One of Norway's biggest CS players tries playing under a female alias [video] | Hacker News Reader

One of Norway's biggest CS players tries playing under a female alias [video]

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91 pointskasperni38 comments

As bad as the situation already is(and it's bad) the lack of action on Valve's side is particularly depressing.

People invest a significant amount of money into their steam accounts(by purchasing skins and games) and targetting folks with some serious bans would help curb this behaviour. For example, a four month ban on the first offence, a year on the second, and lifetime on the third seems pretty reasonable and would surely have a significant impact.

You want people to be banned from the storefront valve instead of just the game cs? That is very extreme. Would valve be extending that to other games? Why do it on just their own?

Honestly why not, actions can have consequences.

Just look at google: how some people lost data. When they start to implement such things, sooner or later a lot of people who have done nothing wrong will be affected. It is like CP.

If you ban someone toxic from a game you don’t want them logging into another game and being toxic there too. An ounce of prevention…

Perhaps you could be lenient and if you’re only worried about prevention and not deterrence you could restrict the ban to online games and forums.

I'm not sure, it's just a quick one off suggestion to indicate the direction I'd like to see.

Maybe you'd not be banned from the storefront, but all Valve's game as well as the steam marketplace for those games. Perhaps Valve could create a system that lets other publishers opt in to receiving a notice when a player receives a ban like this so that they can mirror it. Locking the player out of all online games as a consequence of their actions seems fine.

The details don't need to be hashed out here but my overall point is that Valve has powerful levers at their disposal to tackle these problems and they aren't doing enough.

>Locking the player out of all online games as a consequence of their actions seems fine.

...No? This is a terrible idea on all levels. I never understood this "say bad word" -> "completely banished" pipeline either. To me this just sounds like a power trip from people who want to enforce their ideals on the rest of us.

Disable chat/voip for some time (as CSGO already does if you don't opt out) if someone gets reported too much.

I wouldn't (and won't) drop full price on a modern multiplayer knowing some trigger happy biorobot could ban me for a word or two with no recourse or refund. And I very rarely get worked up about a game enough to swear.

> I never understood this "say bad word" -> "completely banished" pipeline either.

A: We aren't talking about a bad word or two here. You'd not receive an action like this for saying "gg ez noobs" or w/e. We are talking about racist, sexist, violent harassment here.

B: It's not "completely banished", that's why I would suggest exponentially ban durations, hopefully people get the memo on the first offence.

FWIW you can already be banned like this for cheating via VAC. Sexist/racist harassment is just as toxic as cheating to the game. It means big chunks of the population don't feel comfortable participating in the game fully(ask any female friends if they use voice chat in pubs).

How do you deal with the edge cases? How do you separate racism from teasing?

I know we must see this very differently, but to casually suggest this even as the ‘direction’ you want to go in seems very … unconstrained and authoritarian.

Currently you can still buy games if you have a VAC-ban, which is good. But already today you can be excluded from playing other games if you get a VAC-ban in a different game, and there are some other consequences.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C...

If valve did that I would legitimately never buy from them again. Stores are not meant to be behavior police. The second they start doing that it will be yet again used to target and ban people whom have done nothing wrong. Or whom are disagreed with. Twitter users prove that those powers cannot be used justly.

describing steam as a store in this situation is inaccurate. they are providing the game server, setting up the match making, and enabling the communication between players. it puts them in a more reasonable position to moderate.

Funny that some people commenting on the video immediately claim it is fake. This kind of abuse was extremely common when CS was in perpetual beta and voice chat first started being a thing. There is clearly a subset of online gamers, especially in FPS games, who cross the line from joking/hazing into abuse against anyone with a female name or voice.

I sometimes wonder what makes these people knee-jerk deny such obvious behavior anyone can observe?

In all likelihood they are not CS players. I played a ton of Overwatch in college and a decent amount of CoD/Halo as a child. There were definitely bad people in voice chat but nowhere near CS levels. I could see other FPS fans thinking this was fake or at least played up.

