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Comment by fibonacc | Hacker News Reader

Seems especially rampant on FPS games. Often I see swastikas in custom banners in games like Battlefield. Reporting results in no change.

Many women for instance I know pretend to be men in these online games. Often the only people screaming and utilizing voice online seem to be of a specific demographic.

You can go after the bad apples and hope things will change but racism and all sorts of hate based ideologies are constantly touted by what I presume individuals with a lot of idle time.

I also see lots of talks of depression and mental health issues in the chats. I rather that they just remove the online chat feature and custom banners. Remove voice chat especially.

Really miss the days before voice chat because now its the equivalent of giving a village idiot a megaphone.

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Is it really so much to ask for a player who doesn't want to listen to voice chat to click through a menu to turn off voice chat? Or click one or two buttons to mute a player in chat/voice? Do we really need a heavy handed approach like "remove online chat features and custom banners"? If the company provides no method to turn off chat/block/mute/etc then that's one thing. Ask for that. But I've yet to play a game where you can't do this.

Best I can do is a vast government surveillance apparatus for identifying and targeting individuals and then tossing them in jail on questionable charges until they spend $20,000+ on a lawyer. Hard for them to make that hitler talk while in jail, check-mate. Since DHS is known to be the most honest and highest caliber agency of the US, we know this power will be used fully constitutionally, ethically, and impartially.

Is it too much to ask to be able to use the game with voice chat and just been the people who are abusive?

DHS doesn’t need to be involved but the answer shouldn’t be people who don’t want to be abused are the ones who have limits on what features they can use.

Voice chat is incredibly useful if not necessary in certain game types, and it also makes the game far less social.

The people who are abusive in voice chat know exactly how to be abusive to avoid getting caught / identified.

In one game I play, there are several phases of the game when it is both impossible to mute anyone and you cannot see who is talking.

Guess when people spew racist stuff or otherwise scream into their mics?

It's a minority, and they never have anything useful to say - but it causes a lot of people to shut off voice chat entirely because it's so exhausting/jarring to an otherwise good time. And as a result, you don't get to meet the people who are friendly and good natured.

Essentially, by letting them run wild, we're allowing them to dominate the platform. Kick their asses.

> Essentially, by letting them run wild, we're allowing them to dominate the platform. Kick their asses.

So the option is learn how to deal with trolls or remove voice chat completely from games to protect the delicate sensibilities of players? I guess that's up to the company. I had no problem with this prior to company's controlling the servers for extra MRR. Don't like a server? Leave. Unless the entire game is filled with nazi LARPers you'll probably find a place more amicable to your delicate sensibilities. For me, I've had no problem blocking particular trolls and in particularly infested servers I can find a new one that's better for me. It's like the world has forgotten "don't feed the trolls". I'm willing to wager 99.9% of these people are just doing it to get a rise out of someone because honestly. People are so sensitive these days it's made it incredibly easy to say something and get a rise out of literally anyone.

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