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MIC: Overwatch players turn to Reddit to share their stories of Harrassment

KarmaCow

Member
I have no problem with girls/women shit talking, I would encourage them to do so. There's plenty of mean shit you can say to hurt a boy/guy's ego who's trying to insult you, it's up to them to think of it.

I don't know why you're pretending like there's some creativity or depth to shit talking you run into multiplayer games. Look through the examples in the OP, it's idiots regurgitating shit they think is edgy. There's no need to perpetuate that garbage.
 

Tahnit

Banned
I dont know if I got the "good decent people" lottery or what but i have never had this problem. Anytime a girl gets on mic everyone treats her the same as anyone else. Not special, they dont even call out that shes a woman. They just treat her as a teammate. And this has happened tons of times. I have not yet heard a woman get discriminated against in game.

Is this a console thing maybe? Maybe the PC crowd are generally an older generation and know how to treat people with respect?
 

Maximus P

Member
I too would like to see harsh punishments for these assholes.

Not the same, but the abusive personal messages I've received in fifa is a sight to behold. From people simply calling me a 'cunt' to others wishing cancer on my children. I always report to MS, and make a note of their gamer tag.

It's a shame that when I look into some of these people weeks later I can see that their profiles are still active. I've heard that Microsoft opts for short communication bans for abusive individuals rather than out right bans.
 
Why is this every Junkrat main's defense? It doesn't mean shit. In most scenarios the issue is Junkrat cannot provide enough consistent sustained DPS to follow through with the critical elims that'll win a team fight. Overwatch will give you an "elimination" even if you just barely damage an enemy heroe before a killing blow. Having high damage doesn't mean shit if you're not able to consistenty get the necessary picks as one of the DPS heroes to win a team fight.

Unless your team is winning, your perceived individual contribution doesn't mean anything, and it's rare that a Junkrat is meaningfully contributing to a win outside of some very specific scenario or if the rest of your team is already carrying you.

Your post doesn't make any sense.
 

finalflame

Gold Member
I dont know if I got the "good decent people" lottery or what but i have never had this problem. Anytime a girl gets on mic everyone treats her the same as anyone else. Not special, they dont even call out that shes a woman. They just treat her as a teammate. And this has happened tons of times. I have not yet heard a woman get discriminated against in game.

Is this a console thing maybe? Maybe the PC crowd are generally an older generation and know how to treat people with respect?

This has also been my experience in Overwatch on PC. I've more often seen Koreans getting racist hate, but that's not often either.

Your post doesn't make any sense.

Thinking gold medals are a valid, 100% representative measure of your contribution to a game of Overwatch doesn't make sense. But sure, feel free to not address that.
 

Wanderer5

Member
tumblr_ols8ed3ivp1v53vrbo6_1280.png

Oh jeez. -_- (white male with Lucio having the most playtime here)

Glad I haven't seen much of the toxic dipshit in Overwatch. Hiding behind the screen can really bring out the worse of people.
 
Yes. Mostly boys/men have been playing multiplayer since the mid-late 90s and nobody has complained until now. Going through shit talking is a rite of passage.

Yes let's just dismiss the hundreds of women and minorities who say it is a huge issue hampering their enjoyment of their hobby because somehow they aren't as tough and thick skinned as the boys/men of the 1990s or something.

FOH.
 
I wonder how much of the overall populace of OW is responsible for that toxicity.

In my own personal experience, I've found it to be a very small minority of the games population overall, on PC at least. As somebody who switches between American and European servers and mainly plays Quickplay and Arcade and uses mic fairly often it's a rare occurence for me to get something toxic hurled at me in regards to my sex in either voice chat or text chat. Now if I were to switch over to Competitive, whoo boy! Shit gets heated quick, especially when communicating over mic. Seems like tons of people will find any excuse to insult you based on your sex, gender, race or various other things in competitive, especially when your team is losing. Lost count of the amount of times I was told to "Stop playing and get back in the kitchen...bitch."
 

duckroll

Member
I want to congratulate Angry Fork for winning the Most Representative Of All The Problems With Online Gamers award in this thread.

This is called the internet. Before games became more mainstream all people did in counter strike or Socom 2 or other early online games was talk shit to people, it's not a new phenomenon. There are plenty of mute/block functionalities now if you don't want to hear it. Either that or talk shit back.

Yes, it is okay, and no it's not ruining multiplayer/the internet.

