Dealing with the toxic player
Added 2017-10-09 14:32:07 +0000 UTCBy Matthew Rossi
We've seen the Overwatch team working on various ways to deal with player toxicity and bad behavior recently, but it's not a new problem nor is it confined to that game. Hearthstone doesn't even let you talk to other players and you can still have some bad experiences with emote spamming and the like (like that one player who starts using up every last second on their turn just to annoy you) and if you've played Heroes of the Storm or World of Warcraft you've likely run into your fair share of disagreeable behavior.
Every player is different and so I find myself curious about how all of you deal with this sort of thing. Do you report them? Do you think the games you play make that easy enough, or do enough when you make the report? Vote to kick in WoW, does it seem to do much of anything? Sometimes I feel forced to drop a group by the bad behavior of other players and then I'm the one who gets the debuff and has to sit there waiting, which is in my opinion hardly fair. One time I actually sat down back at the entrance and waited until they kicked me just so I wouldn't have to spent thirty minutes waiting for the debuff to fall off after a group kicked the healer, who in my opinion was doing as much as anyone could in the face of their refusal not to be jerks.
So share your stories -- what do you do when confronted by players who seem to be more intent on ruining anyone's good time than actually playing the game?
Comments
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Dawnbright.
2017-10-13 02:14:33 +0000 UTCI’m a healer, so I just leave. Queues are always quick for me. I honestly don’t see any reason to be rude or a jerk. If a game makes you angry, why play?
belaq
2017-10-10 22:11:44 +0000 UTCI mostly just ignore them, or defend the victim.
Markus Larsson
2017-10-10 11:44:26 +0000 UTCPersonally, I just kinda...deal with it and get on with my day? If it's somebody spamming emotes or some such, I just mute the in-game sound. They're annoying, to be sure, but I'm not exactly hankering for some overarching crackdown from the powers that be. Can't really pretend that I've never been a toxic dick before either. Some games are just stupidly anger-inducing and part of the fun is being able to talk shit to other people. Hell, I've met friends through that sort of thing. Just lay into someone for killing you in a particularly BS fashion- they fire back...and eventually you're telling one another how much you'd like to make sweet, sweet love. Best part of interactions on the internet and, by extension, gaming, imo. And, hey, it's FUN to make someone rage out by outplaying them. It's rewarding in its own right to tilt somebody that hard.
TsunTzu
2017-10-10 06:11:25 +0000 UTCSome jerks got a quick dungeon finder queue using their tank and then the tank dropped. They told me he was coming back as the healer and I needed to leave. I refused and they didnt have the votes to kick me. So we waited and they started cussing at me and such. Then I got bored and Leap of Faith gripped the rudest one into some mobs. Faded. And watched him die as i stepped out the dungeon’s portal. Ha.
Josh
2017-10-10 00:34:29 +0000 UTCI have an alt that isn’t in a guild and got sent an invite to join a guild out of the blue with a recruitment message that had half a dozen curse words in it so I reported that. If I see an exceptionally crude comment in a general chat channel I report that too.
David Daniel
2017-10-09 22:56:19 +0000 UTCHearthstone I don't report them, not sure you can, but I do hit the squelch button after 4 or 5 emotes that I think are meant to taunt/ridicule. For other games, if they're using words with sexual meanings or calling people by non-PC names, I'm hitting the report button.
Tom Sweeney
2017-10-09 22:08:41 +0000 UTCI usually single out the players who are making a positive effort, and leave with them to create our own group to do the content, using friends to fill the slots we're now missing. Other than that, my method has always been to "drown the rude with politeness", which actually resolves issues more often than even I would expect. Other than that, I just leave and do something else.
Dawnbright.
2017-10-09 22:07:26 +0000 UTC
