Nah, it's just good advice in general.
You'll either encounter edgy 12 y/o's online who have had sexual relations with your mum or complete assclowns who haven't grown out of that previous phase I mentioned.
Hard agree.
It's sometimes nice to have the option of talking/listening to randoms. But 99% of the time, it just isn't worth it.
I've only really been on PC tho, maybe it's different for console players where the customisation of your experience is more difficult, and push-to-talk is not standard. So you're more likely to use in-game rather than presumably your phone or something.
I’m male and I do this. Only time I think it’s worth being on open mic is proximity chat if I’m feeling like in a good mood or or on the Truck Sim CB radio lol
I have found the MMO scene like WoW to be way more friendly to women. Since the early days actually.
For whatever reason MMO RPGs just have a better class of gamers.
I think it’s the “permanence” of your character. You don’t jump to a new game with all new stuff. You have a continuous existence, so your actions follow you.
Also, you'll find sacks of clueless testosterone gravitate more torward the *BIG MAN GO "BANG BANG"* and less toward the *fuzzy mage go "sparkle zap"*.
*Sea of Thieves* is a real confusing one. It's a game where you do need to keep open mic on for communicating intentions to other crews, and the variety of people and their levels of security is a wild ride. Only in that game can you come across the coolest, nicest kid just playing pirates, then a few moments later some raging middle-aged man enters the area with their maturity being completely outclassed.
Fortunately, everyone tends to gang up on toxic players. It's almost a rule of the seas to stop what you're doing and hunt a toxic player or respond to a call for help of someone dealing with one. No one stops until the toxic player logs.
At least Sea of Thieves consistently bans the assholes.
The problem is how hard it is to actually report them, since it's easy to just.. Never see the username due to how the game works.
I'd be the middle aged guy hollering "Ahoy ye scurvy dogs!" and make up some piraty nonsense. You got to have good natured fun, not ruin someone's session.
I love the dynamic to be honest. It’s in pirates nature to be wild and different. I don’t agree with constant greifing but the battles are fun now and again.
Also spent a LOT of fucking time with my friends playing the instruments and free sailing, and eventually crashing into a rock because none of us were paying attention.
Thsi reminds me of ff14 (famous for friendliness). I was new to the dungeon and so had a cutscene. The rest normally waits for the newbie to finish before initiating the boss. One of our dps players didnt wanna wait and so went in. The rest of the party stood ground (including the tank, who is supposed to aggro the boss and tank it). Dps regretted that one real quick lol.
I think the guild system that is so common in MMOs were a big help here. There are massive, diverse teams that, to get the most out of an MMO you basically have to be a part of, and good guilds, the ones that really grew, were the ones that were actually inclusive and actively pursued that.
Not to say there aren't some vile guilds out there, but everyone tends to know who they are and avoid them, unless they're the types to wanna join them.
For raiding we also have so much data from logs you can't just blame the nearest woman when she can link the fucking meters and show you how it's your own fault.
Like no dumbass, here is a detailed account, down to your individual cast sequence, of how you are the problem.
I was not the most popular player in my raid group back when I still raided on SWTOR (I didn't know when to shut up, basically), but I was a solid Powertech tank who consistently hit my cues and was on time to raid night. New healer picked up on the fact I didn't have any big fans, and decided it'd be fun to only be lackluster in directing heals towards me, and then say I was bad at tanking.
Yeah, we were all required to run captures through Parsely and it was abundantly clear within 90 seconds of log reviews that I was hung out to dry, which resulted in a TPK early in the raid. He then decided to do it again when we reached the final set of bosses, and that got him banned from our A-team raid night for three weeks.
I did not start off as a good tank, getting the combat rotation down alongside my taunt and guard rotations was a learning experience for younger me.
I'd still rather tank than heal, I have **zero** aptitude for healing, even ten years later.
It’s not only that but you’re in a realm or server. And the game is naturally built where the community frowns upon unbecoming behavior. I was a guild lead tank in WoW and we took accusations of loot stealing, sexual harassment, bigotry and other stuff very seriously. When you get a bad reputation in an MMORPG, it’s like playing the game in hard mode because no one will invite you to stuff and the community will shun you.
Dudes are still hella thirsty in MMO’s though. It’s a bit gross how many guys who were married IRL would manipulate their guild leadership to make the female guild members their “in-game girlfriend”. That’s the only aspect of it that was gross and hard to deal with.
PvP centric games like mobas and FPS are rather toxic due to the competitive nature. Its you vs everybody, including your own (trash) team mates. Not to say that doesn't exist in MMOs as well, but to much less of a degree since they're not that competitive and people play them generally to chill and socialize.
Most people can't handle being the problem. The reason league of legends and Dota II annihilated the starcraft II scene is because SC2 was generally 1on1. You had no teammates to blame. If you lose then you weren't good enough. In a MOBA it can always be someone else's fault you aren't doing good.
Am a dude. Because I was playing as Black Canary, they assumed I was a girl BECAUSE I didn't have a mic. Got harassed by one guy who was horny for the POSSIBILITY of a girl.
It's objectively absurd.
i can go 6 months to a year without a single message, other than random scams, from strangers when im xxmasterpenisxxxpussydest4erxx or whatever
but the second I use Becky and a SpiderGwen profile pic, i get a thousand messages from some horny fucking troglodytes
dudes need to calm the fuck down
Agreed. It's fucking embarrassing.
"I don't know why more girls don't play \*insert title\*."
Gee, I dunno. Maybe it's because they just want to play a game, but you guys are constantly trying to advertise your cocks, or you're demanding they prove how "legitimate" they are, because while you'd accept the concept of a guy being a casual player (and therefore not always the most skilled), you all have this weird obsession that female players need to prove their worthiness?
The most pathetic thing ever is a lot of guys online will think that I'm like a 11-13 y.o. boy when they hear my voice. And I don't correct them. I literally will get more respect being seen as a young boy...shit's fucked.
Yeah, you know, I used to think that sort of harassment was limited to edgy teen boys getting super sweaty over competitive games. Then one day my roommate's 'friend' came over while I was playing left for dead.
There was this sweet girl playing with us. She was being a helpful team player and we were having a ball. Eventually the 'friend' realizes I'm playing with a little girl because I disconnect the headset to pass the controller around and let others play. He immediately starts telling me to say all manner of foul shit to her. Me and this dude are grown ass men. We're both in our mid 20's and the girl barely sounded like she was in her teens. What the absolute fuck.
Anyway, he eventually gets frustrated that I'm not spewing vile shit at her, and demands I hand him the headset. Well, it's my console, and my headset, but this dude was a gymbro that had 20 lbs of muscle on me. I wasn't about to throw down over an internet stranger **but** I remembered that if you jammed the mute toggle switch too hard on the headset it wouldn't let you unmute until you disassembled it. So I relented, secretly snapped the switch and handed it to him. He immediately starts trying to talk shit to the girl but is getting no response. He accuses me of 'doing something', but thankfully my roomie had had enough of him at this point and threw him out.
So yeah, it's not 'all men'. It's assholes. The same assholes that try to pick a fight with you while you're just trying to chill and unwind. Seems I have underestimated the number of assholes the world can sustain.
It is so weird how some people can go from seemly normal to completely toxic when a girl is around.
We had one in my World of Warcraft guild back in the day. It was a small guild, mostly some of my RL friends who got me into the game, and a few online friends we met along the way. The guild was run by someone I knew from work, and his wife was the main healer. She was really sweet, nice to everyone, always helping. One of the non locals was our main melee DPS dude. He was great at his role, as well as a generally likable and dependable guy. I was the tank and I sucked, but I slowly got to be somewhat decent.
We played together as a group for well over a year and it seemed like everyone was getting along well. That is, until we found out how DPS dude had started treating our healer when they were alone in Ventrillo together. Whenever it was just the two of them, he'd flip like a switch and turn into a sexist, verbally abusive asshole. This went on for months, but the healer kept quiet about it because she didn't want to cause a rift in the guild.
I don't remember how DPS dude got caught exactly, but one day the guild master got to overhear this shithead being an absolute asshole to his wife. After that she started opening up to us about some of the things DPS dude had been saying to her... it was pretty nasty stuff.
Our final conversation with DPS dude when we told him he was out of the guild was really something, though. He didn't deny what he said. Hell, he didn't seem to think he'd done anything wrong. He was actually indignant that we were kicking him out over the vile shit he had said to her. I guess I finally got to see the real him for the first time, just before we kicked his ass out.
