Addressing Toxicity and Elitism Before League Launch

By George, a couple people around these here parts are startin' to see the light!

Internet world is full of "toxic" people.
Grow up?

It's not something GGG can address, unless they ban/mute 50% of the population every week for a week, and it will diminish to the point you will disable all the dev supported communication channels, including global chat, trade chat, whisps, forum and sub reddit.

You will end up with split community to small clusters of discord groups or basically silent game you could enjoy only with your friends.

Maybe that's a way when thinking about it.


Btw, name calling is usual strategy of adolescent people who have no argument or developed sense of be & let be. Internet points are strong in those.

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achillesdub wrote:

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karoollll2534 wrote:

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achillesdub wrote:

zero difference in what you said.

A lot of difference in what i said.

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If we want our game to continue to bring people in and have them STAY, we need to be more inclusive, less elitist, and less toxic.

hmmm so based on your logic everybody is elitist and toxic.

move along, this discussion is way above your head.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuude lol! The irony in this statement as referenced to your original post is incredible.

You have 42 posts in your history and there are a lot of "shut up"s and "just leave"s in there, to the point that you will be hard pressed to convince anyone you are not a virtue-signaling troll.

Also, to your point, LoL and DOTA and the like remain successful franchises, in spite of their terrible community reputations. Ever play Rust? Oh man, it's brutal, but still a great game!

I actually commiserate with your concerns, but suggest to you that the majority of people who play games, and more to the point online games, understand that the internet is a terrible place and can deal with the "toxic" (gah worst word ever) communities by recognizing it for the impotent harmlessness it really is.

Yeah, I am older, and far less sensitive to the crap that comes out of people's mouth or off their keyboards. You would be served well to be the same.

Also, to reiterate - practice what you preach, son.

Is calling other people elitist a kind of reverse-elitism? Or am I confusing that with reverse-racism? ;)

Certain kinds of people are just toxic on the inside. Take away the possibility of getting a bloody nose and those people will say pretty much whatever is on their minds. Some people just need to be dicks online. It gives them some sort of ego rush or adrenaline jolt. Maybe they're really sweet people in real life.

I have a hard time with these kind of topics because I'm a firm believer in free speech. Words shouldn't be banned as they can only harm you if you let them. That means the only solution to not hearing speech you don't like is to avoid it. That's why most people advise staying out of global and trade, joining a guild of like minded individuals, etc.

This isn't a POE problem anyway. When we have world leaders consistently acting like gigantic internet trolls I think expecting to be able to control some juvenile minded individuals in a game is a futile effort.

Obligatory first post by a 40/40 here. ;P

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鬼殺し wrote:

We do? Pretty much everything about PoE and its community screams 'l2p or gtfo' and 'git gud scrub'. Our global chat is riddled with racist, vindictive fuckheads and Support struggle to moderate it appropriately. Even the subreddit is infamous for its hivemind toxicity.

I've partaken in a LOT of different games' communities (unlike most serious players of this game, which largely close themeselves off to other games) and I will say... PoE has perhaps the most toxic community of any game I've seen.

Perhaps one of the weirdest parts about the toxicity is the general feel most players have that "if it's not something that's directly bugging me right now, I not only think there's no problem, but I'm utterly offended by anyone suggesting there might be for other players, and offended by the thought that any attention at all be made to fix problems that aren't directly impacting me right now."

You're right on the money for every word there... Except maybe the bit about support. I remain at least partly convinced that GGG's management doesn't consider the toxicity a problem, and de facto tells Support that moderation is a minimal-priority issue.

It's also worth noting that PoE has the only official game community that doesn't have a dedicated moderation team, be it either of player-volunteers (like most games) or paid full-time moderators. (like a handful of online games) Instead, it's... A duty that's handled on the side by the support staff.

Moderation is perhaps the only subject I feel that GGG's team fails at worse than bugtesting/QA... But in both cases a lot of the problem can be summed with "they don't bother hiring/putting people to work on them." I consider this kinda troubling when, a couple weeks ago, we saw GGG put out a call to hire more programmers; thanks to Tencent GGG has a LOT of money to play with... For now. And New Zealand is such a remote place, it'll be a struggle to expand the programming team; but moderation and testing don't require applicants with as high an educational background, so the pool isn't as tapped there. Why aren't they hiring for those teams?

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鬼殺し wrote:

It's a free to play game. It's a lot bigger proportionately than its dev team. And it's an incredibly competitive, self-over-others type of game. It has virtually no accessibility options. Scamming is implicitly encouraged by the devs who refuse to rework the game to prevent it. You can die and lose a lot of progress very quickly, which leads to a severe build-up of frustration. Every pore of PoE's community oozes elitism in comparison to other games' communities.

Yeah, that sums up a lot of the inherent problems with the game. And TBH, if GGG ever decides that the toxic atmosphere is something that merits fixing (rather than being a "feature") then the above is all stuff they'll have to address.

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Marxone wrote:

Internet world is full of "toxic" people.
Grow up?

Ah, "Grow up" "get a thicker skin," etc. Classic lines from someone who is SO un-bothered that they bristle at the thought that other people might be affected... Or are part of the problem themselves.

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Marxone wrote:

It's not something GGG can address, unless they ban/mute 50% of the population every week for a week, and it will diminish to the point you will disable all the dev supported communication channels, including global chat, trade chat, whisps, forum and sub reddit.

