While I don't trash talk per say, to knock it off as something that only bad players do to be good is wrong. Trash talking between players in video games is no different when NBA world champion and future HOF Kevin Garnett trash talks to players on the court. It is apart of their game, how they play it. Muhammad Ali trash talked all day and he is considered by most as the greatest boxer to ever live. Now there is a point where trash talk crosses the line if you insult the person by their gender or race or something like that. Trash talk to me is apart of competitive gaming be it video games or sports. To piss off your opponent has always been a legit tactic even in combat as it throws them off their game. So yea as you can see I disagree with your assessment here.
There's an entire book about failing in games and why people have an emotional attachment to them. The book is The Art of Failure by Jesper Juul who also did a talk back at GDC 2009 called "Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences". It's a great book with a hilarious cover and I highly recommend for anyone interested in games and how the effect people and game design in general.
There's an entire book about failing in games and why people have an emotional attachment to them. The book is The Art of Failure by Jesper Juul who also did a talk back at GDC 2009 called "Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experiences". It's a great book with a hilarious cover and I highly recommend for anyone interested in games and how the effect people and game design in general.
Trash talk can be done without being rude, insulting or demeaning. Heck, it can be as friendly as any other teasing you would normally give your friends. That's as far as it should go though.
A few years back me and some friends would get together to play local Call of Duty matches (Mostly because trying to get a game of Call of Duty in Japan with an acceptable connection speed is impossible). I'd usually tease them by sneaking around behind them and saying things like "You really should look behind you more often". Then as they would turn around I'd stay behind them and then backstab them. Then, from that point on I could freak them out just by making them think i was nearby. It would let me get inside their heads a bit, and it would make it that much more gratifying when they'd get the drop on me.
It can be part of the fun, but it usually isn't. Hopefully Microsoft can do something with the Kinect to boot virulent players by recognizing racial slurs and kicking the offenders.
Trash talk can be done without being rude, insulting or demeaning. Heck, it can be as friendly as any other teasing you would normally give your friends. That's as far as it should go though.
A few years back me and some friends would get together to play local Call of Duty matches (Mostly because trying to get a game of Call of Duty in Japan with an acceptable connection speed is impossible). I'd usually tease them by sneaking around behind them and saying things like "You really should look behind you more often". Then as they would turn around I'd stay behind them and then backstab them. Then, from that point on I could freak them out just by making them think i was nearby. It would let me get inside their heads a bit, and it would make it that much more gratifying when they'd get the drop on me.
It can be part of the fun, but it usually isn't. Hopefully Microsoft can do something with the Kinect to boot virulent players by recognizing racial slurs and kicking the offenders.
My solution is just to not play games with other people online. I think it has enriched my life considerably.
While it would be nice if everyone could learn to behave, I think we'll sooner turn into energy beings coexisting in cosmic harmony and then we probably won't have online games the way we understand them today.
Of course, the scenarios in this only apply if there really isn't a good reason to blame your team. Sometimes, you do just end up on the bad side of a team-skill-imbalance, and you've just got to make the best of the situation.
However, the outlets still apply. Blaming the other guy on your team helps no-one, not even if it's true. Blaming the non-person influences, such as the Perfect Imbalances or the recent patches, or even the AFK guy can provide an outlet for the 'butthurt', and helps everyone cool down.
Of course, the scenarios in this only apply if there really isn't a good reason to blame your team. Sometimes, you do just end up on the bad side of a team-skill-imbalance, and you've just got to make the best of the situation.
However, the outlets still apply. Blaming the other guy on your team helps no-one, not even if it's true. Blaming the non-person influences, such as the Perfect Imbalances or the recent patches, or even the AFK guy can provide an outlet for the 'butthurt', and helps everyone cool down.
I have no issue with trash talking in games in general. Every sports has it on pretty much every level and its part of the game. Pretty much every major sport has trash talk. Especially if you look at the NFL. But this has also carried over into Esports as well. Team Solomid said that during a match one time, Zuna, a member of the enemy team would scream whenever he would make a good play or get a kill. TSM later admited after the game that it affected their play. They were rattled by it. These are two teams at the top of the North American scene for League of Legends right now.