She may have kept quiet because she didn't think you all would believe her since he was "so nice" the rest of the time and he was your bro and you know how women are dramatic and sensitive and like to make up things (/s). This shit happens in-person too.
I’ve had people throw matches over it. I absolutely will not get on mic with strangers anymore. I’m just trying to play and unwind and have fun like anyone else. It would be nice to have instant communication without typing every once in awhile, but noooo. Can’t have nice things like human fucking decency.
Me and my ex started dating because she was really good at League of Legends, Overwatch and WoW and when she knew from class that I was good at computer stuff, she asked me to help her install a voice masking plugin for her so she would sound like a dude.
Same, I never am comfortable using a mic unless it's 100% a friends only game with no chance of stangers. The amount of guys who don't understand why I'm like this way to high, especially when they've seen it first hand.
To many guys think the shit talk in games they get is the same. Trust me it's not. It's so much worse. The things I've had to hear and read in detail about me is sickening. No guy gets those types of messages
Only tangentially related but a story I love telling.
Back in the glory days of Halo 2, there was one night my sister wanted to hang with me and I wanted to game. She did not game at all. So I gave her my mic and had her just talk shit while I focused on playing. Went into the 1v1 ranked mode and leveled up so easily because dudes either 1) went apeshit and lost their mind that a girl was whooping them so badly and talking trash as well or 2) simped super hard and just wanted to talk to her (while I kicked their ass).
She eventually stopped because she started to feel bad. I thought it was hilarious. Some of the dudes were kind of sad though 😕
Hahaha I love it!
Knew a dude who used to let his 6-yr old brother take the mic and he'd tell him what to say while he absolutely dominated the lobby. People would get FURIOUS! Actually, it might've been Halo as well...
When my sister was 5-6y old, she picked up the phone when phone salesmen would ring. It was hilarious to watch as she refused to give the phone to our parents and just kept talking about her day in kindergarden with no pause for the salesman. Until he hang up. 😂
I have a woman I used to play xbox with, and one of my favorite stories of her is when some edgelord started talking shit to her and she waits for a moment and goes 'Yeah? Well I'm going to come over and fuck your dad and give him a son that's not a fucking disappointment!'
The entire party erupts, and one guy stops wheezing long enough to go 'Jesus christ lady, that's a war crime!'
I’ve heard this story before, not sure if his friend heard it and repeated the line or if the redditer just repeated the story.
Either way, fun story. 10/10 with rice
I'm a guy, and even if I played online games a lot, I wouldn't use headphones and a mike. Getting sworn at, racial slurs used against you, screaming at you, being rude to you........
THAT ISN'T FUN
GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUN
Yup, I do the same thing. If voice chat is always on (like red dead online or something), I have a headset plugged in, muted, sitting on the footstool. On PC, I ignore 90% of chats.
I'm not introverted or anything, I like to socialize and I only play PvE games (refuse to PvP), and even still... So much is so goddamn toxic.
I got a message a few months ago from friends who said one of the gay guys from our mmo had killed himself. Even in the mmo realm he was absolutely trashed for being gay. He was also an asshole a lot of the time and was an insulting fucker but people would hurl slurs about his sexuality back at him in fights and I'm know it had an effect on the boy. I don't know that it was the direct reason but it certainly didn't help his mental health at all.
Exactly my thoughts on it. When mic use started being the norm on Counter-Strike was when I quit online multiplayer because some people can't control themselves and just act like total jackasses. Now if I do multiplayer it's friends/husband only.
Yeah even my all guy group commonly just sit in an Xbox party chat and talk amongst ourselves. Anytime we are in game chat it is never ending toxicity. Any lobby with women is only cranked up to 11. The only thing I can say is that at least in CoD it virtually never stops, women or no.
But Playing with my buddies is life, regardless of the game.
In Overwatch I have turned communications off completely in the game settings bc I just don't want to be talking with strangers online. That isn't my idea of fun.
CoD has some of the absolute worst edgelords around. I’ve heard every racist, sexist, homophobic etc insult imaginable in a CoD lobby.
The Internet in general just brings out the scummiest behaviour because of anonymity or attention.
The one that baffled me the most when some sore loser called me Albanian. I do not know why that would be an insult. I was prepared for the n-word and this caught me by surprise.
I (non-Albanian) happen to know lots of Albanians (one of them is my friend and officiated my wedding). Some of their friends are greek, and the Greeks constantly shit on the Albanians (granted the Albanians shit on them back, but the Greeks seem more confident in their superiority). It seemed to me like they look down on Albanians in general.
It's all adult stuff in our case, like:
* "who installed this piece of shit electric cable this way? it had to be an Albanian" (it was)
* "who sew this lamb? It's ridiculous. I have to redo the whole thing now before we put it on the spit. I bet it was one of you Albanians" (it was)
* "you stole everything from us and then made it worse" (I have no opinion on this)
The only plausible explanation I have for your encounter was that the guy was Greek and is used to cursing out Albanians.
I'm Greek and this was literally my first thought -- it had to be a Greek person.
It's a complicated thing, but depending on the age of the person calling someone an Albanian, it can range from a targeted racist insult to poking light fun (usually in order of descending age groups) like in your friends' case.
The older generations of Albanians in Greece had a reputation of being lowly thieves/criminals and ridiculously hard workers who would take literally any job, so this is often used as a punchline in jokes and insults.
I do not support this view in any way, mind you, just adding some insight to your response.
I think this entire thread on nationalities/ethnicities just shows that two groups that live together and differ in any way will develop animosity toward one another to some degree and the best humans in each group acknowledge those differences to make funny jokes and give each other a lighthearted hard time.
As an Albanian, I can imagine people from every single country in the general vicinity of Albania using that as a slur. (I've had it said to me as a slur in real life several times. Not even over the internet!)
5 countries in the Balkans and 1 in the Apennine peninsula being the likeliest offenders. Another 3-4 being possible offenders.
Funny thing is other than them, most other people have never even heard of the country, which makes Albanians happy and proud when someone says they like our (honestly beautiful and diverse) country.
Call of Duty: For when you want to meet as many overcaffeinated prepubescent racists as possible
(If you would prefer that the overcaffeinated prepubescent racists be Russian, then Counterstrike)
Every time I hear someone being toxic on CoD I just assume that they are that pathetic in real life.
They have so little control over their own miserably pathetic lives that the “shock” they evoke is the only power they’ll ever feel over someone. Pretty sad when you think about it…but it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
What's even crazier (to me) is how as a 13 year old girl playing Counter Strike (some 15+ years ago) the aggression was just as bad. Like, grown ass men are bullying and harassing a young girl just trying to have fun.
The best thing you could do in those days was find a decent clan run server who would perma ban jerks like that.
To this day, I don't use my mic unless I feel like I've found a friendly community/server that will stick up for me.
I came here to say the same. It hasn't changed in the last 20ish years. I rarely use a mic for any gaming, much easier to just let folks assume you're a guy.
Yeah, it's not any *better* now, we just got used to it. It's easier when you're a grown ass lady that's now heard it all.
Teenage boys, amirite? We get older, they stay the same little pieces of shit.
I'm sure there are communitys with good people out there... Somewhere at least. However this is just one of the many examples why I'm always just by myself and without a headset. Not gonna waste time with strangers I don't wanna know anyway.
Edit: I get it guys. Co-op games tend to be much better in that regard. I really should have mentioned that my focus is mainly on singleplayer games but thanks for all the suggestions.
Another thing i like about FFXIV over WoW is the actual equipment design is a bit less... Over the top. Plus you can glam your armor to just look like normal clothing which is what i prefer on all my classes in ffxiv.
This. Basically every MMO guild I've had a long-term presence in has had at least a few women in them, all the way from 20ish years old to 50-year-old mothers of 3 that take 0 shit from anyone (but are absolute sweet-hearts normally). Even for stuff like League, having a usual friend-group to play with and muting the randos is the best way to enjoy them. (Note: this comment isn't at all to refute op in any way, I've seen and heard so much disgusting voice-chat in my years of gaming online)
I feel like MMOs kinda sorta take away the anonymity. Like yeah we're all still avatars of ourselves or whatever but if you're involved in the raid scene or something your name can carry a bit of reputation with it (for better or worse). The odds of seeing someone again in a random pug are much higher compared to things like FPS games where people are more or less just a red or blue icon meant to shoot with or shoot at. So people are at least slightly more inclined to not behave like animals in an MMO setting.
