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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

There are wide swathes of the video game community which are absolutely toxic, in every possible way you can imagine and some which people of good will would have difficulty imagining. I wish game companies did a better job of market-based approaches to limiting this.

I've often thought, in League of Legends, that I'd pay $100 for access to a special queue which matched me up with other people who had paid $100 to access it. If you earn an account ban, you can probably find a new credit card, level up again, and pay $100, but it should cut down on casual sociopathy. (Yes, that's classist as heck, but after a bad day of LoL I'm pretty OK with that as long as it means that I can play a relaxing game with people who are capable of meeting the absolute minimal norms of civilized society.)

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> There are wide swathes of the video game community which are absolutely toxic, in every possible way you can imagine and some which people of good will would have difficulty imagining. I wish game companies did a better job of market-based approaches to limiting this.

Microsoft tried an approach with Xbox Live on the 360 where gamers could segregate themselves into different communities. Recreation, Family, Pro, Underground. The hope was that the toxic players would stick to Pro and Underground, but there just essentially zero policing for the scale Xbox Live came to be, so trolls would enter the other areas too.

Any community enforcement is doomed to fail, because too much of the community really are a bunch of idiots and jerks. Friends lists and isolation are the only good counterpoints, and Xbox Live is a much friendlier, but much quieter place, since Party Chat came about (which lets you talk to your friends only). I don't ever use my headset without Party Chat now, and most others don't seem to either. Xbox Live was much cooler back in the Halo 2 days, you'd meet new people and have fun, before it hit it's own Eternal September.

> I've often thought, in League of Legends, that I'd pay $100 for access to a special queue which matched me up with other people who had paid $100 to access it.

Do you even need a fee? I used to play Counter-Strike a lot and there was always a wide variety of servers. From "free for all" (FFA) and anything goes to private ones that required registration and had staff strictly policing skill, teamplay, language, microphone noises...

Then there were "gathers." Like pick-up games in soccer or basketball but organized via IRC. People who were annoying just wouldn't get picked.

All of that was free for the participants. Servers, channels, websites were all provided by the players themselves.

I don't really play computer games any more but is this not an option for modern games and systems? Another regression like Usenet?

League of Legends uses a matchmaking system. You queue for a match and it automatically finds an available game for you to play. I think all the MOBA genre games use a queuing system.

I'm continually surprised where civilized folks are coming from. I'm currently in lower tiers (silver 5) where I've met the most understanding strangers, who probably play occassionally like me and quite possibly wouldn't pay $100 to get isolated queues. On the other hand if I come across gold or higher tier players in normal games, they tend to have exactly zero tolerance for mistakes and absolutely no patience to solve situations; even if they'd be willing to spend $100 to play with curated comrads.

I'm not suggesting that commitment to the game (and therefore willingness to pay extra) is inversely proportional to the quality of behavior, but I've seen my share of anecdotal evidence. (Probably the situation is better in diamond and above, but boy I suck to ever reach it.)

League of Legends is especially bad. I recently tried that game with some of my friends that have been playing for a few months (or years). And the amount of whining and threats of reporting people in the chats just because I wasn't immediately a perfect player was extreme.

We didn't play a single game where someone didn't whine about how I sucked, or tell me I was a horrible person, and so on.

It's not a nice environment, and it probably puts a lot of people off from trying it more than a few games.

I'd be right behind you in that queue, if I was a bigger fan of the game to begin with, but due to the circumstances I never really gave it much of a shot.

Do you know that people already pay $60/yr for multiplayer on Xbox Live (and PS+ on PS4)? What makes you think another $100 will change the situation?

The difference is that it's not required and you can play the game still. Also, most of the vile people on XBL are just little kids whose parents pay for their subscription

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