The strategy was actually so effective in rattling TSM, that they decided to adapt it themselves in future matches, yelling or chanting when they would make plays to hype themselves up and to get into the enemy's head.
Trash talk doesn't mean you're a bad player. It might just be how you hype yourself up. Or if you are even with an opponent, it may be how you gain a slight edge in order to beat them. I'm not endorsing racial/derogatory slurs here, just saying there is a place for it in games and it is used by all the top players of pretty much every sport.
One thing if you are going to try and be the peace maker you seriously need to avoid saying, because it never, ever works and you are always going to be a jerk for saying it, is "Both sides did wrong."
There is no phrase more divisive than that one, and no person in any argument more hated than the person who utters it.
Even when both sides have legitimate grievances (more normally one side is legitimately aggrieved and this statement is used to avoid addressing that fact, instead trying to legitimize wrongdoing by one party by pointing to how angry the other is at the wrongdoing) it doesn't actually address those grievances, instead acting to take you from being the mediator to being the superior who gets to assign the blame.
If you feel the need to say this in an argument, rather keep your silence because all voicing that does is get in the way of the two parties sorting things out themselves. Don't be the one preventing people reaching common ground, by claiming it for yourself.
I think, when defending trash talk, people tend to refer to the less common "good-natured teasing" and downplay the more common "genuinely hurtful words". I have never come across a player who utilized "fun" smack-talk. It's always screaming, offensive garbage. That's not to say I've never seen "clean" communication or conversation take place. And often, players simply don't talk.
But I've never seen anyone use smack-talk non-offensively. Ever.
As for blame, I tend to vocally blame myself for losses/poor performance, and compliment my opponents. Not always, but usually.
I think one of the most hurtful comments I ever recieved was, when I finally dared to ask one of the best WoW-players I know, to help us out with something really difficult. Numbers, achievements, top guilds trying to recruit him, his skill - he is extremely good. He helped us without hesitation, not just his skill helped - he could give us some tipps that alone helped tons. I knew we could have made it without him, but it would have taken way longer and we were let down by another player and really needed very good help to get going at all. When we were done and expressed our gratidute, he was asked by somebody else, what he was doing and answered: "I am just helping these morons/dorks/fools." (cannot translate the word too well. it was a word indicating we were stupid, but not harsh.)
I have been called way worse things. Especially as a woman if i do a mistake, it get's blamed on my gender and that i would be way better off standing on the side of a road waiting for customers and so on. But the moron- that was worse. We all acknoledged that we needed the help and that he was on a different skill-plane, but he got personal so quickly without showing any contempt or annoyance before.
There was a conflict in my player group that i could not diffuse. I was leading rated battlegrounds - a field of WoW where it really hurts to lose. Several of the players were indeed considerably worse due to not be as invested as others, but they were kind people who are great to be around. Also they were reliable, on time and helpfull in other respects. The two best players got very annoyed of losing so much due to oops-moments by the others or mistakes that occured again and again. and to be honest... it really was the worse players fault. I assigned them the least difficult tasks, but it still went wrong. The others civilly mentioned this, but in whispers told me, they were so frustreted and would leave, if i would not kick other players out (after failing to improve their playing with gentle tipps and partnering them up with people who had the same tasks and were really good at them). That was the point I disbanded the group all together and never got up again to restore this. It's something all together different if we wipe due to a less skilled player in a PVE environment, where the punishment is not so harsh (losing rating).
It always seems to be a big pool of frustration and anger, if people are on different levels of investments for a game.
I'm coming at this from the other end of the spectrum. I had an awesome gaming community in City of heroes. True we did have some who were less then enjoyable, but the majority would go out of there way to help a new player or one struggling with a new build.
Part of this was the game itself it rewarded team play more then single play, the loot drop system and Xp system all had greater odds with more members. Second there was no Loot competing so no player looses out because someone else was grabbing the rare drops.
The players themselves took this to heart and ran events like "Adopt a Newbie day" where experience players would spend all day teaching the ropes to a newcomer. This end up being a common thing where if a player sees a newbie having trouble they come help. Some of my favorite gaming memories was doing that very thing.
It says something about a game when the community refuses to give up after it shuts down. We still haven't given up on City of heroes returning either.