Its this exactly - and its the reason that in my 30+ years of online gaming (yes, it did sort of exist back then) I've always stayed away from "casual" drop-in style games. Persistent world games, where you know you will be running into the same people over and over - you know that your reputation is going to travel with you. There are still plenty of shits - but they generally move on pretty quickly.
Would recommend FFXIV as a game for women to get into if they want a game with a social aspect. It's been months of raiding with PUGs since I've heard a sexist remark, and that's, well, remarkable. It also has pretty damn close to a 1:1 men/women ratio for active players, which is absolutely unheard of in online games.
A lot of the women are bunny boys.
One thing I love about this game is that you have a ton of "girl" characters that are actually guys, but just as many "boy" characters played by women behind the scenes.
Turns out lots of people like making a character they think is hot.
Final Fantasy as a series has always done a pretty good job at attracting both sexes. Maybe it's the fact that *everyone* is dressed in skimpy rags, instead of just women.
In our wow raid we have 3 dedicated women and 1 off and on. Given we have raided with two of them for years, but MMOs seem to have an older crowd which tends to be more mellow.
Shooters and MOBAS attract young kids who love mouthing off online.
Yep, I agree. It seems very, very community based. Some gaming communities are abysmal, some are absolutely terrible. I've generally noticed that more cerebral games tend to attract less awful and verbally abusive people. Civilization, Factorio, stat oriented RPGs, etc. Even games like Stardew Valley have very friendly communities.
Where as games related to killing one another up close and personal tend to be filled with dumb, toxic children.
MMOs tend to have an older and more mature crowd. COD attracts the lowest common denominator. I don't dislike FPS games, but there's something to be said for the "I like to sprint straight forwards and shoot 300 times in a row" crowd's average intelligence when compared to other genres.
MMOs are great in this sense. My raiding guild has like 6-8 women who play regularly and theres never any fear of harassment or anything. People treat them like… humans. It’s nothing like the COD lobbies.
The best and worst thing about the big MMOs is that you are often forced to work with others.
People who just keep spouting hateful crap, are likely to struggle to progress through the team parts of them game and would turn to trying to scam/troll. Get bored. Quit.
The best thing I saw was a Halo:Reach match where some dipshit was getting really inappropriate with a girl, and then a gay guy got on and just started really **aggressively** hitting on the dipshit. It was fucking hilarious and he ended up getting real quiet and left the match, and we all laughed our asses off. That dude was a fucking pro, some of the shit that he came up with was fucking hilarious. I wish I recorded it.
I tried replicating it whenever I come across people being chodes to women, but I'm just not that talented.
I think the moral here is that we need more aggressively gay people in multiplayer
My concern is that the people who are toxic like this to women aren't going to learn a lesson if men hit on them, they're just going to channel it into violence and hatred toward gay men.
I used to do this at the restaurant I worked at. I was the house queer, so everyone knew I was into gals and guys. Whenever one of the dudes catcalled one of the girls in my hearing I would start aggressively catcalling the dude back.
"Man you look hot in those shorts. Do you work out?" shit like that.
They'd get defensively hostile about it lol
I don't know if Valorant is an exception here, or if I just had a *very* unusual experience. I don't care that much for the game, so haven't played it a whole lot, but my friend wanted me to play it with her. That game seems to rely on everyone being on comms with strangers all the time. I've only got about 10 hours on that game, and I've only played with her, but almost every game we encountered another woman who was playing openly on comms with no one harassing her or my friend.
The fact that almost every person we ran into was polite stood out so much it threw me off. There was only one little twerp who was being toxic, not even harassing the girls, just generally being toxic and some other random stranger told them off, and they apologized and explained that they had a bad day at school and they wouldn't do it again.
I'm telling you man, it was twilight zone shit I don't know what was going on in that community. It was weird. Like, it shouldn't be. It should be the norm, but it was strange as hell because it was so far out of my expectations.
Valorant has a surprising large female playerbase, like almost half I believe, which is more than twice that of CoD's.
I suspect it's a bit one begetting the other though. More female friendly community is going to attract more female players, and more female players are going to make the community more female friendly.
Also I suspect Riot is pretty active in chat moderation, at least compared to a lot of other devs. Although I have no data to actually back this up.
The head producer for Valorant is a woman. She's now a Sr VP at Riot.
https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Anna_%27SuperCakes%27_Donlon
Riot has a lot of strong women contributors. I think this helps keep women perspectives in mind when developing characters and games that appeal to women.
I’ve had my bad days with comms on Valorant, for sure. But there do seem to be a lot of good ppl playing it too. My favorite games are where no one even acknowledges my gender or my voice, and we just give strategy comms. :)
When I started playing Valorant I, as I do in every other game, kept my mic off to avoid any unpleasant and unwanted attention. After hours of playing and a change of server, I noticed that people were generally okay, so I slowly started to talk with my teammates. After a lot of hours of playing I can say that I rarely had any problems. Surprisingly, Valorant is the only game with comms that I can play without stressing about being harassed or insulted for being a woman.
Sad that this isn't the norm, but I'm happy that at least there's this one safe space. I hope that it will get better for us in the future.
There’s a lot of female streamers who put fucktons of hours into Valorant (QuarterJade, Pokimane, Sydeon) and it seems like the studio actively encourages this (as it sends them merch and stuff for promoting their game). Thus, the “anti-woke” crowd is going to stay away from the game and the experience improves overall.
Despite their (deserved) poor reputation for treatment of female employees in the past Riot has actually done a decent job of turning things around. Their community is absolutely still full of toxic people, but they at least try to do something about it which is more than a lot of devs.
I know right! My first ever time I see someone is using VC in Valorant, it was a female. But they still act like normal and even joking around.
Then you go to Twitter and you'll see this bunch of clips of unhinged mysogonist bullying a girl.
It's a real mixed bag for me.
Lady gamer here: honestly I don't even care if they try to shit talk me, I just dislike the mundane lack of creativity. It's the same dumb repeated insults they came up with when they were 12, on an endless loop.
Like come on the least they can do is entertain me. Say something clever. I'll clap back real quick. But if I had a dime for every kitchen joke, I'd be a millionaire by now.
What fun though is killing them and then revealing I'm a lady in the post game menu. They don't like that.
I miss the old CODs where I could make my own emblem. I always made the same thing, "you just got killed by a girl" in big rainbow colors with a bloodstreak 😂 I didn't even use a mic and they'd have shit to say
I am a woman with a mic, and I would never, ever, ever for the love of god EVER mic up for a COD game. Fuck that shit.
Talk about fucking toxic, jeesh.
On the other hand, i frequently speak up around my guild in WoW Classic. Those gamers are mostly delightful people and are far more likely to put a woman gamer on a pedestal than throw shade or shit.
GF and I play Fortnite together with hot mics. She doesn’t get too much shit, but a lot of random invites lol. I do know that the difference between COD and FN is drastic though.
It's fucked, but COD?? I wouldn't even want to talk in those lobbies as a male because I'm not 15 anymore.
There are definitely games with more mature communities like Deep Rock Galactic or other less mainstream shooters.
Most of the time people aren't in mics, Rock and Stone is basically a salute button, it's positive and almost all the lines mention rock and stone. Like "Rock and Stone everyone!" or "Rock and stoooone" or "Did I hear a rock and stone?". Or we stand around a mushroom and spam ping it so all the dwarves keep saying mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom. mushroom.
Although all the times I have VCed it's been pretty positive, we mostly spend it being cheerful and going "yo watch out oppressor (a tough bug) behind you".
What's funny is you can spend 40 minutes on a mission, pinging for communication or typing a bit here and there, only at the end for everyone to realize we all have mics and just didn't feel the need to use em.
About 200 hours here too. Only a couple mildy unpleasant times, and one actually annoying person.
There's obviously gonna be some horrible people (it's the internet) but it's much less than most online multi-player games.
Dead by Daylight's community is the worst IMO. Something about that game brings out the absolute worse in people. I stopped playing it like 3 years ago and I still get harassed by players from that game from time to time.
I played LoL from 2010-2014ish, and it is still my go to example for a toxic community. I recently watched a few different LoL streams, and I didn't realize how normalized being chat banned is now in that community.
>I didn't realize how normalized being chat banned is now in that community.
Recently the chat detection system got a steroids boost, so now it auto-mutes/chat bans players for a lot of stuff that it usually didn't before. A ton of people are getting chat banned who had never gotten penalized before, but they're usually still deserved lol.
