lilja@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Back when I was actively playing Overwatch (this is now years ago) people were basically using the voice and text chat to be toxic shitheads to each other. At one point I decided that I didn’t need strangers telling me to kill myself in my life, so I ditched the game and generally just play single player games now.
Not sure how others have experienced it, but the community feeling of the past that the author is alluding to is gone. If it ever was there to begin with.
My recollection is that what you describe became pervasive roughly concurrently with the rise of the original Xbox. I’m not pinning it to that device specifically, but it was during the time of the original xbox where I felt that voice chat in games transitioned from helpful collaboration to 99% toxic crap.
I rarely used it from that point forward, so maybe there was a later golden age I’m unaware of.
It was there for certain.
In WoW it disappeared when the Dungeon Finder was added, which made social interaction and therefore being nice to each other optional. Before that feature, you had to chat with people in order to form groups for clearing dungeons - a step that the Dungeon Finder conveniently allowed to skip…
Don’t get me wrong, the Dungeon Finder wasn’t the start of it, but it is what accelerated it greatly. Before that social interaction had already been in decline, mostly because everything except for the end-game had been slowly turning into essentially a single-player experience. However, everyone (who stuck to the game) sooner or later reached the end-game content, and had to interact with other players. With the Dungone Finder, this incentive was lost too…
(I am maybe a bit too harsh on the Dungeon Finder - some end-game content was difficult, so you had much higher chances of success if you played with a team you knew well - and therefore had to form/join a guild.)
It made dungeoning take less time. If it’s faster, it’s cheaper. Hazing endears the group to the new member. The inconvenience of hiking out to the dungeon after getting a group together, and reforming a group after someone left because the warlock couldn’t summon the tank in time to start the dungeon well before their dinner, was a shared trauma that helped the group cohese.
I stopped playing overwatch because I would play healer and then get abusive messages sent my way.
The breaking point was when I got one message demanding me to swap off mercy from one guy, and then a message from another teammate yelling at me for swapping off mercy. It was a really fun game at the time, but only with friends.
wirelesswire@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
It was certainly there, but more common in cooperative games. Also, Overwatch is/was particularly infamous for its toxic community. While I didn’t play them myself, I’ve heard a lot of stories from competitive games back in the day where you could host your own lobby. Being a shithead back then could get you banned from any number of private communities, so you needed good behavior if you didn’t want to be an outcast.