Disappointing. I think the entire episode was a tad superficial. Trash talking and getting mad during matches is only the tip of the Toxic Iceberg that gaming seems to be running headfirst into. Just check out any MMO forum (or forum of other games, I sure), and you'll see a level of seething hatred for everything that no human being should ever be exposed to.
One (minor) disagreement: in Magic:tG you DO sometimes just lose to mana screw. Magic has variance. It's a completely legitimate excuse. Keeping a reasonable 2-land hand on the draw and your deck just fails to spit out land 3 after 4 turns... you're not coming back from that. That being said, if you're really good at Magic, you just learn to accept that you're going to take a certain number of losses from bad beats. You certainly don't take it out on your opponent.
I don't think that assigning blame has no place in team games. I mean, in heavily team oriented games, such as Natural Selection 2 or DoTA 2, you've got no real chance of winning if your team-mates play poorly. So the only thing you can do is call out their mistakes and give them suggestions on how to fix them, otherwise you're looking at a drawn out loss or a quit (which generally feels even more ignoble). So you try to be civil and encourage people to become better players, whilst also pointing out what will happen if they keep playing the way they are, so that if they don't listen they might realise that what you said came to pass and that changing their behaviour might be a good idea.
That said, if they don't listen, you may as well rush the enemy hives solo and see how far you get with your melee. You're not getting any fun out of this game any other way.
This just comfirms why I think Nintendo's mute community might have been a good decision. If you take away that communication, you're just left with the game.
how about a worldwide Adopt a Newbie day not just for one game! but for all of them!
basically if all players/gamers recognized a day where this would happen then instead of getting wound up when someone offers advice or getting wound up when a team mate performs poorly it would teach people something based on the strength of that one day to carry over to the next day and the next and so on!
This episode starts out with a very good subject, but ends up being a very poor EC episode. There are no useful suggestions on how to improve this. "Blame the game?" That's a pretty weak solution. If the game deserved that much blame, I wouldn't be playing it.
There was a previous EC episode about trash talking, which did a far better job of covering pretty much the same topic.
And EC is ignoring the truely team destructive problems that these bad apples cause. Like deliberately screwing over their team by going AFK, team killing, or even vote-kicking people who don't deserve it.
No, the problem of 'toxic' players runs far too deep to just 'blame the noob tube" or some such thing. Besides, pointing a finger at a specific weapon further propagates this negativity, turning those innocent people who use *insert weapon here* into 'exploiters of a broken mechanic'. And that's not fair.
What is a real solution?
More MMO style games. Games where every match is played on private Dev controlled servers, and every player has a unique account so that disruptive players can easily be located and punished. And, the devs need to be *willing* to strictly enforce a 'play nice policy'.
A police force, basically.
Even in the MMO style environments, there are many games that simply do not do this. WOW has aways been filled with extremely rude, disruptive and unfriendly players, but blizzard rarely takes any action against them. The last thing they want to do is ban any of their ten million players.
Those MOBA type games like LOL and SMITE are even worse. I won't even touch those games with a 10' pole. In my limited MOBA experience, these were the worst gaming experiences I have ever had, purely because of the behavior of the other players.
I came to the following realization a few months ago about why you should ALWAYS compliment your opponents and speak highly of them.
If you trash talk someone, and beat them, you don't have an honorable victory, because you're basically beating up a small child.
If you trash talk someone, and lose to them, you're clearly an absolutely horrible player because you just lost the the player who is, in your words, a "F***ing n00b who can't shoot for s**t."
If you compliment your opponent and beat them, then you've honorably triumphed over a worthy foe! This is the best thing ever!
If you compliment your opponent and lose to them, then it doesn't hurt so badly: They played well, fought well, and the best man won. There's no shame in that.
Just remember that you'll always be compared to your opponent, so you want your opponent to be as high as possible in your eyes and the eyes of whatever audience is around. Because that means you're high too (and look like a great sport while you're at it!)
The games we play within the game we are playing can be just as engaging as the game itself.
Video games are essentially mind games, but in most cases focused solely on technical skill, puzzle solving and getting your other pinata friends to throw a party. However, online games allow for players to engage, or be forced to engage, in social mind games.
