I suspect the size of an online community contributes to toxicity, akin to Dunbar's number. This may also explain why John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory seems to be more relevant the larger the size of the audience.
Throughout my gaming life, whenever I've engaged with smaller online communities such as this one I've had a good experience. Seeing familiar names and interacting with the same people over the course of some time allows the building of rapport.
That's virtually impossible with something like the official Blizzard forums. The more people there are engaged in a discussion, the more insignificant and anonymous one feels, and this seems to incentivize trolls to come out of the woodwork and feeds into our tribal tendencies. Maybe it also causes people to try harder to be edgy in order to get attention and build a "brand" for themselves.
I always try to interact with others online as I would if I were engaging with them in person.
The toxicity in games such as Overwatch is unavoidable.
I admit that I myself was a toxic player playing that unbalanced garbage... I consider myself a fairly good player, sometimes I Mercy, sometimes I Pharah, sometimes I D.VA. which were my favourite heroes that I alternate depending on my mood, I'd be more successful with these ones but more often than not I would be stuck on a losing streak, again and again and again because Blizzard cannot fix their broken match making system.
I used to be a platinum but had been dragged into silver-gold because of morons who either don't use a mouse or who are just A.I
I literally feel like I AM 1v6 because of the quality of match-making on that game.
Is this what you mean by toxicity?
Once Blizzard starts making ridiculous class-changes like reducing polymorph in PVP to 5 seconds or reducing the harmful effects of warlock curse,
you know players are going to get increasingly toxic towards each other and at Blizzard who caused the issue.
Why did Mercy have to get so dramatically changed? What the hell did they do to D.VA's armor? this is Blizzard fault.
I think this kills most communities. When too many people are involved, people become just another face / username in the crowd and people just start being assholes to each other. Probably does have something to do with being impossible to build or maintain rapport with a large number of people at the same time.rijndael wrote: ↑5 years agoI suspect the size of an online community contributes to toxicity, akin to Dunbar's number. This may also explain why John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory seems to be more relevant the larger the size of the audience.
Throughout my gaming life, whenever I've engaged with smaller online communities such as this one I've had a good experience. Seeing familiar names and interacting with the same people over the course of some time allows the building of rapport.
That's virtually impossible with something like the official Blizzard forums. The more people there are engaged in a discussion, the more insignificant and anonymous one feels, and this seems to incentivize trolls to come out of the woodwork and feeds into our tribal tendencies. Maybe it also causes people to try harder to be edgy in order to get attention and build a "brand" for themselves.
I always try to interact with others online as I would if I were engaging with them in person.
But there are great sites like 4chan which are hilarious because everybody is anonymous and everybody is an asshole by default, lol. High traffic anonymous image boards are great. But they are a very different experience and place than a web forum. They have their own place.
Probably the only way to hope this place stays civil is to hope that most people stay on Reddit. If this place ever gets flooded with 100k+ new people then the quality of discussion will suffer no matter what is done to head it off.
Good points are made with the amount of players in on any given community.
On a random large forum if I see a questionable post, chances are that people will ridicule the poster.
Here I think people are more cautious in their wording. 85%+ of the replies are respectful. This doesn't mean they are correct or that I agree with them, just that people treat others nicely overal. I have seen almost no ridiculing or trolling or assholery here.
Probably because of the relatively small amount of users? Here I'm Gallow, I'm somebody. Some ppl recognize me so I behave. In a forum with 100k users I wouldn't become the flaming tard poster, but I would be just one of the faceless posters in a sea of users.
I wonder if barrens.chat will stay the same for a long time. I hope so. I know Teebling would much rather become a 50k plus user website, but I wouldn't mind a registered user cap of say 8-10k. Maybe add a queue for new registrations, or limit interaction untill certain time passes.
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i hope that the social aspects in-game will weed out most of the truly toxic players, and therefore they won't have much reason to frequent forums like this (aside from legit trolls, but those are easy to spot). those that do remain will likely end up in guilds with other like-minded people, and then it becomes as easy as avoiding that guild.
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