I've seen people tell other people to kill themselves in dota.

Oh I've seen that and way worse on other MOBAs. My point wasn't that this is acceptable or that the video is fake; it was that people coming from more popular communities with less abuse simply have no idea what is or isn't the norm for other communities. If what they're seeing is outrageously outside their norm, they might not believe it.

That is human nature though. We deny things we know are true if we feel guilty. It is easier to attack that admit.

Sadly we are still at the whims of evolution.

We are all sadly not as evolved as we think we are and more importantly we do not see how our social dynamics rely on certian algorithms.

(this is all my own conjecture based on ny experience in life)

In one FPS game I picked a new name that was neutral or male, but people misread it as “foxy” and assumed I’m a woman. In half an hour I got several dumb comments from guys over voice chat. The abuse towards women in games is intense.

This sort of thing has made most multiplayer VR games completely unplayable for me. The only viable solution to hordes of screaming ultra-toxic kids quite literally surrounding you is to put up with it until your rank/ELO gets high enough to solve the problem via matchmaking.

Horizon Worlds is actually not quite as bad as the average third-party game. Ironically, I think this is the one unintended positive outcome of Facebook control - if you get a week ban on Horizon, you’re also banned from all Facebook properties. And not just the web properties, it seems that you also lose access to your entire Oculus library.

Is that a good thing? Probably not, but it seems to be the only thing out there in the VR space with enough teeth to make a tangible difference.

I wonder how much this abusive behaviour can explain the lack of women in certain fields?

For example a girl joining a male-dominated chess club could face some of these remarks, leading to fewer girls joining the chess club.

Then we see an end result of some activities completely dominated by men at the elite levels, creating ammo for misogynists to spew distorted “facts” about how men are better than women.

The treatment of female CS players is sickening. Every public lobby that I've been in where someone had an identifiably female voice eventually ended in harassment and sexist statements.

My wife gets treated like shit if she reveals she's a woman when we play rocket league. It was such a noticeable difference that a few years ago when she started back at school to get another degree and had to take some basic sociology course she used it as the subject for a paper - the teacher was not aware of the gaming world and was pretty shocked by how brazen men and boys were online.

This is exactly how I remember CS (boob insults and everything) and I'm male.

Without wanting to detract from the problem, claiming something is "worse" because it's "bad" is a bit disingenuous when the implication that the alternative is not equally bad is not addressed or compared.

It reminds me of when I arrived for work in what was reputed as "the dryest city in the whole of the UK", only to find rain non-stop for 3 months. When I pointed this out to my boss, he laughed and said "I said it was the dryest, I never said it was actually dry!".

At some point I realized this is why my girl friends almost never play online games without us queued with them :(

Great initiative to show how bad things really are.

Gaming where voice is enabled without admins to supervise it, will degenerate into this nearly every time.

Sad state of affairs indeed.

Oh yeah, the virtual "anonymous"(for whatever value of anonymity) public is not a nice place.

Even in face-to-face interactions I have a rule that 1 in twenty people are guaranteed jerks. But online? 50/50.

And in a PvP environment like CS?... 9 out of 10. I always hope I am wrong, and am pleasantly surprised when I am, but I don't have high expectations.

Might want to change the subtitles from "that was sick" to "that was disgusting" just to prevent anyone misinterpreting that (unintentionally or otherwise) as "sick" is slang for "excellent" in some places.

In context, it’s pretty unambiguous he’s uncomfortable and doesn’t think it was an excellent experience

I know biggest basically makes sense and means most popular here, but I can't get the image of all the cs players lining up to compare heights out of my head.

Sounded pretty "normal", as in males receive same amount of abuse. Some games end up deleting cross team chat completely for this very reason.

I'm afraid the staging undermined the message, alas. Lots of questions in the comments about why these are Norwegians, but the dialogue is all North Americans. Anyone know what happened there?

oh wow that is much worse than I was expecting :(

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