Is It Possible To Fix Gaming Toxicity?
" If toxicity is contagious; yes. Sort of. Perhaps. It's easier to be toxic in a toxic environment. But I firmly believe that loudening (is that a word? If no, then read: encouraging) good behavior is more effective for the environment than silencing toxic behavior. Negativity and over-policing breeds negativity because the focus is on 'the bad', while positivity breeds positivity, that's community 101. Naive? Maybe. But using words like "fixing" is probably more than naive, closing in on utopic. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile. Last edited by Phrazz#3529 on Aug 21, 2020, 8:04:32 PM
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" Fun fact about Utopia: not only does it mean 'no place', the whole schtick of it was the usage of gold in More's Utopia to weight down slaves. In other words, it inverted the concept of 'value' by rightly pointing out that value is arbitrary. Gold is a lazy, idle material; iron (the price of which we all should pay) should be much more prized. Utopia didn't just silence Europe's toxic relationship with wealth and opulence; it rendered it ridiculous. At least, in the context of a book. Toxicity isn't contagious per se; it is, however, self-replicating. If someone is a shithead to you, you're more likely to be a shithead to someone else. Contagion implies guaranteed spread, which I think is not the case here. As certain anecdotal contributions attest, we can still find non-toxic (???) behaviour in toxic environments. Generosity amid the greed and all that. If toxicity were contagious, we could say that those who can remain kind and giving despite being exposed to it have stronger immune systems. A pity there's no vaccine, eh? (No vaccine, but there are definitely ways you can strengthen that immune system. Beer, for example.) As for the silencing, I think (obviously) that in this case it's a band-aid over a festering wound. As do others here, who point out rightly that encouraging non-toxic/positive behaviour is a better approach. BUT as yet someone else pointed out, this can come with issues of its own, as it creates a Tall Poppy syndrome. This is why I say it can't be fixed for PoE because it's not really about promoting good behaviour or stymying/silencing bad. It's about the game itself, and how it affects the behaviour and mood of its players. And PoE's competitive, self-over-others nature is all but inextricable. It is core. At this point, any sort of incentive to be excellent to one another would seem antithetical to everything PoE represents. The good news is I think it's also not going to last in the games industry overall. PoE is such a primitive throwback that it retains certain directly abusive elements that newer games sidestep. Or at least try to sidestep. Reducing direct contact between players is a good start -- sure, you can be passive-aggressive with a 'sorry' emote but you're still a long way from calling someone's mum a fat whore or airing your potentially unwelcome socio-political views on a computer game. Then there's the issue of user-friendly, non-aggravating UI. People are so much more apt to be dicks to each other when the game itself confounds them and strangles their efforts to enjoy it. Conversely, a smooth gaming experience leaves people in a better mood. I firmly believe a game should go out of its way to be both fun *and challenging* for the player, that there is a balance between the two. And I believe GGG's amateur approach to that balance is inherently amateur: they design with the approach that challenging is fun, and anything that challenges the player is therefore fun, including ridiculously frustrating mechanics and obfuscated game play. This myopic attitude from the early days was never really addressed as the game grew and grew, and instead came to define it. Little wonder there's so much toxicity in PoE -- the game itself forces the player into the uncomfortable mindset of wondering why they're not having fun if the game is so challenging and why they're not having fun when it's not, i.e. when it's too easy and therefore boring. PoE does not have a particularly large space between 'too easy' and 'too challenging' -- that space is where I'd say the real 'fun' in a game can be found. And a game that has a narrow area for what most gamers would consider 'fun' between 'too easy' and 'too challenging' is almost certain to be promote toxic behaviour. Can that be fixed? Probably not without upending the long-tortured view that PoE's difficulty is its fun, and that concerted effort to widen the gap between 'too difficult' and 'too easy' is essentially ruining what players have been conditioned into thinking of as the game's 'fun'. GGG have absolutely no incentive to do that. A toxic, angry, but devoted playerbase likely buys as many support packs as a non-toxic, happy...but still devoted one. Beans are beans, toxic or otherwise. As long as you're only counting them and not eating them, who cares? If I like a game, it'll either be amazing later or awful forever. There's no in-between. I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. Last edited by Foreverhappychan#4626 on Aug 21, 2020, 8:39:26 PM
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" Ppl keep repeating this as a given, based on little more than their own personal anecdotes and experience (tellingly, it seems even more common among people who don't even play the game anymore). But that hardly makes it true. I can counter an opinion simply with another, such as my own. Or that of some others, such as-  There's no good data provided, but it's not like the data can't be gathered. Cases in point - https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/hkrxrn/neural_network_analysis_of_toxicity_in_poe_sub/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/hkjq3c/rpathofexile_toxicity_digested_by_data_scientist/ Both of those analyses have their limitations, as both the comments beneath as well as the posters themselves point out. But they're still a damn sight better than simply taking it as a given based on nothing but ones feel for the issue (and before someone uses said posts to knock on Reddit - that's just using Reddit's willingness to analyze the issue against them, not showing that Reddit is bad i.e. you're hiding behind the fact that this forum hasn't been analyzed as such). And based on said data, PoE doesn't seem to have "so much toxicity". First properly define what is 'toxic', and then show that it is indeed a major problem. Only then does the question arise as to whether any drastic action is necessary for it, or even if anything is possible to be done at all. The nice thing about the positive approach is that it doesn't hurt anyone - so even if toxicity isn't actually a major issue, it might still be worth doing (unless it's cost prohibitive). But anyway, your contention that toxicity is inherent to PoE isn't validated, as it's not even clear that PoE even has a big issue. Last edited by Exile009#1139 on Aug 22, 2020, 12:03:02 AM
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"Is It Possible To Fix Gaming Toxicity?"
No. |
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" Yes it is. Just remove internet. #Solved. |
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" Sooo...we should all be playing Grim Dawn instead then? |
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" Play whatever, just dont interact with people, at all. Humans are assholes when given a chance. There were few experiments that have provem that and internet gives them that chance. |
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If you could remove anonymity and make it so bad behaviour was punished then you could remove most toxicity, but even with that you'd still get people who would behave badly if they felt they had nothing to lose.
Realistically then, no. |
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" Blizzard tried that. That went... To shit. Even though anonymity may be a contributing factor to toxicity, they can't demand us to use our full name on a gaming forum/in a game these days. It's unreasoable. But if you are talking about identifying who we are to GGG via a phone number, I'm all for it. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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" Nope. It wouldn't go away. There are people who are shit and are proud of it. |
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