you have no clue whether they'll actually get punished or not, it's very easy to go "Why bother?".
I know one game I can't remember right now adopted a system that informed users about the results of their reports, but it's not nearly widespread enough, all games should have that.
I guess low diamond truly is the holy land of nontoxic players that I happened to just land right in the middle of when I first placed, neat.
Both Overwatch and Dota 2 use that system of informing you when action is taken against a report. Not sure about other big MP games.
I've wanted to respond to this thread since page 1, but admittedly I haven't until now because of the same fears this entire thread is about. Harassment. But seeing that most posts here have been sympathetic to the streamers and condemning of the kinds of toxic people in question, I feel a bit more comfortable now.
Sorry about the large amount of text, I tried to shorten it as much as possible but it's such a clusterfuck in the end anyway.
Fulgrim's WoW raid post is pretty much how my entire experience with a general Discord server went that wasn't even really related to one game in particular. But it was over a longer period of time because I actually knew half these people.
What's worse is that it all started with one person who hated me over the tiniest transgressions (he was fine with me initially... Until he heard my voice) and even turned other people I once knew as friends against me either with temporary I-want-to-fit-in bandwagon bullshit, or permanently.
I admit I wasn't perfect, never am, never will be. I tend to talk too much in text or be a bit ranty (see also: this post), but even after I quickly adjusted myself to not do it in that Discord server, it was just one thing after another that he, and then eventually others, would latch onto instead to bitch at me over. Even going as far as to modify entire text channels and change their purpose just to make fun of me, hurtfully. It was well beyond banter.
And then extending into games. Every little fuckup, every little bit of slack, would get called out on in every game where it mattered. But if anyone else fucked up and ruined the entire thing? Oh, laughs! So hilarious! Such jokers. Hahaha.
Any achievement of mine, or any instances where I did better than everyone else playing, was completely and utterly ignored or downplayed as a "fluke", except by some of the people there who weren't irredeemable jerks.
I was not entirely surprised. Eventually, of course, I got fed up and left. In response the person who started all this and all his groupies puffed out their chests bragging about how they kicked me, and how nobody wanted me there. Wrong and wrong. I left of my own accord. And only a tiny handful of like-minded, easily swayed jackasses wanted me gone, the rest only played along so they wouldn't become some sort of target themselves, or never liked the treatment of me in the first place and wanted me to stay because they actually liked me. But even for those people, the bystander effect took hold and they stayed silent even in the face of the rampant verbal abuse, only trying to console me in private over it. But I don't blame them, really.
I wasn't the only female there. The other one got treated fairly badly in her own ways, accused by a few people of being some manipulative witch trying to split the group because she made her own small server for her closer, nicer friends out of that other server, but she also never used her voice in front of them, because she knew the moment she did, she'd become a big target like me.
I'd bet money that if her and I were males instead, this would have never happened the way it did.
This isn't even the first time it's happened to me, either. I ejected myself from two Garry's Mod communities for the same shit, but this instance is what sticks out to me the most because it was the worst.
This all highlights a bigger part of the issue that's not solvable by just muting people or leaving the game. When it invades your social circles and friendships, all soaking itself into the woodwork and pulling everything apart from within. I mean, it didn't help that there were a few people there already that had proven themselves in the past that they were swayed into seriously, permanently hating a person or thing at the drop of a hat even if they previously liked them just at a desperate attempt to be liked and fit in, but still. The emotional damage it can leave behind when severe enough is terrifying.
On a slightly unrelated note, it's also interesting in a way, another Discord server I'm a part of and play pretty much the same games with where I'm the sole female, all the commonly active members treat each other, including me, like a closely knit family and support each other. It's amazing how different groups of people can be.
since when did shittalking in videogames become newsworthy
Since it people stopped leaving it at just that and started crossing a shitton of lines.
Since when did not even bothering to read the thread, let alone the article, in favor of making a useless shitpost become the norm?
I watched her twitter vid, and I gotta say, I'm just so upset / disappointed in people.
I remember when I played tf2 a lot, there was this guy that kept badgering me to talk to him about womens rights and why women should be, essentially, treated as objects/pets. And how they are inferior, trying to get a rise out of me. I was the only girl on the server and I was just playing the game and hardly talking, but my presence was enough to get some other guys on the server verrrry angry. Another time was when I would voice chat with my other friend, who is also a girl, over the game (before discord) we both got some dudes trying to degrade us because her voice is a bit on the higher side, and thus that meant she was "tumblr cancer"?? What the fuck does that even mean?
I notice that my other female friends get harassed more because their voices are higher. I wonder if that plays a part in riling up angry dudes?
It's not fun, but the only way to play games anymore is to have an existing friend group and be as private as possible. Life is so much easier this way. We don't mind pretending to be boys now.
i don't play to meet friends anymore. it sucks so bad, goddammit.
sorry for the badly written rant, this thread applies to a lot of stuff i've been through personally and it's nice to let it out before doing some gaming tonight
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