games

Bad players in co-op games make me look like a good player. So more power to them.

Co-op games where you're just playing against the game are usually pretty chill, like Warframe is usually the one that comes to mind. I only played it for around a year but I think there was maybe one or two people that were just unpleasant for whatever reason. Team matches where you're playing against other people turn gamers into absolute demons though, MOBAs and FPS games in particular seem to really attract the edge lords. I just assume the psychology is "I am good and this person is bad and now I'm bad from association."

Westerners are shitty at cooperation

i always hated those shit-ass attitudes.

I don't play them anymore but I had runs in team fighting games where randoms were a regular feature, and the skill level could be all over the place, and I never had someone who was bad at the game respond to advice and coaching badly - at worst they ignore it, but I remember winning games in dota 2 by just telling whichever loser was losing his shit on the newbie to shut the fuck up and advise the newbie to do as i say.

Like, if you decide that a skill gap is both a liability to play and potentially gonna make the game worse for you subjectively, first remember yourself and when you started, then fucking HELP THEM WHILE BEING NICE it's so easy and i don't get why people can't just lean into it, it's consistently productive of making a rough time into a fun time IME

You're right that nobody should be getting harassed, but I'm still going to get annoyed when an extremely low-level player decides to queue for challenge modes like Elite Deep Dives in Deep Rock Galactic.

I mean, driving players away from the game is a surefire way to keep the game living and healthy. That way only Real™️ gamers can play

it does not matter if you can't win the difficulty you chose. everyone starts somewhere

every game should have an easy mode.

Why does every game need to have an easy mode if it doesn’t matter what difficulty you choose or if you aren’t successful?

Just play another game lol. I despise Dark Souls. Never beat it, never will. Who gives a shit? There are a bajillion games out there. If you don’t like hard games, don’t play games that are notorious for being hard. I hate cringe dialogue and repetitive nonsense and reading for 45 minutes, so I don’t play JRPGs and visual novels. It’s so simple

and it's a game. it fundamentally does not matter if someone is so bad you can't get your +0.2 second record or whatever

no one cares if you want to feel special because you can win more at some fictional game than other people.

How is it any more “fictional” than any team sport? None of it matters either. If you have an open game, sure it would be rude to get pissy with randoms. But if you have declared certain expectations and standards and your team mates don’t meet them, yeah you should be pissed

Me burning through all my Druid transformations before a battle because I wanted to turn into a cat and talk to rats and meow at people.

But also, like, if you're playing FF14 and I'm out DPSing you as a tank fuck you.

Don't get mad at people expecting to play the game they bought instead of use it as roleplay chat server. It's the dev's fault for not explaining that the game they made is a game where you must abide by arbitrary rules to trigger some win state. They should have explained that more AND fixed their match-making.

WoW is so guilty of this lmao, it's like half the appeal of playing the game for most of the player base - the "i know more than you, so I'm better" types.

The mechanics for each encounter are so opaque that you have to reference a website outside of the game to understand what's going on because the default game is sure as fuck not equipped to tell you anything (and don't bring up the combat log, no one looks at that at mid to low levels, especially if you're new). Some classes can't even be fully utilized without 3rd party add-ons cause it's too difficult to tell what araus are active or when procs happen.

Making it worse, there's a ubiquitous culture of expecting everyone to already know mechanics of each encounter and what you're supposed to do (unless you're playing at CE mythic raiding level ig). There's no trail and error and, in fact, playing that way is considered a huge waste of time and a valid reason to get booted from a group. I CANT EVEN JOIN NORMAL PUG RAIDS IF I DONT HAVE AOTC TO LINK MOST OF THE TEAM FUCK.

I hate it, I wanna like the game so much, maybe for nostalgia, maybe for when it can be fun, but it's such a badly designed game with the worst kind of culture. I felt this for a while, but it really hit me recently when I got a friend to play on a trial account and I was realizing how much information, add-ons, and mechanics they'd have to learn about ON TOP OF THE HOURS IT TAKES TO LEVEL - of course they fucking lost interest, the game's barrier to entry reaches the moon at this point. Even for me, I have trouble getting into groups and I haven't been able to join a guild for years because I've been playing on and off, so I have no "evidence" of my competence in game (like AoTC or high m+ io scores, which are almost impossible to pug your way into anyways).

Why waste time on this when you can just jump into a DRG lobby and actually play the game?

I feel like online toxicity ramped up around the time of competitive gaming becoming popular. Old school online was just join a server, play for a bit and leave. Now its all matchmaking with penalties for losing or leaving locking you into an hour long match where if you get ur ass handed to you its just being miserable for 50 minutes waiting for it to end. Even for unranked modes where you still can't leave and the format won't fill in missing players with new ones and for what reason????

People definitely should stop being shitty but I feel like the format games have taken really promotes the shitty behaviour. I used to play demolition modes in cs source and 1.6 in random servers. Individual performance was meaningless and nobody ever used strategy. Winning or losing didn't mean anything people just played for the sake of playing. Also solo bot modes allowed me to learn the game without risk which is also something gone from gaming completely. It's a barebones tutorial maybe then dumping you straight into real competitive matchmaking for an hour long match.

I desperately want old multiplayer back where it was just about joining a fun server and playing for a bit and having fun not this matchmaking esports shit that makes everyone turbo angry all the time.

If you care about bad players in video games, you're not getting high enough

every souls game should absolutely have an easy mode. yes, even if that means having options that make the game 'play itself', the last of us 2 has such systems, stop gatekeeping the intellectually disabled from your precious safe space, fucking weirdos. for example having to trek back through an area every time i lose to a boss fight (often with intentionally misleading attack animations and patterns) adds absolutely nothing to the game and only serves to gatekeep people with ADHD and the like from learning attack patterns or practising other gameplay maneuvers, and letting me chose to restart a boss fight instead of losing all my XP and having to restart the area (with equipment damage slowly accumulating) takes nothing away from the ''''aesthetic'''' and ''''mystery'''' and ''''atmosphere''''. the enemy ambushes and traps are cute the first time encountered, but become mere drudgery the 12th or 30th time.

I feel this from playing with randoms on Dark and Darker.

Apparently I play cleric like a toddler

Coming back to matchmaking after not having a group or pc for years is fun. It's been nearly a decade since i played even remotely competitively, and i'm just trying to relax on my weekend off. Don't need to shitfling just because there's no cooperation or strategy going on in this server.

All LoL Gamers when reading this:

hurrgg i will report you i will feed i will lose on purpose

Usually they cargo cult their gatekeeping too, like

ur item isnt on the build that website tells me to have. reported.

if you disagree with this and aren't betting money on games or something than you're toxic asf. your emotions, such as annoyance, are valid but taking them out on newer players over a game without consequence is not. outright harassing people over a game that has no relevance to your real life is g*mer behavior. the bad kind. if it's because the inclusion of bad players makes the game more difficult than it's meant to be to the point of unplayability, than that's a balancing issue! take it up with the developers with power of every system of the game and not players who are usually just trying to learn!

for clarity, this comment is my entire take on the matter. if you have any genuine good-faith questions that this does not clear up, ask away. but if your first instinct when reading this is still to dismiss me out of hand without properly engaging with what i'm saying than you can go fuck yourself. a pigpoopball hex upon all debatebros who try to epically disprove basic fucking manners

I do blame Valve for the terrible state of matchmaking in CS2 and DOTA2, and the extremely toxic community they harbour.
In CS2 there is an option to report folks for griefing and communications abuse, but doing so does literally nothing.