Ok but there are 3 options:

1. Mute/block people who offend you. If this functionality isn't in the game then that's a dev problem as it should be a mandatory feature in all games now.
2. Grow thicker skin, fight back, stop taking anonymous people seriously.
3. Have games get rid of all forms of communication because all of them can be used to shit talk people.

The 3rd one is the Nintendo option. It sucks and shouldn't be done.

Yes. Mostly boys/men have been playing multiplayer since the mid-late 90s and nobody has complained until now. Going through shit talking is a rite of passage.

I have no problem with girls/women shit talking, I would encourage them to do so. There's plenty of mean shit you can say to hurt a boy/guy's ego who's trying to insult you, it's up to them to think of it.
 

moerser

Member
im playing on eu pc and have to say i gladly never heard anything like this. i would absolutely destroy anybody who does shit like that. this behaviour is not tolerable.

(special shout out and thanks to that french women who carried me so hard with her ana)
 
Thinking gold medals are a valid, 100% representative measure of your contribution to a game of Overwatch doesn't make sense. But sure, feel free to not address that.

I didn't say it was 100% representative. In any case, I'll continue having fun playing Junkrat in competitive mode. I hope that you enjoy your time playing this video game too.
 

This will never stop happening to someone. It's impossible to have some solution that prevents anyone from getting on the mic in an online game and being a troll or harrassing.

It's simply impossible to police every offense or spend money researching every case. Maybe if you want your Xbox live and PS+ to go up in price by $50 a year so they can hire whole teams to listen to chat logs and servers to store the voice data.

It's a reality of the internet and the best way to fix it is a case by case basis where you mute the ones that cause trouble.
 

xealo

Member
I dont know if I got the "good decent people" lottery or what but i have never had this problem. Anytime a girl gets on mic everyone treats her the same as anyone else. Not special, they dont even call out that shes a woman. They just treat her as a teammate. And this has happened tons of times. I have not yet heard a woman get discriminated against in game.

Is this a console thing maybe? Maybe the PC crowd are generally an older generation and know how to treat people with respect?

Probably depends on matchmaking rating. In most multiplayer games I've played the more serious people get with wanting to win, the more well behaved communication tends to get.

Average skill rating and below is an MMR hell in more ways than people just playing badly.
 

Spinluck

Member
I have no problem with girls/women shit talking, I would encourage them to do so. There's plenty of mean shit you can say to hurt a boy/guy's ego who's trying to insult you, it's up to them to think of it.

Yeah that'll definitely help man.

They should just shit talk back. That will suppress misogynistic bullshit from insecure man children!

Especially when out numbered, that'll work!
 
Yeah that'll definitely help man.

They should just shit talk back. That will suppress misogynistic bullshit from insecure man children!

Especially when out numbered, that'll work!
I wonder why it's taken so long for young girls and women to get into this as a hobby in larger numbers.

Hmmmm.
 
Fucking hell this sucks so much.

Overwatch is the first online multiplayer in which I've engaged with the community because even me as a guy I'm not into getting yelled at for whatever stupid reason, luckily this hasn't been an occurrence, even with women on the group.

Having said that, I came across a girl that said although the Overwatch community in Xbox is way less toxic than the Halo 5 one, she's still encounters those type of messages every now and then.

That's just sad.
 
Thinking gold medals are a valid, 100% representative measure of your contribution to a game of Overwatch doesn't make sense. But sure, feel free to not address that.

I'm going to take a stab at this and say that it "doesn't make sense" that your takeaway from someone mentioning experiencing messages telling them to switch in comp is to rant on how they might play due to the meta and not address the presumed toxic behavior, the thing that really matters.
 

hitmon

Member
Didn't they use to have a block or avoid player feature (at least on PC)? They need to bring that option back or get that shit implemented.
 

GLAMr

Member
IMO, anybody who doesn't call people out for being racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic in chat is just as bad as the perpetrators. I don't care how white, straight and male you are; if we all stood up against these pricks they would pull their heads in. We need to generate a culture where this is unacceptable.

I've been abused, threatened and banned for standing up to bullies in online games, and I don't regret it.
 
I'm curious, is Overwatch worse than most other games for abhorrent comments? I read it a lot in relation to it but wonder if is because the game attracts a larger spectrum than a standard military shooter.

I've played nearly nothing of the game because the bots are kinda crappy to play against and even then I won't always have a solid enough connection to play.

That said, the first time I got online the global chat on the menu had someone who was making very graphically pedophilic comments to another player who they implied was an underage boy. I honestly haven't seen that sort of thing in global chats before and I hope reporting them actually did something.
 

