Is it only competitive when your teammates are obviously boosted ten-year-olds while the enemy team is to a man T500 smurfs? If you can only try to win when you’re yelling at anyone and anything that could possibly be blamed, then maybe that’s your own problem instead of something that everyone does.
This has nothing to do with the topic.
Wtf are you trying to say?
Toxicity will ALWAYS take place. Toxicity is, in a lot of ways, what you allow it to be. It’s easy to look at constructive criticism as toxicity, yet at the same time constructive criticism is what enables you to evolve, grow, and learn as a player. To offer more to your team. You yourself should be the greatest source of said criticism. You should always be viciously breaking down how you play and learning from that in order to improve.
This bs right here:
Is just you going out of your way to excuse how games play out. Painting the enemy team as some sort of stack of pros while your own team is full of crayon eaters and so on and so forth.
That’s a bs mentality. That is just excuse. Petty and pathetic excuse tbh. Even if the enemy team was an OWL team 6 stacking, you need to approach it as an opportunity to learn. Not simply be like “oh f it f this team f these noobs we’re all done.”
You don’t climb because you don’t have the mentality that is necessary to climb. It’s not smurfs that seem to be simply stacked against you for whatever reason. The MMR system ain’t perfect, but if you put in the time and you know your stuff, you will climb.
This game is competitive and it’s team based. Spare me having to argue any opinion to the contrary as they are all bs. A massive part of climbing or succeeding in this game is your ability to adjust and adapt to your own team and the opponents. Nothing is handed to you.
You don’t seem to have a point at all in what you’re saying, within these most recent posts in this thread. Instead, what you offer is a bs excuse that no one should take seriously.
Feel free to prove me wrong. God I’d love for you to be able to.
The idea is to minimize it.
I was using that as an example of what toxic people act like. They make excuses and blame everybody but themselves to avoid trying to improve.
I’m showing that toxicity is not necessary for serious competitive, which Turtle decided was true. It’s often a result of competitive, but it should be minimized instead of ignored because it drives other people away. And the point of that was in a discussion about how the only player in a role is a focal point for toxicity because of how much easier it is to scapegoat one person than two or three, especially if there is something that sets them apart such as being much stronger than the other players. And the lone person in a role would often be a tank, judging by queue times, and driving away tank mains is even worse than losing players in general.
There’s really no reason to try and fight it. Those that are overtly toxic aren’t the type to come to this forum. Furthermore, even if they did come to this forum, they’re not the type to then read what we say and actually be swayed or consider altering their behavior.
They are basic, selfish, sad little people. They are not worth the time it takes to even consider. Just dismiss, ignore, mute, move on, etc. That’s the best option.
Me, myself, I will go out of my way to simply mess with them. That is a cathartic exercise for me, and I enjoy crushing stupid points of view. If you don’t get the same rush of seratonin/dopamines, etc, from just going HARD into another person, then don’t bother engaging them. You gain nothing from doing so.
Yes. They do a lot of stupid stuff. And a lot of people will also react to any form of constructive criticism as some kind of toxicity, or personal targetting, and then just shut down and react in a “F YOU YOU’RE TOXIC” sort of way. Which is not good at all. Really, when it comes to me just Qing into being on your team, both approaches are detrimental to what I want to achieve.
Someone being imposing, toxic, critical, or whatever, could be just as detrimental as someone that, upon being exposed to/experiencing that person, breaking tf down and playing poorly due to pressure or spite. If two people are caught up in this “you’re being toxic!” “you’re being stubborn!” sort of back and forth, my ability to win this match is heavily hindered. Doesn’t matter the intentions, excuses, or whatever.
Tbh, I’ve been involved in a lot of various competitive activities. Be it MMOs, First Person Shooters, or real life sports like Soccer and Baseball. There was a level of toxicity in all of it. I GVG’d in Guild Wars 2, and I was a toxic mf in a lot of ways, but I was also the guy that would sit you down and explain to you all the elements involved in a 15v15 GVG. And, in order to take part in that sort of style of gameplay, I required 14 other people to be interested in and willing to do the same thing.
I would explain to people that our ability to do what we do, to pursue and perfect this type of gameplay, is entirely reliant on all 15 or however many of us, showing up, at the same time, with the same state of mind. If we can’t do that, then we’re just wasting everyone’s time.
This game is 6v6, and a lot of us just play it in the sense of solo Qing etc. It’s team based, objective orientated, and we all share a collective goal .
That sort of setting will ALWAYS encourage and contain elements of what people see as “toxic.” There are examples of HARD toxicity, ofc, like people just straight breaking and spouting off BS in voice chat, or being incredibly mean or even sexist/racist/etc. There is no eliminating that. It will always be a fundamental, unavoidable aspect of any kind of multiplier online game.
