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Comment by jackmott42 | Hacker News Reader

So when I started playing PlayerUnknown's battlegrounds, you started in a lobby, everyone is there and can talk. Almost every time someone would be yelling "Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" endlessly.

It was really nice when the game developer took action to get rid of that. I'm not sure I understand your view that this is a bad thing. There are still games with player run servers that can manage things on their own, but some games, like pubg, can't function that way.

Are you just an awful person that is mad you don't get to be awful any more?

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My experience of community-moderated servers is that someone doing that will be banhammered quickly before they actually ruin the whole session, same with cheaters. The moderation on these larger platforms is shit because it's so slow, even if it does eventually come down. (same as real-world justice: when it's excruciatingly slow people lose faith in it and it arguably fails to do its job). The problem you mention is a problem of global matchmaking being the only option for playing the game and this kind of moderation is the cheapest option when you do it, so while microsoft moderating stuff is better than them not moderating things, the fact is they have removed the tools needed to do much better moderation in the push to remove community servers in the first place.

> Are you just an awful person that is mad you don't get to be awful any more?

Since you're being snarky and completely missed my point I'll join you. Are you fundamentally incapable of using a mute button?

Would you rather go to a place with no mosquitos, or go to a place where you're swarmed by mosquitos and have to swat them away?

Would you rather have no pimples, or get constant pimples and have to apply cream to heal them?

Would you rather encounter no people yelling racial slurs, or encounter it every time you game and have to endless mute offenders?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

It's worth reading the first part of the post again. The second part isn't actually meant to be a sensible reply, as far as I can see.

There are people that are intolerant of black people or trans people or whatever, but then there are people that are just plain mean.

I used to play League of Legends and enjoyed the social aspects of unranked play; it would be fun to meet people that would show me things about the world or vice versa, but there was the awful problem that it could take forever to queue because they'd often be people who insisted on playing one particular lane. I learned to jungle early on and to be flexible about roles so I'd be part of the solution instead of the problem.

When I got into ranked though it was just awful, people were always blaming me for the team not winning and for any real or imagined screw-up. I liked to play Sona who is mainly a healer but can sometimes trash the players on the other team really good. If I was being successful at this I'd get bitched out by my bottom because I was depriving them of XP that would help their character scale but, from the viewpoint of the team, if their bottom and support are getting trashed, they're getting trashed. If I was playing well people would bitch me out, if I was playing poorly people bitched me out.

I liked the idea of "finding my level" in ranked but I went back to unranked because I couldn't handle the negativity in ranked.

Eventually I got sick of a game that committed me to 30-50 minutes of paying attention to it and it would be unfair to to other players to bail out because my wife or my son or horse lessoners or the neighbors or someone on the phone needed my attention. But seriously, if you could adjust the dynamics of a game to cultivate positive social interactions that would be a very good thing.

> if you could adjust the dynamics of a game to cultivate positive social interactions that would be a very good thing.

You can't force people to be nice to you. Seeking to control other people is a pointless endeavor. Your problem is completely caused by a company handling censorship and not having community owned servers where bans are handed down near instantaneously. Further, in the defense of the person insulting you, they shouldn't be prevented from playing the game for being a jackass in chat. Chat ban? Sure. Full ban? I wonder how far you could take that in civil court to get your money back.

> Eventually I got sick of a game that committed me to 30-50 minutes of paying attention

This is your actual problem you just may not realize it. When someone is committing 50 minutes of their life to a stupid video game minor infractions like being a new player suddenly become a real problem. You are dragging down the team and you are ruining their experience. That's not your fault, really. Everyone starts out new and it sucks. It's also not their fault for being mean to you for legitimately ruining their game. It's a lot of time spent just to lose everything because one person doesn't know how to play. People aren't in the mindset of "help the noob" when an hours worth of progress gets flushed down the toilet for doing so. Call it the bystander effect, or whatever.

Riot would be better off making servers for more casual play. Most of the so-called "toxic" behavior I have seen in new games is because of long matches, wins and losses being strictly tied to progress, etc. The competitive aspect makes the game worse for everyone who doesn't want to compete.

>It's also not their fault for being mean to you for legitimately ruining their game.

It is 100% their fault. Whatever circumstances befall someone, it doesn't give them the right to act toxically and insult and degrade others. There's a difference between being angry (an emotion), and channeling that anger into a negative interaction. They're perfectly capable of controlling themselves and not throwing a tantrum like a child.

It's not about helping out the noob, it's about being civil.

lol this is a wild accusation you straw-manned his position from "community moderation is good" to "banning people from saying nigger is bad" when no one said that.

even for your complaints about PUBG, i've played a hundred games of PUBG and others where nothing like that ever happened, and when it did we just mute the guy and move on. acually the majority of games i played with mic'd teammates we used it to coordinate and play better as a team.

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