Blizzard

Banned
Someone in this thread has already said it—this sort of stuff comes with the territory, and its part of the trade off that you get with anonymity.
I would suggest two counterpoints.

1. "Can I get some nudes?" and "I bet you have a fat cunt." are literal quotes from the OP, and they should not come with the territory. Societal change needs people to stand up against behavior like this rather than accepting it as the status quo.

2. Facebook has shown that scummy behavior doesn't go away once anonymity is removed, sadly.
 

finalflame

Gold Member
I'm going to take a stab at this and say that it "doesn't make sense" that your takeaway from someone mentioning experiencing messages telling them to switch in comp is to rant on how they might play due to the meta and not address the presumed toxic behavior, the thing that really matters.
Choosing to play an ineffective hero and refusing to adapt to help your team in a competitive game mode is far more egregious toxic behavior, IMO. So is misunderstanding the medal system and using it to justify your toxic, selfish, non-contributive behavior.

Does this mean people are entitled to being insulting towards OP? Nah, not acceptable under any circumstances. Are they entitled to being respectfully upset? Yup.
 
Choosing to play an ineffective hero and refusing to adapt to help your team in a competitive game mode is far more egregious toxic behavior, IMO. So is misunderstanding the medal system and using it to justify your toxic, selfish, non-contributive behavior.

Does this mean people are entitled to being insulting towards OP? Nah, not acceptable under any circumstances. Are they entitled to being respectfully upset? Yup.
...

Yeah no
 
I don't get why people are like that. I was never like that but then again, Back in my old days there weren't a whole bunch of voice chat around either. I think the first time i actually knowingly stumbled upon a woman in a game was WOW but i thought nothing of it.

Guess I was raised right.
I only play with friends these days so my view on the online community is kind of limited. However whenever I do get dipped into a public voice chat I nope out of there instantly.

If i caught my kids acting that way, Oh man.
 

Azoor

Member
I had a guy call me the N word one time, I reported him and I always encourage people not to be quiet about harassment of any kind.
 

finalflame

Gold Member
...

Yeah no

^OVERWATCH^
Yeah, yes. Disagree all you want, but much like in MOBAs, if an individual is a non-contributor and refuses to be a team player, they bring the rest of the team down with them. This is going to upset your teammates in a competitive game mode where a lot of your focus is on winning, period. Whether or not they choose to be vocal about it is a function of their personality.

To be clear, this never justifies sexist, insulting, and/or otherwise offensive dialog towards anyone, but it is what it is.
 
Yeah, yes. Disagree all you want, but much like in MOBAs, if an individual is a non-contributor and refuses to be a team player, they bring the rest of the team down with them. This is going to upset your teammates, period. Whether or not they choose to be vocal about it is a function of their personality.

To be clear, this never justifies sexist, insulting, and/or otherwise offensive dialog towards anyone, but it is what it is.
Jesus Christ you're saying that someone choosing to play a character they like best in a video game designed to be played for fun are the equivalent to being insulted, degraded, debased and dehumanized.

Gamers everybody.
 

Azoor

Member
I'm curious, is Overwatch worse than most other games for abhorrent comments? I read it a lot in relation to it but wonder if is because the game attracts a larger spectrum than a standard military shooter.

I've played nearly nothing of the game because the bots are kinda crappy to play against and even then I won't always have a solid enough connection to play.

That said, the first time I got online the global chat on the menu had someone who was making very graphically pedophilic comments to another player who they implied was an underage boy. I honestly haven't seen that sort of thing in global chats before and I hope reporting them actually did something.

As someone who used to play a lot of online games back in the 360 days, Overwatch is not nearly as awful as games like COD or Halo, at least in my experience.
 

Christhor

Member
I didn't say it was 100% representative. In any case, I'll continue having fun playing Junkrat in competitive mode. I hope that you enjoy your time playing this video game too.

Overwatch is fun, having fun is fun, but why would you go play comp if you're not playing to win? The arcade modes are the most fun part of Overwatch anyway and don't have the toxicity.
 

kcxiv

Member
haha, i had some guy wanting my home address, because he said i disrespected him. He said he was gonna shoot me! haha dead serious. Im like, yeah, you just want my address so you can send me a 10 pizza's and foot me with the bill!

I told him to hit me up on twitter or email, but yeah, he never did.
 

xealo

Member
...