Trash Talk, more often then not, is the most engaging byproduct of social interaction. Unless it's just a forum of people talking about how awesome my Dragenache pinata is - that is probably the most engaging.
Fighting usually happens within a person's lifetime and trash talk is not any different, aside from being only verbal and usually without a visual of the other player(s). Like any game understanding your opponent is critical, but for social gaming understanding yourself can be even more critical. Trash talkers will always try to bring the worst out of you - the game essentially being to get the other person pissed. It is akin to trolling in many cases.
Most players, especially after a "shitty" game are likely to be lured into the trash talker's trolling.(also alliteration = awesome) Which of course only fuels the fire and generally brings enjoyment to the trash talker, because at that point they have basically won. 'Getting back' at your imposed opponent can be a difficult challenge for those who are not so quick witted, but this does not mean you will lose. Beginners tend to not see this as a challenge and will resort to kicking and flailing, but advanced players understand (even if not viewed as a game) that the only clear way to win is to bring the troller down with quick witted comments, absurdity, thoughts on the opponent's mother or reminding them that they are both homosexual and homophobic. The only way to overcome trash talk is to control your own rage and do some counter trolling.
"But fallace, I like to troll." Yes, we all do. It is a lot of fun! But there is a difference between good old fashioned trolling and just being a huge piece of shit. For example, bringing up legitimate inside information on a opponent's dead family member - not okay, but bringing up the fact that it must be hard for them to play with their controller stuck so far up their vagina - acceptable. Extruding emotions out of players in online gaming can be great fun, but like anything moderation should be observed.
The great thing about online gaming is that it is one of the only places where trash talking will not lead you to getting your ass kicked, but if you live your life like you do in your trash talk then you are truly a piece of shit and should rethink your position before someone bigger comes along and rethinks your face for you.
I think the options to avoid trash talk are pretty obvious, for those who just can't take it - scream deafeningly into the mic drowning out all other chatter until you feel comfortable with your victory or pass out from asphyxiation.
[Viva Pinata and Call of Duty online experience referenced]
I can't help but feel that there IS a place for a certain sort of trash talk. After all, can you picture Spider Man without his banter? Kinda boring huh?
Of course, there are some key differences between banter and simple racial epithets. Namely, it requires actual thought, is designed to entertain both parties to some degree and, preferably, goes both ways.
I've found that the older I've gotten, the less patient I'm becoming with rage and even blaming. Eventually the scales just tipped. LoL's community outweighs my enjoyment of that game now.
It's not even the hardcore griefers I'm talking about; it's the joes like me who give into the temptation to blame mid for this or top for that. I don't even care if it's me they're blaming. I'm a grown up now, and I don't have to deal with this kind of incivility IRL, so why would I seek it out in my leisure hours?
Anyway, I *really* resonated with this one as per usual.
A super large part of Player Toxicity is actually a developer/game design problem. If the game punishes and frustrates by design, it will encourage and foster toxicity *no matter what*.
You bring up a few good points, but I think they are about different issues. The first is someone grandstanding (for a lack of a better word) when a third party gets involved. "I'm just helping these newbs" is the type of thing people say when someone else asks them "why the heck are you doing <insert something they've done before>?" People do it in real life too, it's just a way to get acknowledgement, you probably shouldn't take it too personally.
The second issue is more about people deciding what type of game they really want to play, and you definitely see this in real life a lot, especially in sports. I was a very good baseball player growing up, travelling almost every weekend across the country to play in special rep tournaments, a friend of mine was even drafted by the Astros, but I didn't really enjoy it. I didn't want to go to kill my entire summer at practice and in tournaments, so eventually I quit and joined a "1 game a week, no practices" league.
This seems to be the problem with your RBG team, you had some people that wanted to be on the Rep team, and others who wanted to be on the "1 game a week" team. Those two groups rarely mix well. While one group is constantly working to gear themselves up, getting the best enchants/gems and tweaking their talents based on their competition, the other side is playing "just for fun". Both sides are fine, but they don't mesh together very well. As someone who's been on both sides, while not having someone pull their own weight on the competitive team is bad, seeing them make the same mistakes match after match is way worse.
The toxic enviromant in MOBA led me to stop playing games of that ganere.
