I’ll try only once to tell you why this mentally will not serve you in the future.
It’s not about “wrongthink” or Trump supporting or free speech.
It is simply stupid to address one issue by conflating all related issues because problems do not get solved that way.
If you address toxicity, you do not eradicate sexism and vice versa.
Just because people are being shot in Mexico doesn’t mean teenagers in London can’t complain about it.
Just because children in Africa are struggling to eat doesn’t mean kids living below the poverty line in Germany should not complain.
It may not be your intent but you completely belittle this issue by comparing it.
You said “we are talking toxicity in general” and that is false. We are NOT - YOU decided to conflate the two.
I have a problem with racism in gaming but it is wrong to conflate my issue with the sexism issue because they are separate.
Feel free to carry on as you are but you will continue to face a greater and greater majority against you for the rest of your life if you continue this way.
What a relief to see that the OP has been restored.
Always a good idea, of course, but the problem still has some more complicated aspects (which I addressed in my other post in this thread; I’ll get some quotes since it’s a bit far back now)–
And:
Again, I STRONGLY encourage people to report any abusive players they encounter, as a victim OR bystander. In my earlier reply, I linked to a post (by Wyoming) explaining that the number of matches where a player has been reported is what’s important, and that the number of reports in one match does not actually matter. Go ahead and check it out if you’d like (not sure if it’s OK for me to link to the same post twice in one thread, sorry)
Wyoming also has a really good and informative thread documenting important posts from the devs, and there’s even a (MASSIVE) section about reports and stuff in this particular post:
I’d definitely recommend giving it a look, for anyone who’s unsure about the report system. Reporting is a very powerful tool in the fight against rotten behavior in-game
im not trying to sound dismissive but why get upset, you feed them a response you give them what you want. these people have nothing good to say and dont know you for who you are so there is no reason to get upset over it. its the internet, people are gonna behave with little to no filter and its not nearly as bad as it was 10 years ago.
dont let them live rent free in your head, they are quite literally random people who are venting their frustration at what they think is the easiest target.
mute and move on, focus on no one but yourself.
What do you expect them to do, they gave you all the tools you need to not have to deal with them. A mute button use it. Sucks that you had to go through this but the devs can’t do anything about it. Mute them and squelch their chat, don’t forget to report with an actual explanation in the report, avoid as players.
Just ignore it and report them, i can’t count how many times I’ve been called racial slurs for playing winston or doomfist. If you respond to them it just gets worse.
i don’t even have to skim the thread to know it goes like,
op: i was targeted and harassed for my gender and i wish it wasn’t like this
dbag 1: it’s your fault for not muting them.
dbag 2: it’s your fault for letting it get to you instead of just ignoring it.
dbag 3: you weren’t targeted for your gender, you just got bullied and happened to have a gender the bullies made fun of you for.
dbag 4: you’re making this up because i’ve never witnessed it, therefore it can’t be real.
The problem isn’t muting or blocking. Trust us we do all of that.
Let’s try make an analogy that wouldn’t be to far from what is happening.
Imagine walking into a room and two people poke you with a stick. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just annoying. You instantly leave the room (voice coms) and you play the team based game without much team based work.
Then you walk into the next room and get liked again with a stick. It doesn’t hurt. Just annoying. Rinse and repeat.
The stick doesn’t hurt. But getting poked over and over and over again gets just a little gosh darn annoying that it starts to grate at you.
The mute and block work. But you have already been poked for the 40 millionth time.
I hope the analogy works to explain the frustration that is caused.
They could actually do something about it, but they won’t. There could be community lead policing and cheat prevention via either a replay system with chat where cheaters and trolls were more harshly policed, but that would reduce the revenue from alt accounts where most of these players come from.
The fact is that between hardware bans and actual instant punishment for player abuse they could eliminate this problem very quickly, but it’s better to be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing anything.
Again, I’ve been playing Blizzard games since 1996 when they released the first Diablo. Over the decades of playing their games, I’ve watched their policies change. In 1996, they did little to nothing about cheaters and cheaters were RAMPANT.
By the time I started playing WOW in Dec 2004, Blizzard started taking a hardline “find and ban cheaters” approach and cheaters became rare as people became reluctant to risk getting banned… which is awesome.
But they’ve waited from 1996 to 2020 to start banning people for being offensive racist/sexist/ableist jerks… I’m not exactly pleased with their response time. I been insulted and threatened by other players of Blizzard games too many times to be pleased.
Maybe after I’ve seen years of reports of about hundreds of thousands of accounts being proactively banned for toxicity, I’ll trust Blizzard to care as much about racism and sexism as they do about cheating.
What is your proposed solution? The battle between cheating and anti-cheating measures is, in fact, an ongoing war. It is programmatic. It is manipulating the very code being executed.
How would you propose an accurate (and most importantly efficient) algorithm for enforcing punishment on how another human makes you feel? How would you propose a solution that can understand and interpret (not even correctly) what a human says or even what a human types?
I understand we are living in the age of information and technology is rapidly advancing, but not like that, chief.
Even though male players aren’t in any way the only sexist offenders, in video games or anywhere else in the world, despite how you make it sound like, I do agree that, just like with all Toxicity, it should be apprehended by the Report system.
Until then though, I should also suggest to Mute and Avoid, as there are things you can do in order to minimize the effect toxic people have on you.
The behaviour you’re describing should be treated with the same gravity as cheating; as in, if you can collect proof that somebody went all in on a sexist/racist/homophobic attack against another player, even if its only one instance, that’s a permaban.
Rude remarks, guy got mad and called you a bot and told you to uninstall, sure, that can be the kind of stuff we vote to silence people over using Blizzard’s current system, knowing full well that most people will probably never be actioned and, if they do, they will be given far too many warnings before any real consequences reenacted. It’s whatever. Those are the kind of ‘accidents’ that happen when you put a bunch of socially incompetent middle schoolers and basement dwellers in a game together.
But there’s really no excuse to be ripping into a female player with threats and degredation about her gender. That’s not something you say because you were mad, or because you thought it was funny, or because you got carried away. It’s something you say because you’re a garbage human being and you want to hurt somebody for being different.
As for the victim blaming in this thread… Jesus. I can have a thick skin and not be upset by what strangers on the internet say to me… and understand that they have no right to behave that way. Anyone who hasn’t figured that out yet is part of the problem.
