You have the power, not them. Mute them. Report. Stop feeding them.
Most people are not really sexist. Most lash out no matter what simply because they are angry and it get gets portrayed in different ways.
99% of the time, males are harassed for anything and everything, even before a match starts. Out of thousands of matches I have played, I have never heard a female get harassed in a match. Normally everyone is nicer to them because… well… female. Which is sexist to not harass them when they have no problem harassing other male players for mistakes.
The only way you are going to “stop” this problem entirely is by banning all men from playing the game. Or at least muting them as soon as a female player is in the game. Otherwise, you will always have instances of “the problem”.
More generally, it’s a necessary consequence of freedom of expression that people are going to express things that offend or insult you. Still you don’t want to “stop” that. What you want is proper recourse after the fact for people whom it affects too negatively.
In the concrete situation at hand, that would mean a properly staffed and moderated report system that has enough reasonable arbiters so that both the catastrophes of a) no consequences at all and b) automatic consequences for anyone accused are avoided. That would cost money. So what you want is for Blizzard to spend more money on moderating the game.
I’m sorry, but there is no other reasonable solution.
Welcome to the online world.
If you weren’t female, you would still get attacked.
Luckily for me I am an Aussie and Diamond border and have only had this happen a few times. Yanks haha
My on my main my battletag for years was my name “Jessica” and back in 2018 I changed it from my name to just something different and it’s been that way since.
I finally lost it after a Rialto game when a group of men in would not leave me alone, even when I left the voice chat.
I eventually also began talking less on the microphone, basically I’m just silent now. I hate it, I’ve been gaming since I was a toddler, and Overwatch and TF2 are the only games I’ve experienced such men. On TF2 it’s worse they KICK you from the game if you talk on the mic, luckily Overwatch doesn’t have a vote kick.
To be clear, the OP was just speaking about her own personal experience as a female player being verbally attacked and bullied by a male player (who presumably used specifically misogynistic language against her), so that’s why that particular situation is being discussed here. That’s all; there is no part of her post that declares other kinds of abuse and harassment to be “unimportant”.
I’m very confident that everyone here can agree that ALL abuse and harassment is bad and needs to be addressed, regardless of gender.
And again, I remind everyone to always REPORT these abusive players when you encounter them. Because if we don’t report them, Blizzard won’t be able to find them amongst the thousands and thousands of other people playing the game. The playerbase is so large, they count on us to bring these things to their attention. Therefore, it is VERY IMPORTANT for us to do our part.
If I may offer another quote here, to help visualize the effectiveness of reporting? Sorry if I’m getting annoying with this; I just feel like people could use to hear it, since many seem to have lost faith in the system. (Source: this post)
I would especially like to point out this part in particular:
only about 1% of players are ever so consistently toxic that they ever reach the levels of suspensions or permanent bans
We can take this to mean that a majority of these abusive players may very well be deterred from behaving in such a manner if they get penalized for it, or perhaps even after being warned.
(PS: I hope Wyoming doesn’t mind that I keep quoting them like this; they’ve just provided so much useful information about this stuff)
i mean i could get poked once and say f this and dip.
if people are harassing you and not working together anyways then why subject yourself to it. they likely arent working with anyone else. its not much different from someone who feeds all game or isnt ever around when theyre needed.
if you get poked 40 million times then some of that has to be your fault.
ive been called literally every single name in the book and played Cod, halo and gears of war all at their peaks where there was 0 regulation. i dont flinch and developing a thicker skin is crucial for your mental state.
Making these posts is not going to do any more than the last post or the one before that. There is a system set up for reporting, muting, and avoiding. While I think the third option is woefully underpowered (they should be permanent blocks and a lot more than 3- if someone has trouble queuing because they get blocked by a bunch of people, too bad), this isn’t going to do anything.
You cannot control what other people do. Even complaining on the internet has limited power. At some point, use the tools you have. Mute them. Report them. Even play without voice chat if it’s bad enough (pssst… the game can still be fun). Or find a group.
These are things that can actually improve your experience.
The full game I had to hear them say vulgar things to me
Wait, I don’t understand. Did the mute button vanish? Was there a bug that made you unable to click it? Did your mouse disconnect and you couldn’t do anything?
I know, victim blaming blah blah blah. But reasonable people have to accept that if I go around shouting the Lord’s Prayer in an IS headquarter it’s somewhat a bad idea and me getting beheaded then is partially my fault. I know this is an extreme analogy, but every minute of harassment you endured beyond the point where you could mute them is on you. Sorry.
Sexism is used because most of the players dont have the brain capacity to think of something original. Ive always (in my opinion) had a 50/50 dice roll whenever I get a female in my games. Either they solo q and everything goes smoothly, just normal games. Or she’s qd with people and is the most toxic cretin ive had the misfortune of having to converse with. (not to say that all of them are like that, this is just my experience). Ran into a three stack of girls last week. Instantly starting being toxic to this poor lcuio on my team, basically bullied him, other tank (this was a guy) Jumped on the band wagon, either attempting to save his own skin or to get some sort of validation. These kind of events are always a coin flip on how they go. Im sorry to hear that this happened to you. Best advice would to be to find at least a 3 stack to play with, then even if the other three get toxic you’ve got 2 others to back you.
It may come to you as a surprise but if I tell people to stop feeding, to stop staggering or to swap to a better situational pick they may be less than receptive. In fact they will often be outright aggressive and insulting. It is no surprise to me that when there is a woman saying those things they might instead of being generally toxic in response would be particularly toxic in some way about their gender. And due to many midlets sensitivity to idiots making go back to the kitchen jokes there is a good chance that they would find sexist toxicity to have worked very well in the past and be encouraged to bring it back up. But tldr if you see every refusal to listen to your shot calls as stemming from your gender (rather than peoples general abrassiveness and stubbornness) then you will see no end to your persecution or inequality. After all you are using every instance of something not going your way as proof that you are being disadvantaged based on the arbitrary. If you were a man the entire team of random people would follow all your directions without question. How unlucky