This is where the initial argument comparing Video Games to professional sports falls over. Ray Lewis getting indicted on murder charges doesn't negatively impact me watching football (or if it does, it's to a very minimal level).
Having some racist 12 year old screaming and yelling on XBL greatly affects if I enjoy playing a multiplayer game.
I just wanted to back Waladil's comment, and add that I've actually turned trash talkers around during a match to where they show mutual respect. An important part of this is to be sincere in your compliments as well.
I generally don’t do those thing mostly because I don’t play a lot of multiplayer games, since I believe everybody else in the world is better than me.
The only thing I do that I think might be bad is when I sometimes when I play team fortress 2 and there’s 3 snipers or 3 spies I tend to get annoyed and ask why that’s necessary.
Posts
A few years back me and some friends would get together to play local Call of Duty matches (Mostly because trying to get a game of Call of Duty in Japan with an acceptable connection speed is impossible). I'd usually tease them by sneaking around behind them and saying things like "You really should look behind you more often". Then as they would turn around I'd stay behind them and then backstab them. Then, from that point on I could freak them out just by making them think i was nearby. It would let me get inside their heads a bit, and it would make it that much more gratifying when they'd get the drop on me.
It can be part of the fun, but it usually isn't. Hopefully Microsoft can do something with the Kinect to boot virulent players by recognizing racial slurs and kicking the offenders.
A few years back me and some friends would get together to play local Call of Duty matches (Mostly because trying to get a game of Call of Duty in Japan with an acceptable connection speed is impossible). I'd usually tease them by sneaking around behind them and saying things like "You really should look behind you more often". Then as they would turn around I'd stay behind them and then backstab them. Then, from that point on I could freak them out just by making them think i was nearby. It would let me get inside their heads a bit, and it would make it that much more gratifying when they'd get the drop on me.
It can be part of the fun, but it usually isn't. Hopefully Microsoft can do something with the Kinect to boot virulent players by recognizing racial slurs and kicking the offenders.
While it would be nice if everyone could learn to behave, I think we'll sooner turn into energy beings coexisting in cosmic harmony and then we probably won't have online games the way we understand them today.
However, the outlets still apply. Blaming the other guy on your team helps no-one, not even if it's true. Blaming the non-person influences, such as the Perfect Imbalances or the recent patches, or even the AFK guy can provide an outlet for the 'butthurt', and helps everyone cool down.
However, the outlets still apply. Blaming the other guy on your team helps no-one, not even if it's true. Blaming the non-person influences, such as the Perfect Imbalances or the recent patches, or even the AFK guy can provide an outlet for the 'butthurt', and helps everyone cool down.
The strategy was actually so effective in rattling TSM, that they decided to adapt it themselves in future matches, yelling or chanting when they would make plays to hype themselves up and to get into the enemy's head.
Trash talk doesn't mean you're a bad player. It might just be how you hype yourself up. Or if you are even with an opponent, it may be how you gain a slight edge in order to beat them. I'm not endorsing racial/derogatory slurs here, just saying there is a place for it in games and it is used by all the top players of pretty much every sport.
There is no phrase more divisive than that one, and no person in any argument more hated than the person who utters it.
Even when both sides have legitimate grievances (more normally one side is legitimately aggrieved and this statement is used to avoid addressing that fact, instead trying to legitimize wrongdoing by one party by pointing to how angry the other is at the wrongdoing) it doesn't actually address those grievances, instead acting to take you from being the mediator to being the superior who gets to assign the blame.
If you feel the need to say this in an argument, rather keep your silence because all voicing that does is get in the way of the two parties sorting things out themselves. Don't be the one preventing people reaching common ground, by claiming it for yourself.
But I've never seen anyone use smack-talk non-offensively. Ever.
As for blame, I tend to vocally blame myself for losses/poor performance, and compliment my opponents. Not always, but usually.
I have been called way worse things. Especially as a woman if i do a mistake, it get's blamed on my gender and that i would be way better off standing on the side of a road waiting for customers and so on. But the moron- that was worse. We all acknoledged that we needed the help and that he was on a different skill-plane, but he got personal so quickly without showing any contempt or annoyance before.