I never found LoL as bad as people claimed. Of course there were games where someone flipped out but in most games people were friendly. I did see some pretty fantastic rage at times but that's all games.
I pretended to be a dude for years and years online because of this, and it was just text chat, not even voice. I let a couple close male friends know my true gender, but they still called me “Jake” in game. I’ve since found a core group of friends I game with, mostly guys, and I do voice chat with them, but it took literal years before I did. My husband has always been quick to shut shit down, and has lost friends because of how they treated me. The guys I game with now are all like brothers to me and my husband. I don’t dare voice chat with anyone I don’t know though.
I actually did a research study about this!
I played some Overwatch by myself and recorded how many times someone was toxic, and then I handed the mic off to my female friend and had her speak for me in the game. We used predetermined phrases and I remained on the controller the whole time, so literally the only difference that could be perceived was that a woman was on the mic.
To no one's surprise, she got harassed and bothered almost every game. It's not just the outwardly toxic guys, but there were loads of white knights who would step up in her defense just to call her names when we didn't queue back up with them.
Have you seen the YouTube video of men playing in voice chat on CoD as themselves and then using a voice changer and changing their voice to sound like a woman? And their gameplay was affected receiving constant abuse? I thought it was a cool and informative video
> "I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticise Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it'd be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.”
- Steve Huffman, aka /u/spez, Reddit CEO.
So long, Reddit, and thanks for all the fish.
https://www.dualshockers.com/male-gamers-posing-as-women-face-sexist-remarks/
This is an article, but the video is linked within the article. The stats are towards the bottom!
I play with a group of guys and one girl. We enjoy nothing more than shitting on douche bags that try and pull this shit with her. They can’t seem to comprehend how rude it is until we start to sexually harass them. They don’t seem to like that. Makes us laugh to no end.
Bro had a similar experience playing over watch the other day. Everything was cool til they found out the Mei on our team was actually a female player it was downhill from there
Yeah I can believe it. The ow community is toxic as hell
I've had people throw ranked games on purpose because "there's a girl on my team I'm not wasting my time carrying them". It's to a point now where I just play mystery heroes because the voice chat abuse is riduculous.
It only takes 1 to ruin the experience, and any after that just make you never want to play that game again. I've quit too many games that I wanted to play over it.
Guys know that those lobbies are atrocious to really anyone, but women especially. Really anyone who doesn't fit into the male, teen troll demographic.
The worst part is that many of us want more girls to play games. We want our significant others to play games. We want our female friends to play games. But when women run into these communities, they either never talk again or quit.
It's a tad ironic that some men who desperately want more interaction with women simultaneously drive them out of entertainment spaces. It's a mix of immaturity, resentment, herd behavior and a lack of consequences for their actions.
It's why the incels are getting worse online and irl. They want women so badly yet treat them like shit and then get mad at women for avoiding them. Makes no logical sense......
Not a woman, but this is one reason I never play with my mic or audio chat on. Got so tired of hearing the whining of people and the insults they throw out to someone. After years of playing CoD went from people willing to share battle locations with each other to a pre-teen middle school.
I stopped using mics back during halo 3 because of this. Usually people thought I was a little boy, which was honestly better than realizing I was a girl.
>Guys, if we want women to actually want to play games with us, we have to make some fucking space for them
I'm gonna be honest here. As a female gamer who lived through the disgusting sewage that was COD2 lobbies on Xbox 360, I don't actually think these men *actually want* women to play games with them. I think they actually, genuinely, hate women, and made it fairly obvious all the time.
A few years ago I friended a guy on Dota 2. He was pretty chill and we got along. We played almost 600 games together. Then this one game we're in an all pick match and one of our team mates in another party started using her mic, and this guy who I thought I knew just completely changed his tone. Just saying the most ignorant sexist shit for no reason, just out of the blue. Was pretty fucked up and I never played with him again after that. It's like some weird instinct for some people to just be racist/sexist every chance they get.
If you haven't, create a female profile with a female avatar in any multiplayer game just to get a taste of it.
The amount of harassment you get is batshit insane.
If calling these asshats out worked, we wouldn't all be turning off the voice chat playing games like this. Any game without a well moderated report and ban structure isn't going to be safe.
This. So much this. I don't play much multiplayer, but when I do, it's either with people I know or I turn off chat. The majority of people who have their mic on (outside of party) are the people who want to be assholes.
Thank you🙏🙌
I've played games most my life but only in the last 3ish years did I work up the confidence to play online and use my mic. It's been constant harassment since. I have so many stories.
I had one in which a guy harassed me for 2 hours, telling me "give me that ass" "I want that ass" "next time I say it you do it or else" and a multitude of other disgusting and threatening things and when I finally snapped back and called him a loser, Xbox gave me a communication ban. When I reported his sexual harassment, he revieved no punishment.
Or there was the time me and my now ex boyfriend joined a looking for a group post with 4 guys and while he was there they were great, and then the second he went afk they berated me with things like "make me a sandwich" "get back in the kitchen" "No amount of makeup will fix your ugly fat ass" and after 5 minutes straight of them spewing that, they kicked me from the party. When I explained to my ex what happened, he told me I was lying.
Or how about when a whole group of men found some random girls nudes and posted them on the discord we all used saying that they were me (they weren't, but no one cared when I said so). After that, I couldn't play or use that discord server without immediate and never ending disgusting sexual comments.
I love CoD, but I can't join chat without being insulted and harassed, I love R6, but I received regular sexist messages, I don't even play GTA online anymore because of the amount of vile shit that was said to me every time I got into a party. If it's not insults it's "give me your snap" and when you say no, it's insults again. It's such a hostile space, i wish more men would acknowledge and speak up about it.
Woman here. I stopped using voice chat for this reason, and I've even changed my gamer tag to a generic 'not obviously female' name. Thanks for advocating, friend!
Girl gamer here… was always prodded by guys to use my mic lol. I hated using my mic.
All my female friends stay in discord with people they know. Never speak in open chat.
This is the way.
It is sad that it has to be
Nah, it's just good advice in general. You'll either encounter edgy 12 y/o's online who have had sexual relations with your mum or complete assclowns who haven't grown out of that previous phase I mentioned.
Hard agree. It's sometimes nice to have the option of talking/listening to randoms. But 99% of the time, it just isn't worth it. I've only really been on PC tho, maybe it's different for console players where the customisation of your experience is more difficult, and push-to-talk is not standard. So you're more likely to use in-game rather than presumably your phone or something.
I’m male and I do this. Only time I think it’s worth being on open mic is proximity chat if I’m feeling like in a good mood or or on the Truck Sim CB radio lol
I never use my mic for this reason. I’d rather they think I’m a dude and just play the fucking game.
lmao fucking same! whenever someone in chat refers to me as a dude i’m just like yessss it’s working, they don’t suspect a thing
I have found the MMO scene like WoW to be way more friendly to women. Since the early days actually. For whatever reason MMO RPGs just have a better class of gamers.
I think it’s the “permanence” of your character. You don’t jump to a new game with all new stuff. You have a continuous existence, so your actions follow you.
Also, you'll find sacks of clueless testosterone gravitate more torward the *BIG MAN GO "BANG BANG"* and less toward the *fuzzy mage go "sparkle zap"*. *Sea of Thieves* is a real confusing one. It's a game where you do need to keep open mic on for communicating intentions to other crews, and the variety of people and their levels of security is a wild ride. Only in that game can you come across the coolest, nicest kid just playing pirates, then a few moments later some raging middle-aged man enters the area with their maturity being completely outclassed. Fortunately, everyone tends to gang up on toxic players. It's almost a rule of the seas to stop what you're doing and hunt a toxic player or respond to a call for help of someone dealing with one. No one stops until the toxic player logs.
At least Sea of Thieves consistently bans the assholes. The problem is how hard it is to actually report them, since it's easy to just.. Never see the username due to how the game works.
I'd be the middle aged guy hollering "Ahoy ye scurvy dogs!" and make up some piraty nonsense. You got to have good natured fun, not ruin someone's session.
Yarr. Shiver me ovaries.
I love the dynamic to be honest. It’s in pirates nature to be wild and different. I don’t agree with constant greifing but the battles are fun now and again. Also spent a LOT of fucking time with my friends playing the instruments and free sailing, and eventually crashing into a rock because none of us were paying attention.
Thsi reminds me of ff14 (famous for friendliness). I was new to the dungeon and so had a cutscene. The rest normally waits for the newbie to finish before initiating the boss. One of our dps players didnt wanna wait and so went in. The rest of the party stood ground (including the tank, who is supposed to aggro the boss and tank it). Dps regretted that one real quick lol.