Yeah no

Competitive is competitive mode for a reason. If you're going to pick a hero who spends his time dealing trash damage that gets healed up quickly but feeds the other teams healer ult charges faster, go to quick play or arcade.

Junkrat has problems in competitive because most of the time he's just not able to finish off the players he deals damage to. I'm not saying they deserve to be insulted for it, but it's not entirely unreasonable to have other players question that particular character pick, if done in a reasonable tone.

I like playing Junkrat. I think he's a fun character. But I wouldn't do so in competitive, for much of the reason I don't play Torb in there either, even though Torb is one of my most picked heroes in defence quickplay.
 
Yeah, yes. Disagree all you want, but much like in MOBAs, if an individual is a non-contributor and refuses to be a team player, they bring the rest of the team down with them. This is going to upset your teammates in a competitive game mode where a lot of your focus is on winning, period. Whether or not they choose to be vocal about it is a function of their personality.

To be clear, this never justifies sexist, insulting, and/or otherwise offensive dialog towards anyone, but it is what it is.

I feel like you've got an axe to grind with people who don't live up to your expectations of teamplay in a team shooter, and are trying way too hard to marry it to the topic of vile abuse lobbed at people over things they can't help, like being women.

Like, your point is taken but nobody gives a shit.
 

finalflame

Gold Member
Jesus Christ you're saying that someone choosing to play a character they like best in a video game designed to be played for fun are the equivalent to being insulted, degraded, debased and dehumanized.

Gamers everybody.

Choosing to ruin the game for 5 other people because you insist on being selfish and playing a hero that isn't contributing to your teams success is toxic IMO, yes. Especially when you think you're contributing just fine because "muh gold medals". It upsets me, personally, far more than being insulted over the internet.

Doesn't mean I'd ever insult anyone over it, because I find that behavior to also be abhorrent and wouldn't partake in it.

YMMV.

I feel like you've got an axe to grind with people who don't live up to your expectations of teamplay in a team shooter, and are trying way too hard to marry it to the topic of vile abuse lobbed at people over things they can't help, like being women.

Like, your point is taken but nobody gives a shit.

Sure, fair enough. It was brought up in response to another poster who incorrectly attributed his contribution to gold medals. The sidebar has probably overstayed its welcome at this point so I'm happy to move on.
 
Overwatch is fun, having fun is fun, but why would you go play comp if you're not playing to win? The arcade modes are the most fun of part of Overwatch anyway and don't have the toxicity.
Because you can play to win and play a character you're good at? Just because it doesn't fall within "THE META" doesn't mean he's sabotaging shit on purpose. Maybe he sucks as other characters.

It's stupid. It is an absurd connotation to even make, it's insulting quite frankly.
 

kcxiv

Member
Jesus Christ you're saying that someone choosing to play a character they like best in a video game designed to be played for fun are the equivalent to being insulted, degraded, debased and dehumanized.

Gamers everybody.

Comp is a different beast. If you dont want to do what it takes to win in comp, then go back to quick play! Nothing irks me more then some guy trolling in comp. I have had to learn to play about 15 characters so i can adapt to the situation. I hate playing soldier 76, but i have to play him at times for the team. If you cant play a team based game correctly GTFO.

I play quick play as well and i dont say shit to the team comp. We could play with no healers and no tanks, and i could give no fucks. Comp like i said, its a different beast. There to win and nothing else.
 

Sophia

Member
Still reading the topic, just finished the OP...

I've posted before about the harassment I've received in Overwatch. While I don't think it's as bad as the 1 in 3 games mentioned in the OP's quote, it's still pretty bad. It might be because I don't really use voice chat, and limit myself to text chat. It can be really toxic sometimes tho, and I can't imagine what it's like for other women who aren't as thick skinned like I am. : \
 
I feel like you've got an axe to grind with people who don't live up to your expectations of teamplay in a team shooter, and are trying way too hard to marry it to the topic of vile abuse lobbed at people over things they can't help, like being women.

Like, your point is taken but nobody gives a shit.

Succinct.
 
Overwatch is fun, having fun is fun, but why would you go play comp if you're not playing to win? The arcade modes are the most fun part of Overwatch anyway and don't have the toxicity.

I do play to win. Typical scenario:

*in starting room*

guy w/ mic: uh junkrat can you switch to [insert whoever they think i should be]
me: no thanks
guy w/ mic: #@(%&Y@&

*match ends, we win, I got gold eliminations, damage, and objective kills and POTG*

gg
 
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