thanks to my own experience and the current hot topic:
I came to an idea, if it would be good for the game, if the devs just disable the ingame chat, excluding lobby to make the game less toxic. I would exclude the lobby chat, because the obvious toxicity comes from ingame chats.
What do you think about it? Would this change help to make the game less toxic and frustrated? Or would this change might be revive the voice chat and get used by people to proper communication or will toxic players just starting to use voice chat to annoy people (currently only a few people, maybe one in 1000 games use voice chat)?
At least one problem could be solved: people can’t be false reported for abusive text chat.
There is already an option to disable chat, I don’t see why you would need to punish those who are using it without abusing it. I rarely see toxic chat, and when I do, it is easy enough to mute the offender. In the cases where it is just someone being frustrated, I will say something neutral or positive to refocus the team on winning the game.
I see positive comments far more than negative ones, and if chat were disabled, I would miss out on the epic role-playing a random Li Li was doing in QM the other night! She was definitely ready for adventure.
Well then maybe extend it to the draft then? Because the mute function is only ingame and some games the toxcity starts in draft, when one player instant picks an uncommon pick like The Butcher 1st.
I have made well around 30-40 ingame friends or so from speaking during matches, so huge no from me.
Rather, I’d say that they should remove the “disable all chat” and remind those people to just use mute if they encounter a toxic person.
It’s really not rocket science to just mute the toxic people. People who just disable all chat instead miss out on a lot of potential friendships or important information from the chat.
I would love to know if I had some of those anti socials in my matches at least so I would know whether I’m wasting my time trying to be social/funny/supportive.
Based on the HS forums I wouldn’t recommend that either, because I remember people there are screaming for an “auto-squelch” all the time. But I see your point, I also meet a few nice people, but the thing is it’s just rare and most of the time I encounter way more toxic behaviour than normal conversations. Maybe it’s because I stuck in silver, but as I read Nigh’s comment that he said it’s also in higher leagues I suggested this, because I thought it might would help the majority of players.
Ranked is inherently more toxic, atleast.
I would imagine that it’s worse at the lower ranks because ignorant people are usually the most toxic.
But speaking as a “serious” QM player so do I not see that much toxicity.
But regardless of how much toxicity there is, to me it’s somewhat a matter of just getting used to it and not letting every insult get to you, and just mute them immediately and focus on the game.
A MOBA is inherently “toxic” because of it’s super serious nature as well as reliance on your team. If one can’t handle people who are toxic, then one is not that suited for ranked, in my opinion.
Though i obviously agree that the chat is toxic (Can’t disagree with myself heh)
I would not want it removed tbh, i like the idea of it not being there, though i love having it myself, removing one of the social aspects of the game, kinda removes some of the joy aswell.
The communication part strategiwize is absolutly not there, but socially it is there from time to time.
So i agree and yet don’t. How about them apples!
You can disable in-game chat for yourself, that’s good enough. That’s what I’ve done and my winrate absolutely started to go up in ranked. Even if I’m not participating in chat, toxic or otherwise, it can be really distracting.
Just yesterday I met a nice Lili on my team and we were both making jokes about the bad situation our team was in. But then we all took boss and turtled in our base because our core was at 1%, and I guess that was enough to win because none of the enemy team decided their own core was worth saving while they were trying to get our 1% core down. There was a valeera who kept blaming everyone but we paid no mind to her and just enjoyed our time. It was hilarious seeing the enemy core fall.
Its the little things that make me believe in teamchat.
I would like to mention another point that might wasn’t clear enough, this change could make voice chat more attractive as the least used function ingame and in general people tend to be less toxic in voice chat, because it is more comparable to real life and you “see” (actually hear) more details in the voice as in writings.
False, it’s only true for the few players, who are good, but for the most player pings are usually enough.
Is this really a major problem? All people I knew are using headsets and I never experienced that this was an issue to them and personally as an actual stand microphone user (not headset) I don’t have problems with it though. - But I get your point.
Maybe if you are male. Although it is more rare in HotS in my experience, in other games I have had, shall we say, young men start acting like 2 year olds demanding attention when they hear a female voice. This is one reason I do not use voice chat often if I am solo queuing, and stick to Party Voice if I am with friends.
It can get even weirder when they realize that I am their tank.
Shotcalling, cooperation and positivity happens at the same place where ppl flame/blame. If you remove the option to communicate, you remove the good, not just the bad, while there’s already an option to handle the bad (mute).
(These are true to voice too, so the game won’t become less toxic, just harder to track toxicity and having a bigger problem from language barriers.)
This wasn’t well thought out. Not by far.
Stuff like this makes me not want to perma-disable it. There’s some wonderful people out there that still give you some faith in humanity while playing.
For the troublemakers (who do exist) there is fortunately the block option. If I sense there is anyone in the match who might report a teammate just out of malice and is attempting to make people lose their temper, I just don’t chat at all in that match.
I’ll send a private GG to the good players afterwards.
My sister does that, with Yrel, Li Li and Lucio but no typing though, she is too small so parental control is enabled. The excitement is real.
That’s why it makes me really sad sometimes to see people flaming a player who is immersed in their character. For all you know you are flaming a small human who is having the time of their lives.
Or even if it’s an adult it’s still wrong. By making those people jaded and cynical by negativity the world becomes worse one step at a time…
I love when people do things like that in chat. Two of my most memorable moments were with random folks in QM, getting creative with lore.
For the first, I was playing Diablo on Braxis, and my team decided to pull off a cheeky boss camp while the beacons were channeling, and the enemy team were all alive. We only needed a few more seconds on the channel, and the enemy didn’t notice the boss shenanigans, so they all ran past where I was anchoring to cap the bottom beacon. I got there before them and made my last stand. As I died, the boss was taken and the zerg were released, so I typed in chat, “MY LIFE FOR AIUR!”
Junkrat responded, “En taro Diablo.”
The second moment was when I was playing Arthas, and there was an Uther on my team. Since I was in a playful mood, while we were waiting for the gate to open, I typed, “Can we set aside our differences and focus on the battle ahead, Uther?”
He responded, “You have crossed a dangerous line, boy!”
And with that, we were off to the races. The entire match was spent (mildly) flaming each other in character, especially when one of us made any sort of mistake. At the end, where I normally just type “gg”, I typed, “gg, even Uther, may he rot in hell.” He promised me that justice would one day be served.
