If you constantly feel like you’re walking on eggshells around a person, that’s a pretty healthy sign that this person is abusive towards you. And oh boy, does this community make me feel like I gotta tiptoe.
Judging by the state of this forum, it’s clear that a significant number of people here feel the same way.
I am concerned that a huge number of people in this community react WAY too violently towards banter, swearing, disagreement, etc… And ironically, it’s THOSE people who make this community a hostile environment.
Outright abuse is easy to pinpoint, block, and report.
But it is difficult to report someone who has flagged you for ‘trolling’ simply because they don’t like your opinion (no matter how reasonable or polite you were being). It’s difficult to cope with the sheer passive-aggressiveness of this community.
That is why so many people are leaving chat entirely. This ‘team’ game is quickly becoming a silent, solo endeavour. The sociability of this game is disappearing fast.
It’s a real shame.
I’m sure these people are a minority, but unfortunately, they are self-righteous and LOUD, and invasive - like weeds.
It’d be cool if we could just share our thoughts, poke fun at each other, and chill out - without fear of being silenced just for disagreeing with some salty dummy, or fear of being outright harrassed or accused of being a bad person by someone who refuses to hear us out or treat US with respect.
Please be truly sociable. Don’t just pretend.
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Mercy mains flagging everything, if that hero didn’t exist this game be so much better off. Balance wise, skill wise.
Bet Hanzo would still have his one shot
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You are always free to say what you want, but not free from the consequences. Since 2016 OW was pretty lenient on these sort of things and wanted it to work itself out but it has only become more toxic. The community has forced this to happen and now we all have to live with it.
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Are you talking about the game, the forum, or just in general?
Sometimes, it’s not passive. It’s bait.
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Of course, I agree wholeheartedly that people should face consequences for bad behaviour. The problem here is that people frequently suffer consequences disproportionate to their actual behaviour.
Eg: getting banned for saying “Holy sh*t, good job, lads” in chat after a team kill. That’s not abusive, and removing ALL swears in favour of a hyper-sensitive community (and investors) is ridiculous, and contributes directly to a dead community.
Tbh I think the lack of real human moderation is the biggest problem here. Abuse is common in all competitive games. But the fact that you can easily be banned just because someone had an unfair reaction to you is wrong, and again contributes to a dead community.
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In 2016 the game was toxic more so from not having role queue. People would flame eachother for not having enough healers/ tanks. Or support/ tank players locking dps no chance of winning
Did you ever hear the story of why “Belgium” figures prominently in the US release of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Gizmodo has a very amusing article on it - I’d link to it but these forums don’t allow such things.
The short version was there was a joke that hinged on a common obscenity, but US publishers wouldn’t allow it, so Adams came up with a workaround that wound up being one of the most memorable gags in the book.
I personally find swearing to be lazy, careless, and boring. One of my friends in college had an odd quirk of speech where he swore constantly and almost compulsively - he didn’t have Tourette’s, just what must have been a lot of very poor influences growing up. And the funny thing was you’d just tune it out after awhile - it wouldn’t even register - so you really only had the tone of his voice and expression to go by. It was a thing of habit, not malice or anger - and because he wasn’t stupid, it caused him a lot of anxiety because in a college setting, there are many situations where unwittingly cursing a blue streak, be it ever so devoid of ill-will, is not going to fly.
Perhaps topically, I myself fell afoul of the boards automatic moderation by insufficiently obfuscating some quoted material from a recent game. But rather than get bent out of shape, I just said fair enough, a little more obliqueness is required - and I can do that easily enough.
Why is it so important that you or anyone else needs to swear on the forum or in-game? Why do you need to use the same few words that millions of others have already run into the ground? It’s a very narrow slice of verbiage that is forbidden - treat it as creative challenge to come up with something more interesting and unique.
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Just got my first in-game warning for text chat, ever. I’ve been endorsement level 5 forever and I’m pretty sure what got me my “warning” was me swearing. That’s all I can think of.
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For multiplayer games, it’s the community that determines whether the product is worth buying. If I knew what Overwatch would’ve become today many years ago, then I would’ve never bought it. I’ve had similar regret purchases with a few other titles and the only thing they have in common is that they’re all multiplayer live service games. Maybe this is telling me something?