So all you can do is just adjust and develop how you react to it. All you can do is refuse to give it any power or sway over how you approach and play this game, how you deal with your team and your opponents. I’ve played main tank in OH SO MANY ladder games and had people just spouting stupidity in the team chat, putting everyone on tilt.
What’d I do? Completely ignore it. I made my calls, I told people which approach I was taking, I would call out my shield uptime like health etc, I would call out enemies, their positions, where pressure was coming to. And I didn’t give a damn if someone is spouting their hatred fueled manifesto while I was doing it. They didn’t exist to me at all, I was there to win the game, and to enable everyone on my time as much as I could to do the same.
That’s the simple reality of it. We here on this forum, we aren’t doing a damn thing to effect Q times. We can take up causes, we can argue, we can go “REEE DPS VS THE WORLD, DPS ARE THE WORST, TANKS BEST, ETC ETC” and adhere to this tribalistic bs that is so rampant around here. Does nothing. Doesn’t change a thing. As the vast majority of people that play this game, don’t mess around here on the forum.
What we can do is adjust how we approach things, how we approach for instance the discussions about the state of the game and balance on these very forums, how we treat each other here. We can change that, and move toward a more progressive and constructive outlook, and maybe within the small microcosm of this environment we can create some change, create some growth, encourage positivity, and encourage consideration.
Or, I can sit back and tap away at my keyboard constructing long winded throat punches of toxicity that render people unable to respond to me without simply opening themselves up to further throat punches. I could just commit to being a condescending, abrasive, dismissive POS.
And tbh I did do that. That’s why my other account is banned for 1000 years.
What takes place here, our approach and the way we treat one another on this forum, really has no effect on Q times or people’s willingness to play one role or another. We need to address the state of the game, balance, etc, in a holistic and considerate way, and try to adjust that in a way that ENCOURAGES people to play and enjoy this game, in order to effect things like Q times etc. But we can’t do that if we’re stuck in straight up stupid forms of argumentation.
This forum is the best place to discuss detailed aspects of balance, state of the game, enjoyment, experience, etc. There’s no denying that. But the vast majority of people on this forum don’t really discuss any of that in any sort of constructive way, and instead just go at each other’s throats, promote some sort of “us vs them” sort of mentality, and argue about how they “feel” something when playing this game and no one can understand their “feelings.”
It’s nonsense, it’s bs, it’s a waste of time.
Actively expand your understand, the context of the discussion, and appreciate the fundamentals of the game. Keep all that in mind and then engage with your peers in a way where we can collectively, cooperatively, help eachother to develop understanding and acknowledgement of aspects, put your effort towards that, or simply shut the f up.
No one has time to deal with someone having “issues” or “feelings” with a Moira orb bouncing off of 16 walls and tagging them just long enough to send them back to spawn. Sure, sucks, sure, bad feelings, w/e. Going deep into that serves NO PURPOSE and is completely irrelevant when it comes to the overall picture and how compositions work within a coordinated environment, or even the ladder.
I have spent far too much time on this forum, and even after 3 or 4 or however many years it’s been, even taking long breaks from it, etc, I still cannot shake the fact that I absolutely hate how discussions take place here. I am getting tired of pandering to stupidity.
I pray to God that I won’t come across something on this forum that will end up in me getting yet another account banned for 1000 years. Thus my humble plea, in the forum of the perspective I outlined above, for all of us to actually discuss and work together. Or simply shut up so I and people like me don’t get triggered scrolling through thread after thread of ignorance, self-servitude, self-centered fallacies and mental gymnastics, etc.
If this forum is going to be a place to discuss the details of balance, then let’s do it properly. Let’s cite our reasons for our thoughts, let’s remain open to stats from Overbuff, OWL, etc, let’s take all things into consideration and work together. Let’s move forward with open minds.
Or… Simply don’t partake in the discussion at all. Shut up, if you don’t want to consider anything and just want to voice your opinion, keep it to yourself. Tell your cat or dog or spouse about it. Rant off to them how done wrong you feel in relation to the game. Spare us having to break stuff down in order to simply get you to a point where you can actually understand wtf is happening to you.
Babysitting is getting annoying.
Edit: And don’t take any of this personally. I’m sorry for going off like I did in respond to what you said. I just used it as sort of a launching point. None of this is meant to be directed at you personally, or “because” of you or whatever. Like I just went off in a general way, addressing whoever tf might be bored enough to read all that. It really doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just wanted to make that clear.