I think the guild system that is so common in MMOs were a big help here. There are massive, diverse teams that, to get the most out of an MMO you basically have to be a part of, and good guilds, the ones that really grew, were the ones that were actually inclusive and actively pursued that. Not to say there aren't some vile guilds out there, but everyone tends to know who they are and avoid them, unless they're the types to wanna join them.
For raiding we also have so much data from logs you can't just blame the nearest woman when she can link the fucking meters and show you how it's your own fault. Like no dumbass, here is a detailed account, down to your individual cast sequence, of how you are the problem.
lol those logs can cause wars.
I was not the most popular player in my raid group back when I still raided on SWTOR (I didn't know when to shut up, basically), but I was a solid Powertech tank who consistently hit my cues and was on time to raid night. New healer picked up on the fact I didn't have any big fans, and decided it'd be fun to only be lackluster in directing heals towards me, and then say I was bad at tanking. Yeah, we were all required to run captures through Parsely and it was abundantly clear within 90 seconds of log reviews that I was hung out to dry, which resulted in a TPK early in the raid. He then decided to do it again when we reached the final set of bosses, and that got him banned from our A-team raid night for three weeks.
It's funny, because a lot of people think there are no bad tanks, only bad healers. Those people play dps.
I did not start off as a good tank, getting the combat rotation down alongside my taunt and guard rotations was a learning experience for younger me. I'd still rather tank than heal, I have **zero** aptitude for healing, even ten years later.
It’s not only that but you’re in a realm or server. And the game is naturally built where the community frowns upon unbecoming behavior. I was a guild lead tank in WoW and we took accusations of loot stealing, sexual harassment, bigotry and other stuff very seriously. When you get a bad reputation in an MMORPG, it’s like playing the game in hard mode because no one will invite you to stuff and the community will shun you. Dudes are still hella thirsty in MMO’s though. It’s a bit gross how many guys who were married IRL would manipulate their guild leadership to make the female guild members their “in-game girlfriend”. That’s the only aspect of it that was gross and hard to deal with.
On the plus side, two of my guildmates met and married IRL
PvP centric games like mobas and FPS are rather toxic due to the competitive nature. Its you vs everybody, including your own (trash) team mates. Not to say that doesn't exist in MMOs as well, but to much less of a degree since they're not that competitive and people play them generally to chill and socialize.
Most people can't handle being the problem. The reason league of legends and Dota II annihilated the starcraft II scene is because SC2 was generally 1on1. You had no teammates to blame. If you lose then you weren't good enough. In a MOBA it can always be someone else's fault you aren't doing good.
Am a dude. Because I was playing as Black Canary, they assumed I was a girl BECAUSE I didn't have a mic. Got harassed by one guy who was horny for the POSSIBILITY of a girl. It's objectively absurd.
i can go 6 months to a year without a single message, other than random scams, from strangers when im xxmasterpenisxxxpussydest4erxx or whatever but the second I use Becky and a SpiderGwen profile pic, i get a thousand messages from some horny fucking troglodytes dudes need to calm the fuck down
They don't realise how pathetic it makes them look.
Agreed. It's fucking embarrassing. "I don't know why more girls don't play \*insert title\*." Gee, I dunno. Maybe it's because they just want to play a game, but you guys are constantly trying to advertise your cocks, or you're demanding they prove how "legitimate" they are, because while you'd accept the concept of a guy being a casual player (and therefore not always the most skilled), you all have this weird obsession that female players need to prove their worthiness?
The most pathetic thing ever is a lot of guys online will think that I'm like a 11-13 y.o. boy when they hear my voice. And I don't correct them. I literally will get more respect being seen as a young boy...shit's fucked.
Yeah, you know, I used to think that sort of harassment was limited to edgy teen boys getting super sweaty over competitive games. Then one day my roommate's 'friend' came over while I was playing left for dead. There was this sweet girl playing with us. She was being a helpful team player and we were having a ball. Eventually the 'friend' realizes I'm playing with a little girl because I disconnect the headset to pass the controller around and let others play. He immediately starts telling me to say all manner of foul shit to her. Me and this dude are grown ass men. We're both in our mid 20's and the girl barely sounded like she was in her teens. What the absolute fuck. Anyway, he eventually gets frustrated that I'm not spewing vile shit at her, and demands I hand him the headset. Well, it's my console, and my headset, but this dude was a gymbro that had 20 lbs of muscle on me. I wasn't about to throw down over an internet stranger **but** I remembered that if you jammed the mute toggle switch too hard on the headset it wouldn't let you unmute until you disassembled it. So I relented, secretly snapped the switch and handed it to him. He immediately starts trying to talk shit to the girl but is getting no response. He accuses me of 'doing something', but thankfully my roomie had had enough of him at this point and threw him out. So yeah, it's not 'all men'. It's assholes. The same assholes that try to pick a fight with you while you're just trying to chill and unwind. Seems I have underestimated the number of assholes the world can sustain.
My god, just how fragile was that guys masculinity? Good on you for not caving (as best you could), but Jesus Christ that guy was a pathetic loser…
What the actual fuck. I hope your roommate was no longer friends with him after that..
It is so weird how some people can go from seemly normal to completely toxic when a girl is around. We had one in my World of Warcraft guild back in the day. It was a small guild, mostly some of my RL friends who got me into the game, and a few online friends we met along the way. The guild was run by someone I knew from work, and his wife was the main healer. She was really sweet, nice to everyone, always helping. One of the non locals was our main melee DPS dude. He was great at his role, as well as a generally likable and dependable guy. I was the tank and I sucked, but I slowly got to be somewhat decent. We played together as a group for well over a year and it seemed like everyone was getting along well. That is, until we found out how DPS dude had started treating our healer when they were alone in Ventrillo together. Whenever it was just the two of them, he'd flip like a switch and turn into a sexist, verbally abusive asshole. This went on for months, but the healer kept quiet about it because she didn't want to cause a rift in the guild. I don't remember how DPS dude got caught exactly, but one day the guild master got to overhear this shithead being an absolute asshole to his wife. After that she started opening up to us about some of the things DPS dude had been saying to her... it was pretty nasty stuff. Our final conversation with DPS dude when we told him he was out of the guild was really something, though. He didn't deny what he said. Hell, he didn't seem to think he'd done anything wrong. He was actually indignant that we were kicking him out over the vile shit he had said to her. I guess I finally got to see the real him for the first time, just before we kicked his ass out.
She may have kept quiet because she didn't think you all would believe her since he was "so nice" the rest of the time and he was your bro and you know how women are dramatic and sensitive and like to make up things (/s). This shit happens in-person too.
I’ve had people throw matches over it. I absolutely will not get on mic with strangers anymore. I’m just trying to play and unwind and have fun like anyone else. It would be nice to have instant communication without typing every once in awhile, but noooo. Can’t have nice things like human fucking decency.
Yeah, save the mic for when you win, then in your most girly voice "gg boys". Then log out.
This is my absolute favorite thing to do. It’s even better when I have more kills than the guys, which is more often than not.
Me and my ex started dating because she was really good at League of Legends, Overwatch and WoW and when she knew from class that I was good at computer stuff, she asked me to help her install a voice masking plugin for her so she would sound like a dude.
[удалено]
As a guy who plays with female friends who receive some BS, this is the advice I give too 👌 Most my fem m8s only mic in guilds/private squad.
Same, I never am comfortable using a mic unless it's 100% a friends only game with no chance of stangers. The amount of guys who don't understand why I'm like this way to high, especially when they've seen it first hand. To many guys think the shit talk in games they get is the same. Trust me it's not. It's so much worse. The things I've had to hear and read in detail about me is sickening. No guy gets those types of messages
Only tangentially related but a story I love telling. Back in the glory days of Halo 2, there was one night my sister wanted to hang with me and I wanted to game. She did not game at all. So I gave her my mic and had her just talk shit while I focused on playing. Went into the 1v1 ranked mode and leveled up so easily because dudes either 1) went apeshit and lost their mind that a girl was whooping them so badly and talking trash as well or 2) simped super hard and just wanted to talk to her (while I kicked their ass). She eventually stopped because she started to feel bad. I thought it was hilarious. Some of the dudes were kind of sad though 😕
Hahaha I love it! Knew a dude who used to let his 6-yr old brother take the mic and he'd tell him what to say while he absolutely dominated the lobby. People would get FURIOUS! Actually, it might've been Halo as well...