There was a conflict in my player group that i could not diffuse. I was leading rated battlegrounds - a field of WoW where it really hurts to lose. Several of the players were indeed considerably worse due to not be as invested as others, but they were kind people who are great to be around. Also they were reliable, on time and helpfull in other respects. The two best players got very annoyed of losing so much due to oops-moments by the others or mistakes that occured again and again. and to be honest... it really was the worse players fault. I assigned them the least difficult tasks, but it still went wrong. The others civilly mentioned this, but in whispers told me, they were so frustreted and would leave, if i would not kick other players out (after failing to improve their playing with gentle tipps and partnering them up with people who had the same tasks and were really good at them). That was the point I disbanded the group all together and never got up again to restore this. It's something all together different if we wipe due to a less skilled player in a PVE environment, where the punishment is not so harsh (losing rating).
It always seems to be a big pool of frustration and anger, if people are on different levels of investments for a game.
Part of this was the game itself it rewarded team play more then single play, the loot drop system and Xp system all had greater odds with more members. Second there was no Loot competing so no player looses out because someone else was grabbing the rare drops.
The players themselves took this to heart and ran events like "Adopt a Newbie day" where experience players would spend all day teaching the ropes to a newcomer. This end up being a common thing where if a player sees a newbie having trouble they come help. Some of my favorite gaming memories was doing that very thing.
I miss City of Heroes it created an awesome community that refusing even now to brake up. Not one but two Community driven projects are being done via volunteer work (for now) to give the CoH community a new Home. http://www.missingworldsmedia.com/, http://www.heroes-and-villains.com/, there even http://valiance.shogn.net/.
It says something about a game when the community refuses to give up after it shuts down. We still haven't given up on City of heroes returning either.
That said, if they don't listen, you may as well rush the enemy hives solo and see how far you get with your melee. You're not getting any fun out of this game any other way.
basically if all players/gamers recognized a day where this would happen then instead of getting wound up when someone offers advice or getting wound up when a team mate performs poorly it would teach people something based on the strength of that one day to carry over to the next day and the next and so on!
There was a previous EC episode about trash talking, which did a far better job of covering pretty much the same topic.
And EC is ignoring the truely team destructive problems that these bad apples cause. Like deliberately screwing over their team by going AFK, team killing, or even vote-kicking people who don't deserve it.
No, the problem of 'toxic' players runs far too deep to just 'blame the noob tube" or some such thing. Besides, pointing a finger at a specific weapon further propagates this negativity, turning those innocent people who use *insert weapon here* into 'exploiters of a broken mechanic'. And that's not fair.
What is a real solution?
More MMO style games. Games where every match is played on private Dev controlled servers, and every player has a unique account so that disruptive players can easily be located and punished. And, the devs need to be *willing* to strictly enforce a 'play nice policy'.
A police force, basically.
Even in the MMO style environments, there are many games that simply do not do this. WOW has aways been filled with extremely rude, disruptive and unfriendly players, but blizzard rarely takes any action against them. The last thing they want to do is ban any of their ten million players.
Those MOBA type games like LOL and SMITE are even worse. I won't even touch those games with a 10' pole. In my limited MOBA experience, these were the worst gaming experiences I have ever had, purely because of the behavior of the other players.
If you trash talk someone, and beat them, you don't have an honorable victory, because you're basically beating up a small child.
If you trash talk someone, and lose to them, you're clearly an absolutely horrible player because you just lost the the player who is, in your words, a "F***ing n00b who can't shoot for s**t."
If you compliment your opponent and beat them, then you've honorably triumphed over a worthy foe! This is the best thing ever!
If you compliment your opponent and lose to them, then it doesn't hurt so badly: They played well, fought well, and the best man won. There's no shame in that.
Just remember that you'll always be compared to your opponent, so you want your opponent to be as high as possible in your eyes and the eyes of whatever audience is around. Because that means you're high too (and look like a great sport while you're at it!)
Video games are essentially mind games, but in most cases focused solely on technical skill, puzzle solving and getting your other pinata friends to throw a party. However, online games allow for players to engage, or be forced to engage, in social mind games.
Trash Talk, more often then not, is the most engaging byproduct of social interaction. Unless it's just a forum of people talking about how awesome my Dragenache pinata is - that is probably the most engaging.