With the 1-3-2 experiment it’s obvious this sort of soft mindset isn’t high on the priority list. It has also already been pointed out games known for creating toxicity are exceptionally successful when the primary gameplay appeal is competition. You may try to deny it but competition goes hand in hand with toxicity, intensity, and anger. The way you deal with the latter isn’t to castrate the game itself. I know how much you’re annoyed by expanded versions of these ideas so here’s, what, version 9.5?
This person is too “reformed” for my taste but he or she gets it. There is a lot of pettiness in this community that when mixed with game design produces bad results. I still can’t get over the fact Jeff Kaplan justified reducing king of the hill maps from best of five to best of three because they were too competitive and players would feel “devastated” losing 3-2 at 99%-99%. That is exactly the thing you would want. Stuff like this really makes me wonder how this game is developed and managed.
This doesn’t mean that updates which encourage toxicity are necessarily good for competition. Competition causes toxicity, not the other way around.
I’ll be honest, I have no clue what point you’re trying to make here. It wouldn’t be good to avoid giving one particular player more responsibility because…?
I’ll deal with the Dumpster Fire Fanfiction in its own post. A brief look at it isn’t exactly encouraging though.
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You evaluate your priorities. The 1-3-2 experiment already signals a willingness to give one player special responsibility, granted playing solo tank is interpreted as such. I never attached such significance to tank players but if people want to romanticize them so be it. It’s recognized that the player population isn’t remotely evenly split between the three roles so one role would often have to be soloed or there are going to be long queue times and looser SR spreads. What the intention of these ideas is is to give the roles likely to be soloed greater power to perform their functions. Here I was naively thinking this would be interpreted as greater fun. What these ideas are mostly about is giving serious compensation to tank and support players, making their roles more fun to play in the process.
The 1-3-2 experiment seems more like a good way to stop the 1-3-2 proponents while showing everyone that Experimental Mode isn’t just PTR on the same client than a full-effort attempt at implementation. I have no doubt that they tried to make 1-3-2 work at some point, but it’s unlikely that they still are interested. Especially with the mixed-at-best response.
What it seems like is that there are bigger things at stake than your toxicity concerns.
They don’t need to prove this to anyone, sugar. It’s called confidence. They know what the Experimental Mode is for.
It’s clear why they are still interested - long queue times aren’t going away unless they lose major activity in the damage role. Apparently they are still working on it:
It polarized the dev team. People tended to either hate it or be intrigued by it. Most people were cautiously optimistic, like, “Oh yeah, this could be really interesting.” But then we had people staunchly opposed to it who said, “This is so different, it puts too much pressure on the tank player, the game feels too lethal.”
We’re running experiments to see if we can balance our way out of those issues. Like, with the game feeling too lethal: certainly, the number of tanks that are present can be an influencing factor, but we could just as easily look at everybody’s damage and hit points and make adjustments there.
Although they do seem rather lackadaisical. Jeff Kaplan was posting on this forum as if this was the version they were seriously considering replacing 2-2-2 with and I found it clearly incomplete at best.
The closest comparison it has is PTR, where things almost always went to live with only minor modifications. They don’t want people panicking if they do something drastic like sexy Roadhog in Experimental mode.
You should see the O Lawd He Comin’ Roadhog in the other thread.
One would be too good for the game to render properly, the other would just feed his brains out with the best healing and damage reduction in the game while falling out the bottom of the map because he couldn’t fit through a door while growing.
I couldn’t wait to see one not being able to fit through a door or getting stuck inside a room. 
The only pressing problems for me are why the Devs haven’t yet released the remaining 21 of 31 OWL Grey Skins made. And why we can’t have the option to change our ability colors if we own OWL Team Skins.
God bless you, gaming companies adore people like you. Electronic Arts might print out your feedback and use it as validation and motivation to keep doing a great job. You spend money on all these OWL skins?
7 of 10 OWL Grey Skins were free. (Needed the $30 pass to get the other 3 
) As for team skins, Twitch token drops covered most of that. (But now that drops are no longer available… )
They were free?
First post updated.
Before Jeff Kaplan commented on 1-3-2 being something the developers had already been working on there wasn’t strong support for it. He’s obviously not afraid of “stopping proponents”.
Speaking of what the experimental mode is supposed to be for:
It’s a significant change, and the team isn’t sure how it’s going to work out, but that’s the beauty of Experimental mode: allowing players across all platforms to test the dev team’s wildest ideas without leaving the client.
…
After Triple Damage, are there any upcoming changes you can discuss?Kaplan : After Triple Damage, we will probably focus on balance changes in Experimental. At least until we cook up our next wacky experiment.
Wild ideas and wacky experiments. I don’t know why they’re putting themselves down like this but it sets the bar at a convenient height. It seems like they could use help on the wild and wacky side of things to say the least.