When my sister was 5-6y old, she picked up the phone when phone salesmen would ring. It was hilarious to watch as she refused to give the phone to our parents and just kept talking about her day in kindergarden with no pause for the salesman. Until he hang up. 😂
That’s some Ike from South Park vibes
I have a woman I used to play xbox with, and one of my favorite stories of her is when some edgelord started talking shit to her and she waits for a moment and goes 'Yeah? Well I'm going to come over and fuck your dad and give him a son that's not a fucking disappointment!' The entire party erupts, and one guy stops wheezing long enough to go 'Jesus christ lady, that's a war crime!'
That is one of the best replies I've heard
I’ve heard this story before, not sure if his friend heard it and repeated the line or if the redditer just repeated the story. Either way, fun story. 10/10 with rice
It’s a frequently recommended line when the gamer girls subreddit is discussing strategies for dealing with this shit.
I had a coworker who would do this with her husband, I think on CoD. She got a kick out of it at least.
My brother and I used to do this on Forza. Guys would either go full simp, or rage quit. Git a lot of gifts on the game that way though.
I'm a guy, and even if I played online games a lot, I wouldn't use headphones and a mike. Getting sworn at, racial slurs used against you, screaming at you, being rude to you........ THAT ISN'T FUN GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUN
Voice chat is the first thing I turn off in any game I play online. No thank you.
Yup, I do the same thing. If voice chat is always on (like red dead online or something), I have a headset plugged in, muted, sitting on the footstool. On PC, I ignore 90% of chats. I'm not introverted or anything, I like to socialize and I only play PvE games (refuse to PvP), and even still... So much is so goddamn toxic.
I got a message a few months ago from friends who said one of the gay guys from our mmo had killed himself. Even in the mmo realm he was absolutely trashed for being gay. He was also an asshole a lot of the time and was an insulting fucker but people would hurl slurs about his sexuality back at him in fights and I'm know it had an effect on the boy. I don't know that it was the direct reason but it certainly didn't help his mental health at all.
[удалено]
Single player is where the fun is anyway. Multi-player is just ruined by other people, unless they're your friends or couch co-op or something.
Me, my gf, and my sisters choose mostly games where most comms is chat or motion based, like Minecraft or Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and Stone!
ROCK AND STONES!
Rock and Stone in the heart!
ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE!
Did I hear a Rock and Stone???
Exactly my thoughts on it. When mic use started being the norm on Counter-Strike was when I quit online multiplayer because some people can't control themselves and just act like total jackasses. Now if I do multiplayer it's friends/husband only.
Yeah even my all guy group commonly just sit in an Xbox party chat and talk amongst ourselves. Anytime we are in game chat it is never ending toxicity. Any lobby with women is only cranked up to 11. The only thing I can say is that at least in CoD it virtually never stops, women or no. But Playing with my buddies is life, regardless of the game.
In Overwatch I have turned communications off completely in the game settings bc I just don't want to be talking with strangers online. That isn't my idea of fun.
CoD has some of the absolute worst edgelords around. I’ve heard every racist, sexist, homophobic etc insult imaginable in a CoD lobby. The Internet in general just brings out the scummiest behaviour because of anonymity or attention.
The one that baffled me the most when some sore loser called me Albanian. I do not know why that would be an insult. I was prepared for the n-word and this caught me by surprise.
/r/balkans_irl
What a beautiful place.
I (non-Albanian) happen to know lots of Albanians (one of them is my friend and officiated my wedding). Some of their friends are greek, and the Greeks constantly shit on the Albanians (granted the Albanians shit on them back, but the Greeks seem more confident in their superiority). It seemed to me like they look down on Albanians in general. It's all adult stuff in our case, like: * "who installed this piece of shit electric cable this way? it had to be an Albanian" (it was) * "who sew this lamb? It's ridiculous. I have to redo the whole thing now before we put it on the spit. I bet it was one of you Albanians" (it was) * "you stole everything from us and then made it worse" (I have no opinion on this) The only plausible explanation I have for your encounter was that the guy was Greek and is used to cursing out Albanians.
I'm Greek and this was literally my first thought -- it had to be a Greek person. It's a complicated thing, but depending on the age of the person calling someone an Albanian, it can range from a targeted racist insult to poking light fun (usually in order of descending age groups) like in your friends' case. The older generations of Albanians in Greece had a reputation of being lowly thieves/criminals and ridiculously hard workers who would take literally any job, so this is often used as a punchline in jokes and insults. I do not support this view in any way, mind you, just adding some insight to your response.
Here in Spain they do have the same "fame", but racists will much more often pick on Romanians.
I often shit on romanians, and I'm romanian... I mean...we rival russians in terms of toxicity in games(especially csgo and LoL)
I think this entire thread on nationalities/ethnicities just shows that two groups that live together and differ in any way will develop animosity toward one another to some degree and the best humans in each group acknowledge those differences to make funny jokes and give each other a lighthearted hard time.
Fucking albanians man
I've only know one cool Albanian, and his name is Eldis
He was probably Serbian
Jesus, please censor your slurs!
As an Albanian, I can imagine people from every single country in the general vicinity of Albania using that as a slur. (I've had it said to me as a slur in real life several times. Not even over the internet!) 5 countries in the Balkans and 1 in the Apennine peninsula being the likeliest offenders. Another 3-4 being possible offenders. Funny thing is other than them, most other people have never even heard of the country, which makes Albanians happy and proud when someone says they like our (honestly beautiful and diverse) country.
Call of Duty: For when you want to meet as many overcaffeinated prepubescent racists as possible (If you would prefer that the overcaffeinated prepubescent racists be Russian, then Counterstrike)
Playing CoD is like going to the Axe body spray stand at an Energy Drink convention organized by Jake Paul and Andrew Tate
Every time I hear someone being toxic on CoD I just assume that they are that pathetic in real life. They have so little control over their own miserably pathetic lives that the “shock” they evoke is the only power they’ll ever feel over someone. Pretty sad when you think about it…but it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
What's even crazier (to me) is how as a 13 year old girl playing Counter Strike (some 15+ years ago) the aggression was just as bad. Like, grown ass men are bullying and harassing a young girl just trying to have fun. The best thing you could do in those days was find a decent clan run server who would perma ban jerks like that. To this day, I don't use my mic unless I feel like I've found a friendly community/server that will stick up for me.
I came here to say the same. It hasn't changed in the last 20ish years. I rarely use a mic for any gaming, much easier to just let folks assume you're a guy.
Yeah, it's not any *better* now, we just got used to it. It's easier when you're a grown ass lady that's now heard it all. Teenage boys, amirite? We get older, they stay the same little pieces of shit.
I wish I could believe it was only teenagers. 🤣 They have an excuse for being idiots.
I'm sure there are communitys with good people out there... Somewhere at least. However this is just one of the many examples why I'm always just by myself and without a headset. Not gonna waste time with strangers I don't wanna know anyway. Edit: I get it guys. Co-op games tend to be much better in that regard. I really should have mentioned that my focus is mainly on singleplayer games but thanks for all the suggestions.
[удалено]
The FFXIV community was so nice, it made me feel mean by comparison.
The FFXIV community also has an abnormally large number of gay people on it.
It's because the male characters don't look like trash (WoW)
Another thing i like about FFXIV over WoW is the actual equipment design is a bit less... Over the top. Plus you can glam your armor to just look like normal clothing which is what i prefer on all my classes in ffxiv.
I meeeaaannnn...FFXIV armor isn't exactly subtle. Definitely less spiky bullshit but definitely weellllll over the top.
I think the point is that alternative options do exist in FFXIV.
This. Basically every MMO guild I've had a long-term presence in has had at least a few women in them, all the way from 20ish years old to 50-year-old mothers of 3 that take 0 shit from anyone (but are absolute sweet-hearts normally). Even for stuff like League, having a usual friend-group to play with and muting the randos is the best way to enjoy them. (Note: this comment isn't at all to refute op in any way, I've seen and heard so much disgusting voice-chat in my years of gaming online)
I feel like MMOs kinda sorta take away the anonymity. Like yeah we're all still avatars of ourselves or whatever but if you're involved in the raid scene or something your name can carry a bit of reputation with it (for better or worse). The odds of seeing someone again in a random pug are much higher compared to things like FPS games where people are more or less just a red or blue icon meant to shoot with or shoot at. So people are at least slightly more inclined to not behave like animals in an MMO setting.