Fighting usually happens within a person's lifetime and trash talk is not any different, aside from being only verbal and usually without a visual of the other player(s). Like any game understanding your opponent is critical, but for social gaming understanding yourself can be even more critical. Trash talkers will always try to bring the worst out of you - the game essentially being to get the other person pissed. It is akin to trolling in many cases.
Most players, especially after a "shitty" game are likely to be lured into the trash talker's trolling.(also alliteration = awesome) Which of course only fuels the fire and generally brings enjoyment to the trash talker, because at that point they have basically won. 'Getting back' at your imposed opponent can be a difficult challenge for those who are not so quick witted, but this does not mean you will lose. Beginners tend to not see this as a challenge and will resort to kicking and flailing, but advanced players understand (even if not viewed as a game) that the only clear way to win is to bring the troller down with quick witted comments, absurdity, thoughts on the opponent's mother or reminding them that they are both homosexual and homophobic. The only way to overcome trash talk is to control your own rage and do some counter trolling.
"But fallace, I like to troll." Yes, we all do. It is a lot of fun! But there is a difference between good old fashioned trolling and just being a huge piece of shit. For example, bringing up legitimate inside information on a opponent's dead family member - not okay, but bringing up the fact that it must be hard for them to play with their controller stuck so far up their vagina - acceptable. Extruding emotions out of players in online gaming can be great fun, but like anything moderation should be observed.
The great thing about online gaming is that it is one of the only places where trash talking will not lead you to getting your ass kicked, but if you live your life like you do in your trash talk then you are truly a piece of shit and should rethink your position before someone bigger comes along and rethinks your face for you.
I think the options to avoid trash talk are pretty obvious, for those who just can't take it - scream deafeningly into the mic drowning out all other chatter until you feel comfortable with your victory or pass out from asphyxiation.
[Viva Pinata and Call of Duty online experience referenced]
Lord knows I fall into these traps a lot...Much as I try to avoid actually blaming people, it's HARD.
Of course, there are some key differences between banter and simple racial epithets. Namely, it requires actual thought, is designed to entertain both parties to some degree and, preferably, goes both ways.
It's not even the hardcore griefers I'm talking about; it's the joes like me who give into the temptation to blame mid for this or top for that. I don't even care if it's me they're blaming. I'm a grown up now, and I don't have to deal with this kind of incivility IRL, so why would I seek it out in my leisure hours?
Anyway, I *really* resonated with this one as per usual.
You bring up a few good points, but I think they are about different issues. The first is someone grandstanding (for a lack of a better word) when a third party gets involved. "I'm just helping these newbs" is the type of thing people say when someone else asks them "why the heck are you doing <insert something they've done before>?" People do it in real life too, it's just a way to get acknowledgement, you probably shouldn't take it too personally.
The second issue is more about people deciding what type of game they really want to play, and you definitely see this in real life a lot, especially in sports. I was a very good baseball player growing up, travelling almost every weekend across the country to play in special rep tournaments, a friend of mine was even drafted by the Astros, but I didn't really enjoy it. I didn't want to go to kill my entire summer at practice and in tournaments, so eventually I quit and joined a "1 game a week, no practices" league.
This seems to be the problem with your RBG team, you had some people that wanted to be on the Rep team, and others who wanted to be on the "1 game a week" team. Those two groups rarely mix well. While one group is constantly working to gear themselves up, getting the best enchants/gems and tweaking their talents based on their competition, the other side is playing "just for fun". Both sides are fine, but they don't mesh together very well. As someone who's been on both sides, while not having someone pull their own weight on the competitive team is bad, seeing them make the same mistakes match after match is way worse.
This is where the initial argument comparing Video Games to professional sports falls over. Ray Lewis getting indicted on murder charges doesn't negatively impact me watching football (or if it does, it's to a very minimal level).
Having some racist 12 year old screaming and yelling on XBL greatly affects if I enjoy playing a multiplayer game.
Kind of apples to oranges.
The only thing I do that I think might be bad is when I sometimes when I play team fortress 2 and there’s 3 snipers or 3 spies I tend to get annoyed and ask why that’s necessary.