This game has created one of the worst communities I have ever seen. How do you even fix that?
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I’ve never played a single game of any type where the macro “community” was called great. I don’t understand why folks pretend otherwise.
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Pick a direction and stick to it. OW has become one of the most uncertain games out there. It tries to be a MOBA, it tries to be an FPS, it forces teamwork but tries to leave space for individual skill and solo-carry potential, it wants to please both casual and competitive tryhard communities. Even hero design is uncertain - look at Reaper. Yeah, he’s “edgy”, but not violent. But he’s the bad guy, remember that. Unless we’re talking Archives event.
The community became like this because Overwatch has some place for everyone. And when different opinions clash, they tend to argue. And oh boy does this game have so many people of different opinions.
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While I agree with much of what you said I would point out Archives is pre Reaper being a villain. It was Gabriel doing his underhanded ops for Overwatch but not the villain. He wanted answers and needed them one way or another. It was very much an ends justified the means mindset. The man he shot but was supposed to take prisoner was doing dirty deals and spited Gabriel saying he’d be out in a day. Gabriel gritted his teeth, considered his options, and made abduction into an assassination. That’s the opening scene for the event after all.
Once he assumes the moniker Reaper as a Talon head, he is a villain but he seems to only want revenge on the organization that slighted him and ruined his body multiple times. Ironically, Moira the doctor who did his second huge mutation is another Talon admin. He is not utter evil but his fall from grace is and was consistent as far as I can tell.
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Best way is to lead by example, be the difference you want to see. A player that tilts and throws games, is overly toxic to team mates when things don’t go their way, etc. while expecting that the community changes for the better is only making their idea more unreachable.
Nailed it on the head here, unless the population of the game has dwindled down to a very small number of loyal players, most communities for games aren’t that great.
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This isn’t a community; it’s just a bunch of people that bought the same game.
Blizzard hasn’t even provided the basic tools required for useful communities to develop, such as Guild/Clan features, so I’m not sure what kind of cohesion you’re expecting from a playerbase that spends 99% of the time playing with 11 random strangers. Even Diablo 3 has had guild features for the past 7 years but apparently the OW devs just haven’t had the time or the inclination to add them to their multiplayer-only team shooter.
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The Overwatch community is not unusually toxic compared to similar games in this era of gaming. If you go back to earlier game communities in the 1990s and 2000s, toxic people were rare and were about as tolerated as they would be in a physical social setting. Gaming communities used to have in-person picnics so you could meet all of your gaming friends IRL.
I cannot even imagine doing that now. I don’t ever want to meet anyone from this forum, and I rarely say anything in game chat because most games are 11 jerks whom I’d rather not know beyond the end of the match.
Okay, so why did this change? Two reasons: capital-G Gamers thrive on toxicity and harming people IRL as much as possible, and competitive ranking systems end up being digital caste systems for tens of millions of young men who have no other sense of worth or accomplishment beyond their SR number and rank icon. When a Gamer who has no sense of self-worth beyond his SR loses a match, his value decreases. This can be an actual psychological crisis for some people. And the perception that losing matches is other people’s fault for various reasons only adds to the rage and antagonism.
And what can we do to change it? There’s no single answer to this. One thing that might help would be a higher level of economic equality. Gamers need to have a real sustainable life outside of gaming. In the healthy gaming communities of the '90s and '00s, playing online games was not something anyone based their whole identity on. They were everyday middle-class people who, instead of watching TV, played an online game a few hours a week. Modern-day Gamers would refer to these people disdainfully as “casuals,” yet they envy the real life they have.
The esports industry is fueling a lot of this Gamer toxicity by dangling the promise of making a living as a pro gamer or streamer. What bothers me most is the perception that OWL players have nothing beyond Overwatch. Every other professional sports league spends a substantial effort to show the players out of uniform volunteering in their communities, hanging out together, sharing their vacation photos, and they have guest spots on TV shows and such. Blizzard spends no such effort on OWL players. It’s always them in their uniforms playing Overwatch. This reinforces the Gamer belief that gaming is an all-encompassing identity, and there is nothing beyond the game.
Some psychiatric evidence suggests that removing leaver penalties might help reduce stress and mental illness associated with competitive gaming. When you feel stuck in a game, it’s not much different emotionally than being locked in a room with people who are shouting at you. You should have the right to leave any abusive environment, even if it’s an online game, without punishment.
Another game-design solution is to rework the competitive system so that we’re not punished for the bad actions of other players (smurfs, leavers, throwers, cheaters, organized groups in solo queue). Overwatch, like most games, expects strangers who don’t like each other to work together as a team and win and lose as a team, but that only works for organized sports where there is an actual team that trains together and for the most part know and like each other. Football and baseball would be as toxic as Overwatch if all teams were randomly assembled and made to suffer equally for a loss. It’s simply bad game design, and the Overwatch designers should have anticipated this environment.