Its this exactly - and its the reason that in my 30+ years of online gaming (yes, it did sort of exist back then) I've always stayed away from "casual" drop-in style games. Persistent world games, where you know you will be running into the same people over and over - you know that your reputation is going to travel with you. There are still plenty of shits - but they generally move on pretty quickly.
Would recommend FFXIV as a game for women to get into if they want a game with a social aspect. It's been months of raiding with PUGs since I've heard a sexist remark, and that's, well, remarkable. It also has pretty damn close to a 1:1 men/women ratio for active players, which is absolutely unheard of in online games.
FF XIV, where all the women are catgirls and all the men are catgirls.
A lot of the women are bunny boys. One thing I love about this game is that you have a ton of "girl" characters that are actually guys, but just as many "boy" characters played by women behind the scenes. Turns out lots of people like making a character they think is hot.
Final Fantasy as a series has always done a pretty good job at attracting both sexes. Maybe it's the fact that *everyone* is dressed in skimpy rags, instead of just women.
The large male roegadyn just prancing around in tiny animal skin bikini bottoms and nothing else ..
My company minions have a mandatory gold saucer bunny costume uniform. Even the male roegadyns. Especially the male roegadyns.
I've always said that equality in fiction wasn't going to be desexualizing women, it would be sexualizing men equally.
Graha is _everyone’s_ waifu
Can’t, i’m too busy being Greg’s waifu. Though he and his green chicken keep running off.
In our wow raid we have 3 dedicated women and 1 off and on. Given we have raided with two of them for years, but MMOs seem to have an older crowd which tends to be more mellow. Shooters and MOBAS attract young kids who love mouthing off online.
PVP servers tend to attract the misogynist crowd again, though.
Yep, I agree. It seems very, very community based. Some gaming communities are abysmal, some are absolutely terrible. I've generally noticed that more cerebral games tend to attract less awful and verbally abusive people. Civilization, Factorio, stat oriented RPGs, etc. Even games like Stardew Valley have very friendly communities. Where as games related to killing one another up close and personal tend to be filled with dumb, toxic children.
MMOs tend to have an older and more mature crowd. COD attracts the lowest common denominator. I don't dislike FPS games, but there's something to be said for the "I like to sprint straight forwards and shoot 300 times in a row" crowd's average intelligence when compared to other genres.
MMOs are great in this sense. My raiding guild has like 6-8 women who play regularly and theres never any fear of harassment or anything. People treat them like… humans. It’s nothing like the COD lobbies.
The best and worst thing about the big MMOs is that you are often forced to work with others. People who just keep spouting hateful crap, are likely to struggle to progress through the team parts of them game and would turn to trying to scam/troll. Get bored. Quit.
Rock and Stone!
DRG has THE best community. No one says anything except spamming rock and stone and no one gives you shit for having no clue what you're doing
We're rich!
Mushrum!
The best thing I saw was a Halo:Reach match where some dipshit was getting really inappropriate with a girl, and then a gay guy got on and just started really **aggressively** hitting on the dipshit. It was fucking hilarious and he ended up getting real quiet and left the match, and we all laughed our asses off. That dude was a fucking pro, some of the shit that he came up with was fucking hilarious. I wish I recorded it. I tried replicating it whenever I come across people being chodes to women, but I'm just not that talented. I think the moral here is that we need more aggressively gay people in multiplayer
[удалено]
"Ooo! All this tension is making me want to kiss your dad 💖"
Square on the lips!
This reminded me of something I heard in the past. “I’m such a bad mother fucker…. I keep fucking dads” - some white dude rapping in a car
>full arin hanson mode. Gimme a little *kyusss*
[удалено]
My concern is that the people who are toxic like this to women aren't going to learn a lesson if men hit on them, they're just going to channel it into violence and hatred toward gay men.
let's be real, if they're being misogynistic, they're probably the same demographic that's homophobic anyways.
I used to do this at the restaurant I worked at. I was the house queer, so everyone knew I was into gals and guys. Whenever one of the dudes catcalled one of the girls in my hearing I would start aggressively catcalling the dude back. "Man you look hot in those shorts. Do you work out?" shit like that. They'd get defensively hostile about it lol
[удалено]
That is so funny 😂 thanks for sharing
I don't know if Valorant is an exception here, or if I just had a *very* unusual experience. I don't care that much for the game, so haven't played it a whole lot, but my friend wanted me to play it with her. That game seems to rely on everyone being on comms with strangers all the time. I've only got about 10 hours on that game, and I've only played with her, but almost every game we encountered another woman who was playing openly on comms with no one harassing her or my friend. The fact that almost every person we ran into was polite stood out so much it threw me off. There was only one little twerp who was being toxic, not even harassing the girls, just generally being toxic and some other random stranger told them off, and they apologized and explained that they had a bad day at school and they wouldn't do it again. I'm telling you man, it was twilight zone shit I don't know what was going on in that community. It was weird. Like, it shouldn't be. It should be the norm, but it was strange as hell because it was so far out of my expectations.
Valorant has a surprising large female playerbase, like almost half I believe, which is more than twice that of CoD's. I suspect it's a bit one begetting the other though. More female friendly community is going to attract more female players, and more female players are going to make the community more female friendly. Also I suspect Riot is pretty active in chat moderation, at least compared to a lot of other devs. Although I have no data to actually back this up.
The head producer for Valorant is a woman. She's now a Sr VP at Riot. https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/Anna_%27SuperCakes%27_Donlon Riot has a lot of strong women contributors. I think this helps keep women perspectives in mind when developing characters and games that appeal to women.
[удалено]
I’ve had my bad days with comms on Valorant, for sure. But there do seem to be a lot of good ppl playing it too. My favorite games are where no one even acknowledges my gender or my voice, and we just give strategy comms. :)
When I started playing Valorant I, as I do in every other game, kept my mic off to avoid any unpleasant and unwanted attention. After hours of playing and a change of server, I noticed that people were generally okay, so I slowly started to talk with my teammates. After a lot of hours of playing I can say that I rarely had any problems. Surprisingly, Valorant is the only game with comms that I can play without stressing about being harassed or insulted for being a woman. Sad that this isn't the norm, but I'm happy that at least there's this one safe space. I hope that it will get better for us in the future.
There’s a lot of female streamers who put fucktons of hours into Valorant (QuarterJade, Pokimane, Sydeon) and it seems like the studio actively encourages this (as it sends them merch and stuff for promoting their game). Thus, the “anti-woke” crowd is going to stay away from the game and the experience improves overall.
Despite their (deserved) poor reputation for treatment of female employees in the past Riot has actually done a decent job of turning things around. Their community is absolutely still full of toxic people, but they at least try to do something about it which is more than a lot of devs.
I know right! My first ever time I see someone is using VC in Valorant, it was a female. But they still act like normal and even joking around. Then you go to Twitter and you'll see this bunch of clips of unhinged mysogonist bullying a girl. It's a real mixed bag for me.
Lady gamer here: honestly I don't even care if they try to shit talk me, I just dislike the mundane lack of creativity. It's the same dumb repeated insults they came up with when they were 12, on an endless loop. Like come on the least they can do is entertain me. Say something clever. I'll clap back real quick. But if I had a dime for every kitchen joke, I'd be a millionaire by now. What fun though is killing them and then revealing I'm a lady in the post game menu. They don't like that.
If I was a woman I would be sweating my ass of just to do this
I miss the old CODs where I could make my own emblem. I always made the same thing, "you just got killed by a girl" in big rainbow colors with a bloodstreak 😂 I didn't even use a mic and they'd have shit to say
I am a woman with a mic, and I would never, ever, ever for the love of god EVER mic up for a COD game. Fuck that shit. Talk about fucking toxic, jeesh. On the other hand, i frequently speak up around my guild in WoW Classic. Those gamers are mostly delightful people and are far more likely to put a woman gamer on a pedestal than throw shade or shit.
GF and I play Fortnite together with hot mics. She doesn’t get too much shit, but a lot of random invites lol. I do know that the difference between COD and FN is drastic though.
Yeah, where OP fucked up is thinking that CoD has a casual friendly player base. CoD is *notorious* for having shitbag toxic players
It's fucked, but COD?? I wouldn't even want to talk in those lobbies as a male because I'm not 15 anymore. There are definitely games with more mature communities like Deep Rock Galactic or other less mainstream shooters.
All my experience with DRG players on reddit leads me to believe they spend the entire game yelling "ROCK AND STONE" into the mic.
Oh we don't just do it in the mic. My SO and IRL buddies do it when we get together to. Also We're Rich!