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Pretty much nailed the hammer on the head there.
Every person here is a ticking time bomb.
Touch them, refer to them, even just use the wrong gesture towards them or even your own teammates and KABLOWEY!
A can of worns instant drama in chat flame wars because every players feels incpined to their own personal fun without contributing to the experience or growth of the game.
I originally joined the forums to learn and express myself.
Eventually I just couldn’t express mysepf as freely due to other players and the mods. Even the report system.
So I learned. I leaned heavily on strategic talk and began teaching myself in hopes of sharing the knowledge I’ve gain with others.
Now we can’t even agree on strategy or game mechanics because of the same one sided mentality of “My fun comes first.”
All this forced positivity really created a highly toxic environment where one sided fun because not only highlt addictive it even makes players highly hostile if they don’t get their lone fix. That ia toxic positivity. Unlike a toxic negativity where players naturally step away from it, many people grow attached to a toxic positive environment that recreated their own exclusive scene, circle, or grouping.
It’s like a drug addicts elites’s class specification
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But the catch here is the forums and the game do not allow for that - it is a hard constraint that will be enforced, perhaps by questionably coded software. That was the point of my rambling: that it’s something that one has to adapt to, because like the publishers, Blizzard is not going to budge so you might as well find ways to have fun with it because those policies are more about preventing legal complications than contemporary tastes in colorful language.
IRL in the US, swearing in commonplace, far more casually prevalent than it was in my 80s college days.
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No. It’s not.
I walk on eggshells with people at work all the time because my background is conservative christian and I work for a liberal arts university. Are they abuse? Not even remotely.
I walk on eggshells with my students because they have this awful tendency of misinterpreting what I’m saying hardcore. No, my students are not abusive to me.
There are situations where you have to be careful, but those do not equate to abuse. they are not even close.
Abuse is a situation of power imbalance where one side uses power to dominate the other to the detriment of mental health. I’m tired of us throwing around such serious terms when talking about things that aren’t even remotely close to that.
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Your lifestyle seems unhealthy and even in this post you seem angry or frustrated…
Just wanted to point that out that it is not normal avoiding your human expressions nor avoiding others completely. Especially not in those daily day to day avenues you are exposed to.
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The community should just learn to use the mute button as it DOES THE EXACT SAME.
See all those smurfs in your games? Well they rotating suspended accounts and because this community is unable to use the mute function as intended they are back in your games able to speak again.
This game is dying because it opposes gamer culture and is catering to a very tiny loud, passive-aggrasive and etternally opressed minority who will report you for the slightest reason.
Banning people does nothing but increase the pool size of smurf accounts, banning people for “inappropriate communication” keeps lots of players from actually spending money for ingame items and worst of all about this community is that the MUTE button does the exact thing as banning a player does but instantly…
Legit its rare to find any person talking in my games, good job.
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Bloody hell, you know what I meant.
“Abuse is a situation of power imbalance where one side uses power to dominate the other to the detriment of mental health”
“To the detriment of mental health” isn’t necessarily true. It’s still abusive for you to scream and swear at me, even if I am in no way affected by your behaviour. I argue that one side definitely does use power (see: a bot-moderated reporting/flagging system) to dominate the other side - silencing them.
But that’s an argument about semantics, which is silly.
I understand that sometimes you have to make concessions to fit in with a community. My point here is that these concessions are made by the majority to please the minority, and those concessions are directly responsible for the DEATH of that community. Many people have reported feeling unsafe even opening chat or commenting because they don’t know what will get them banned these days. Damn - some people have even reported getting temporarily banned despite never opening chat in the first place.
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using text chat is just asking to get banned in Overwatch. People will report you for saying gg ez, or talk hella crap on a smurf to tilt you. If you bite back you’re getting reported.
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Too true. I had a Sombra throw a comp game (run around the edge of the map cloaked because we lost the first two points) and when I asked for people to report him I GOT A CHAT WARNING TODAY.
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The new age censorship is abysmal. Some people just hate freedom (even their own).
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It is like that because the moderation is also very biased.
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I’ve seen some players just express “I’m reporting both of you.” Whenever an arguement breaks out.
Seems less players are choosing sides and just repprting whatever annoys them the most.
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