bullying, harassing, or even “criticizing” them is an entirely pointless endeavor that does nothing but make you feel superior to another person. having a “minimum standard” for random matchmaking is OK i guess, but not having that standard met is the developer’s fault for not having proper matchmaking, not the random shitty player just trying to play the game.
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. it does not matter if you can’t win the difficulty you chose. everyone starts somewhere, and in games where different difficulties tend to be almost like entirely different games, this is even more true. if you want a game where you have an 100% chance of everyone involved being at the correct skill level you want, than don’t play with explicitly random players. no one cares if you want to feel special because you can win more at some fictional game than other people. I respect skill, but if you think that’s a reason to bully people than you should leave every game scene ever to save people from your presence
if a player stumbles into something but doesn’t understand it it’s the developer’s fault 90% of the time. if a player doesn’t want to “git gud” it’s the developer’s fault 90% of the time. every single genuine criticism made about a game’s difficulty is inherently valid. every game should have an easy mode. players should default to helping new players rather than dismissing them. learning a game by playing it is always more intuitive than using google or reading blog posts.
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.”
Rocket League and Overwatch made me quit competitive online team games permanently. Between people who drop out the moment you start losing and people who fly off the handle at you or start wrecking the moment you make a mistake (or they just perceive you as having made one), it’s just not worth it.
It really seems to vary due to a lot of factors. DRG has been mostly kind to me even when I’ve fucked up, for instance, but fuck up while playing Don’t Starve Together by eating meatballs instead of bacon and eggs and everyone hates you.
Westerners are shitty at cooperation
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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
Every popular multiplayer game is practically an e-sport slopfest and have terrible matchmaking. It’s hard to break into the leaderboards if you’re a small studio but larger ones can pour a ton of money into getting attention until enough people take interest in it organically
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 physically cannot get better at games without challenging yourself to harder situations you might not be fully prepared for! Being a shit player in a higher difficulty for a cooperative game is literally how everyone HAS to start for those games. Wiki trawling doesn’t cut it. You can’t adjust to new game mechanics just by doing math!
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.
cope
Edit: I have to deal with the fact I’m shit all the time in solo DRG and I’m fine with it. No difference between that and another player really given how hard it is to improve, except that I can improve myself, but that doesn’t make much of a difference in just one match (or sometimes they can improve in one match, and in that case just teach them the likely small things they’re missing!!) I can understand it’s more annoying because it’s harder to understand why exactly they’re making mistakes, but that isn’t really their fault
First part of message was probably too callous, sorry
Level 1 accounts are entitled to queue for endgame content actually. The players have no agency in making that decision and its all the developer’s fault. What, are you some kind of bully? I’m calling the cyberpolice and posting a wall of text to hexbear dot net.
this but unironically
either communicate it better or don’t allow fucking level one players to play content that they literally cannot win due to progressionalso everyone is “entitled” to queue for everything, they bought the goddamn game, shit players are part of the gameplay. Are you just not good enough to play around it? Don’t blame people who don’t know what they’re doing for your lack of skill
This sarcastic and shitty argument that “the players have agency so it’s their fault” ignores the fact that they make decisions in a completely controllable context the developers can modify at will and created specifically according to their image of the game. Developers have the entire gamut of human psychology to use and mold to their advantage and the advantage of their players; That’s why things like game progression are effective as player motivation so much of the time. Anyone who is genuinely at fault for queuing for a high difficulty option is either a troll or doesn’t know better, and I hope we can at least agree that a troll is not the same thing as a genuinely shit player.
If you can’t handle the difficulty of teaching new players than play a different game!! NoT eVerY GaMe is fOr EverYone
If you can’t handle the difficulty of teaching new players than play a different game!! NoT eVerY GaMe is fOr EverYone
This is a stupid point coming from you because the game already exists to cater to certain people. Teaching and learning are two different things. If teaching other people isn’t part of the game, then why should they have to play something else because of bad players’ problems and inability to move on from a game they hate?
because teaching people is part of the game. git gud
also i’m trying to emphasize that the same “git gud” logic people use to shit on bad players can be turned on them very easily. I do not actually blame anyone for, say, wanting a mode that prevents newer players from joining. You just have to get off your high horse to ask that and stop blaming shit players for being shit players
also having read your comment multiple times i have no goddamn idea what you’re trying to say. co-op games intrinsically have a degree of learning and teaching even with experienced players, they have to figure out how to communicate with each other even at that high level and that takes an exchange of learning that goes both ways.
Are you just not good enough to play around it?