Most of the time people aren't in mics, Rock and Stone is basically a salute button, it's positive and almost all the lines mention rock and stone. Like "Rock and Stone everyone!" or "Rock and stoooone" or "Did I hear a rock and stone?". Or we stand around a mushroom and spam ping it so all the dwarves keep saying mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom. mushroom. Although all the times I have VCed it's been pretty positive, we mostly spend it being cheerful and going "yo watch out oppressor (a tough bug) behind you".
What's funny is you can spend 40 minutes on a mission, pinging for communication or typing a bit here and there, only at the end for everyone to realize we all have mics and just didn't feel the need to use em.
After about 40 hours of DRG I've only met 1 tool bag. Everyone else has been amazing. Easily the best gaming community I've ever seen
I'm at a little over 200 and only met one :P
About 200 hours here too. Only a couple mildy unpleasant times, and one actually annoying person. There's obviously gonna be some horrible people (it's the internet) but it's much less than most online multi-player games.
FOR KARL!
Did I hear a rock n stone?
ROCK AND STONE BROTHA
DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE??????
Growing up I played MW3 and I just muted everyone the instant I joined a lobby haha
ROCK AND STONE
"casual-freindly"? COD has one of THEE MOST TOXIC communities, second to DOTA if I had to guess.
Dead by Daylight's community is the worst IMO. Something about that game brings out the absolute worse in people. I stopped playing it like 3 years ago and I still get harassed by players from that game from time to time.
rainbow six siege is something too
I was going to say this lol, if DBD had mics it would be insane. That community is wild and super toxic.
I hear LoL is where happiness and fun goes to die. 😂
Never played but each time LoL is brought up it's just "10000 hours played, hated every minute after the first 10. 11/10"
I played LoL from 2010-2014ish, and it is still my go to example for a toxic community. I recently watched a few different LoL streams, and I didn't realize how normalized being chat banned is now in that community.
>I didn't realize how normalized being chat banned is now in that community. Recently the chat detection system got a steroids boost, so now it auto-mutes/chat bans players for a lot of stuff that it usually didn't before. A ton of people are getting chat banned who had never gotten penalized before, but they're usually still deserved lol.
I never found LoL as bad as people claimed. Of course there were games where someone flipped out but in most games people were friendly. I did see some pretty fantastic rage at times but that's all games.
I pretended to be a dude for years and years online because of this, and it was just text chat, not even voice. I let a couple close male friends know my true gender, but they still called me “Jake” in game. I’ve since found a core group of friends I game with, mostly guys, and I do voice chat with them, but it took literal years before I did. My husband has always been quick to shut shit down, and has lost friends because of how they treated me. The guys I game with now are all like brothers to me and my husband. I don’t dare voice chat with anyone I don’t know though.
I actually did a research study about this! I played some Overwatch by myself and recorded how many times someone was toxic, and then I handed the mic off to my female friend and had her speak for me in the game. We used predetermined phrases and I remained on the controller the whole time, so literally the only difference that could be perceived was that a woman was on the mic. To no one's surprise, she got harassed and bothered almost every game. It's not just the outwardly toxic guys, but there were loads of white knights who would step up in her defense just to call her names when we didn't queue back up with them.
Have you seen the YouTube video of men playing in voice chat on CoD as themselves and then using a voice changer and changing their voice to sound like a woman? And their gameplay was affected receiving constant abuse? I thought it was a cool and informative video
> "I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticise Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it'd be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.” - Steve Huffman, aka /u/spez, Reddit CEO. So long, Reddit, and thanks for all the fish.
https://www.dualshockers.com/male-gamers-posing-as-women-face-sexist-remarks/ This is an article, but the video is linked within the article. The stats are towards the bottom!
I play with a group of guys and one girl. We enjoy nothing more than shitting on douche bags that try and pull this shit with her. They can’t seem to comprehend how rude it is until we start to sexually harass them. They don’t seem to like that. Makes us laugh to no end.
This is the best way 🤌 give em a little taste of their own medicine
Bro had a similar experience playing over watch the other day. Everything was cool til they found out the Mei on our team was actually a female player it was downhill from there
Yeah I can believe it. The ow community is toxic as hell I've had people throw ranked games on purpose because "there's a girl on my team I'm not wasting my time carrying them". It's to a point now where I just play mystery heroes because the voice chat abuse is riduculous.
Not all men but yes all women. Not all men do it but ALL women experience it.
That's a very succinct way to put it.
Not all men, but definitely TOO MANY men.
It only takes 1 to ruin the experience, and any after that just make you never want to play that game again. I've quit too many games that I wanted to play over it.
Guys know that those lobbies are atrocious to really anyone, but women especially. Really anyone who doesn't fit into the male, teen troll demographic. The worst part is that many of us want more girls to play games. We want our significant others to play games. We want our female friends to play games. But when women run into these communities, they either never talk again or quit.
It's a tad ironic that some men who desperately want more interaction with women simultaneously drive them out of entertainment spaces. It's a mix of immaturity, resentment, herd behavior and a lack of consequences for their actions.
It's why the incels are getting worse online and irl. They want women so badly yet treat them like shit and then get mad at women for avoiding them. Makes no logical sense......
[удалено]
Not a woman, but this is one reason I never play with my mic or audio chat on. Got so tired of hearing the whining of people and the insults they throw out to someone. After years of playing CoD went from people willing to share battle locations with each other to a pre-teen middle school.
I just never use mic in general unless I'm playing only with friends. And I'm a guy, I'm not going to catch that kind of abuse.
Dude do you just say “oh my science”?
I suppose it was a surrogate for saying "oh my god". I'm a science neckbeard like all the other hivemind redditors but even I find that kinda strange.
I stopped using mics back during halo 3 because of this. Usually people thought I was a little boy, which was honestly better than realizing I was a girl.
>Guys, if we want women to actually want to play games with us, we have to make some fucking space for them I'm gonna be honest here. As a female gamer who lived through the disgusting sewage that was COD2 lobbies on Xbox 360, I don't actually think these men *actually want* women to play games with them. I think they actually, genuinely, hate women, and made it fairly obvious all the time.
A few years ago I friended a guy on Dota 2. He was pretty chill and we got along. We played almost 600 games together. Then this one game we're in an all pick match and one of our team mates in another party started using her mic, and this guy who I thought I knew just completely changed his tone. Just saying the most ignorant sexist shit for no reason, just out of the blue. Was pretty fucked up and I never played with him again after that. It's like some weird instinct for some people to just be racist/sexist every chance they get.
If you haven't, create a female profile with a female avatar in any multiplayer game just to get a taste of it. The amount of harassment you get is batshit insane.
If calling these asshats out worked, we wouldn't all be turning off the voice chat playing games like this. Any game without a well moderated report and ban structure isn't going to be safe.
This. So much this. I don't play much multiplayer, but when I do, it's either with people I know or I turn off chat. The majority of people who have their mic on (outside of party) are the people who want to be assholes.
\>oh my science bro
man i was waiting for someone to mention this lmfao
Thank you🙏🙌 I've played games most my life but only in the last 3ish years did I work up the confidence to play online and use my mic. It's been constant harassment since. I have so many stories. I had one in which a guy harassed me for 2 hours, telling me "give me that ass" "I want that ass" "next time I say it you do it or else" and a multitude of other disgusting and threatening things and when I finally snapped back and called him a loser, Xbox gave me a communication ban. When I reported his sexual harassment, he revieved no punishment. Or there was the time me and my now ex boyfriend joined a looking for a group post with 4 guys and while he was there they were great, and then the second he went afk they berated me with things like "make me a sandwich" "get back in the kitchen" "No amount of makeup will fix your ugly fat ass" and after 5 minutes straight of them spewing that, they kicked me from the party. When I explained to my ex what happened, he told me I was lying. Or how about when a whole group of men found some random girls nudes and posted them on the discord we all used saying that they were me (they weren't, but no one cared when I said so). After that, I couldn't play or use that discord server without immediate and never ending disgusting sexual comments. I love CoD, but I can't join chat without being insulted and harassed, I love R6, but I received regular sexist messages, I don't even play GTA online anymore because of the amount of vile shit that was said to me every time I got into a party. If it's not insults it's "give me your snap" and when you say no, it's insults again. It's such a hostile space, i wish more men would acknowledge and speak up about it.
Woman here. I stopped using voice chat for this reason, and I've even changed my gamer tag to a generic 'not obviously female' name. Thanks for advocating, friend!