If sooo many people are THAT toxic, then perhaps that's the way it should be? The playerbase is full of SO many toxic folk, that their removal from discussion is NOT a loss to anyone else.

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Marxone wrote:

You will end up with split community to small clusters of discord groups or basically silent game you could enjoy only with your friends.

You DO realize you just basically described the game as-is; one doesn't enjoy it with randos, so this would be the same as today just with the toxic noise removed.

Why are you so adamant about GGG not improving moderation, hmm?

I know I'm way late to this thread and the flaming/discussion ratio has begun to skyrocket, but I'm gonna respond to OP anyway. I honestly think that the Toxicity and Elitism are two totally separate issues, so lumping them together is trying to oversimplify both issues.

Re: Elitism: I don't know why POE allows you to skip the Tutorials on your first character. This is an insane decision that has baffled me ever since the big Tutorial rework, because the Tutorial for POE is a really, really good one. Easily the best I've ever seen in an online game. But NOBODY READS IT when they start playing, which leads them to annoy global with inane questions that the asker literally had to opt-out of knowing the answer to. Is it a little bit too Big Brother for GGG to force new players to at least glance over the detailed mechanical explanations with pictures and animations? Possibly. But I think it's win-win-win for everyone if there were some system in place to either A, lock you out of using global/trade chat UNTIL you've opened every page of the Tutorial, or B, disable the "skip all tutorials" button until the account has reached a milestone of some kind. You could even make said milestone be as early/easy as A10 Kitava, which most players consider the end of the tutorial/start of The Real Game anyway.

Re: Toxicity: I don't hang out in the low-level Global channels so I can't speak to that at all. I agree that Global should be disabled by default (if that isn't the case already), but it's hardly new or revelatory that it's a magnet for sewage... I mean, Penny Arcade made a comic about this FIFTEEN YEARS AGO (link below). But I would strongly disagree that POE has a remotely toxic community compared to other PC games; I level to maps almost exclusively in public parties (even if I'm running with the Guild, we open it up to public) and I can't say that I've ever had a strongly negative experience with the Randos we've come across. Compare that to games like League of Legends and Overwatch, where it's all but impossible to go even ONE MATCH and not have the toxic flaming begin. And NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD compares to how toxic fighting game communities are... I don't know that I've ever been told something after winning a round of SF or MvC that I can repeat here without Support stepping in to delete it. I'm not saying there aren't some sub-humans out there lurking in the low Globals, because I absolutely believe that there are. But until that toxicity shows up in public parties, it has no real ability to impact your gameplay experience. Just turn global off, and be happier for it.

Edit: forgot the link! https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Re: Elitism: I don't know why POE allows you to skip the Tutorials on your first character.

First character on an account may not be your first play through in the game.

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Phaeded wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Re: Elitism: I don't know why POE allows you to skip the Tutorials on your first character.

First character on an account may not be your first play through in the game.

I'm certainly one of the people with more than one account, so I can't argue with this statement. Isn't it a net-positive though for the incredible minority of multi-account players to have to see a tutorial ONCE per account, if it means new players actually gain an understanding of things like "increased" vs "more" and other important gameplay systems? And it's not a rhetorical question, the answer could easily be No; like I said in my way-too-long post, all of this could easily be way too "Big Brother/Nanny State" to actually be a good idea. Maybe somewhere in between, where you have to click multiple times to Disable All Tutorials, with a popup along the lines of "Are you sure? Skipping these tutorials is a REALLY, REALLY BAD IDEA if you're new to the game."

I don't know the answer to this, I'm just spitballing here. Because POE is a very complicated and brutally unforgiving game, in a genre filled with extremely simplistic and overly forgiving games. New players NEED that information, but if they've come from easy games like D3 and Runescape they have no way of knowing how much they don't know.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

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Phaeded wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Re: Elitism: I don't know why POE allows you to skip the Tutorials on your first character.

First character on an account may not be your first play through in the game.

I'm certainly one of the people with more than one account, so I can't argue with this statement. Isn't it a net-positive though for the incredible minority of multi-account players to have to see a tutorial ONCE per account, if it means new players actually gain an understanding of things like "increased" vs "more" and other important gameplay systems? And it's not a rhetorical question, the answer could easily be No; like I said in my way-too-long post, all of this could easily be way too "Big Brother/Nanny State" to actually be a good idea. Maybe somewhere in between, where you have to click multiple times to Disable All Tutorials, with a popup along the lines of "Are you sure? Skipping these tutorials is a REALLY, REALLY BAD IDEA if you're new to the game."

I don't know the answer to this, I'm just spitballing here. Because POE is a very complicated and brutally unforgiving game, in a genre filled with extremely simplistic and overly forgiving games. New players NEED that information, but if they've come from easy games like D3 and Runescape they have no way of knowing how much they don't know.

How about a trick question lead-in? First ask "Is this your first time playing Path of Exile?" If the person answers yes, disable the option to disable tutorials. :)

But you are hinting around the major issue with most complaints about POE. It's big and complicated and there are usually no easy answers that will satisfy everyone.

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achillesdub wrote:

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karoollll2534 wrote:

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achillesdub wrote:

zero difference in what you said.

A lot of difference in what i said.

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If we want our game to continue to bring people in and have them STAY, we need to be more inclusive, less elitist, and less toxic.

hmmm so based on your logic everybody is elitist and toxic.

move along, this discussion is way above your head.

Sounds almost like toxic elitism to me, but what do I know...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