Lastly, anonymity is the source of most of the Internet’s problems. We need to balance maximum privacy with minimum anonymity. If our real names and photos were associated with our accounts, we’d all act a lot differently. I, for one, wouldn’t even be here – and I’m fine with that.
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Report and ignore. It will die down, eventually…
This is very well put, and I agree with most of your points.
Sadly it is very seldom that one approaches this game the way you did just right now. Props to that.
During my uni years I actually did a psych paper (on my elective psych course) of online gaming and gamers in general, how it affects one’s personality in and outside gaming, and for those people who actually commit the majority of their youth (youth in this case being their early to late teens) to gaming it immensely affects their social skills and everything else related to rl.
I am way beyond the years of “primal gaming age”, but I did notice everything you wrote. I am the 80’s child so to say, so in my time, gaming was a very different notion back then.
Nowadays people are going to try and make money out of anything. Technological advances just give them more fuel to concentrate themselves on milking money out of whatever “kids deem popular nowadays”.
I remember reading a tweet (kill me now, but I honestly cannot remember whose tweet it was, or what player in question it was) about a Contenders player who later got into OWL earning money while boosting others (he even got banned for it). Since Contenders (I do not even know what exact year it was, and if anyone can correct me and fill in my blanks, feel free to do so) did not bring any money whatsoever to people who were eligible enough to play there but demanded more time from them than one would demand from anyone on a regular RL paying job, they were economically “forced” to earn money by boosting other players.
I also know that ML7 said numerous of times how he used to boost ppl “back in the day” to earn some money, since he was a law student back then, only like a year ago or so, maybe even less, graduated from law school, and it was basically the only income he would receive before his stream kicked off. I would not be surprised to hear that many other streamers did the same, before their streams kicked off too.
On the specific OW note or the problems we are currently facing, you cannot force people to do anything. You cannot force people not to throw, not be mean in VC or game chat, etc.
The thing is no matter the sanction that Blizzard could come up with, there will always be people who will find a way to circumvent it or “outsmart” Blizzard in one way or the other.
Fair enough, Reaper wasn’t a good example. I’d say Sigma takes his place then. A scientist gone mad and sounding actually threating in his traler, probably the best one Blizzard made, and what is he like in-game? Ehhhhh… well, at least his ult voice line has something common with his trailer version. Otherwise, not evil at all.
Can you imagine Connor McDavid going onto an NHL forum complaining about all the useless potatoes he’s made to carry every game? Oh wait, he already does that. He’s on the Oilers team LMAOO
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wait what how is he not violent
Your point about Reaper is spot on. He’s the bad guy??? Lol he always seemed like a dark anti-hero to me…
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The only way to change a terrible community is to create a barrier to entry for the undesirable elements, then kick them out
I definitely think overwatch and video games in general bring out the worst in me ngl. I’m way more toxic in game than irl (and it’s not just the “anonymity” of gaming but other factors as well, like huge competition in games).
TF2 had a great community.
So rare to find a jerk in that game.
Was that at its height or after most moved on to other games? I’ve never played so I cannot say.
great from 2008-2012 when i played it.
Worth every minute.
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Honestly I feel that the game itself can provide the best avenues for shaping a community. Blizzard has put so much work into coddling the solo queue experience, while at the same time either ignoring, failing to support, or actively punishing 3rd party clans, it creates an environment where the self-rightous and egotistical are encouraged to keep playing and never change.
There are other factors as well, like the fact that the game doesn’t provide tutorials on basic gameplay concepts like teamplay while at the same time pouring on tons of positive reinforcement regardless of actual performance.
When players are coddled like that, egos swell. When ego’s inevitably clash with the truth of the game or other players, the first instinct is to lash out. Hence toxicity is born.
If solo and group queue weren’t isolated, groups would become the ideal way to play (as opposed to the worst), LFG would be a success, and the community could start to have some common sense of what is and isn’t generally acceptable behaviour in the game, as opposed to being a community comprised of 36 million opinions.
If Blizzard stopped pouring on positive re-enforcement and maybe on occasion was brave enough to tell the player they did something wrong, maybe a few more people would get it through their thick skull that they can’t always pick Genji and expect to win (or whatever else they are doing wrong).
TL;DR the community is bad because Blizzard over-enables solo queuers and overrewards bad play with lots of positive re-enforcement.
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TF2 had a bunch of loosely-associated and/or isolated communities because it allowed people to host their own dedicated servers, not a big mishmash of everyone in one community clumped together. I bet if Overwatch allowed for privately run self-policing dedicated servers, you’d be able to find good ones to play on.
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