It doesn’t bother me personally as I’m used to carrying. I’m max level in Gears 5 and carry brand new players on the max level Horde matchmaking all the time. It bothers me at a systemic level that they’re allowed to queue for it because they’re clearly having a miserable time, a minimum level requirement is all I ask for but I guess that would be too much to ask and instead those newbies should just keep suffering while unintentionally ruining the experience for everybody else. It would be bullying to ask them to queue for a lower difficulty after all.
I’ve had people send me hate mail and death threats for just suggesting they play a lower difficulty or even just the tutorial but that’s OK because it’s actually the developer who’s in the wrong. Silly me.
Don’t blame people who don’t know what they’re doing for your lack of skill
If they could just go away and take the time to learn in the queue clearly marked “beginner” that would be better for everybody involved. My skill can only carry the game so far when they’re running into no-man’s land and unintentionally sabotaging the game for everybody else.
But asking them to learn the game would be criticising them and might feed my god complex so that’s out of the question apparently.
they bought the goddamn game, shit players are part of the gameplay.
How does this work for free to play games like Halo Infinite where I get brand new accounts queueing for Legendary firefight who stare at weapon pickups trying to figure out which button to press?
you literally just said you wanted a minimum level requirement, that is literally just what I’m talking about with taking the issue to the developers, you aren’t even disagreeing with me
people giving death threats is shitty, yeah, not going to defend that shit
using sarcasm to hide your 
?With extra strawman
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
every game should have an easy mode
I’m going to assume you just got yelled at by someone for constantly dying
oh no it just randomly came to me from seeing bad gamer takes. never play co-op without friends.
So you’ve literally never played a souls game co-op with randos?
No investigation, no right to speakDespite how vocal the toxic parts of the souls fanbase can be, sunbros who engage in random co-op tend to have the exact opposite mentality
Never got hatemail for sucking in a souls game after over a decade of playing them online and I’ve played a lot of those on xbox too, so if anyone was gonna call me a slur for not helping them with a boss it was gonna be there but that never happened
I’ve had way more toxic interactions from so called teammates in far easier games
my friends are bad all the time and the people online talking about bad players are annoying.
oh yeah also i have experienced this in my distant memory. played co-op game event and toxic g*mers shitting on me for not being high enough level for an event that doesn’t even have progression in it. i would not have cared as it was a lobby i believe i missed the description of, but unfortunately this was a common experience for other people who played that same event. also lots of tiny weird comments made about misplays when i try to learn various games. its extremely toxic shit and i don’t know why people defend it.
i was referring to the “only play with friends” part when it comes to my recent life and what drove me to post this. i’m not posting this because i’m “salty” i’m posting this because I think people who take their frustration of a game out on worse players are doing a bad and toxic thing and shouldn’t treat it like a good thing
also every game should have an easy mode
Why every game? Should every book be rewritten to be at a child’s reading level?
Not every piece of media is for everyone and that is a good thing.
I do agree with 90% of what you said besides this point tho. I hate the competative “a lack of skill is rude” bs.
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Some games are fun BECAUSE of the difficulty. And if you get frustrated by those kinds of games, just don’t play them.
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.
based do it more
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This guy blue DPSs
tanks are an entirely separate role from dps in the holy trinity what are you talking about
what unholy amalgamation has ff14 created with their class system
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oh i thought you were referring to them as the tank
idk just seems like someone who hasn’t figured out the “meta” yet, give them time. unless ff14 does horrible shit like forcing you to grind to access dungeons in which case fuck that shit entirely
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FFXIV let’s you play dungeons with full on bot squads due to all the complaints they were getting from toxic players in dungeons, lmao. “Great Community By The Way”
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.
I’m not sure what this means but if you’re trying to analogue all bad players to treating the game as a “roleplay chat server” than that feels pretty dishonest
Your post(s) feel pretty dishonest. The bad players are bad because the game is too poorly designed. But then how are they’re good players? You’re trying to treat video game skill levels like societal classes and it’s annoying.
I’m not saying the players are bad because the game is poorly designed, I’m saying the fact they end up working alongside skilled players in a way that makes both upset is an example of bad design, IE impromper matchmaking. bad players will make bad decisions because they’re bad at the game and this includes choosing difficulty options they shouldn’t. allowing a player who by the very definition of being bad does not know which option is best to pick the option that makes other’s experience worse, is bad game design
i never once likened it to societal classes lol
You’re complaining about several different things. No one likes matchmaking and the difficulty will reflect that shitty and inherently limited design. But difficulty itself is a different topic and should be based on whatever the devs feel like enforcing on players. If they want players to choose, great. But if they choose only one difficulty for everyone then suck it up or play something else.
A lot of multiplayer games already have casual mode. You’ll still get barely good players getting upset at worse players beneath their barely serviceable skill level because that’s the nature of competitive games. As for co-op, there’s not really matchmaking unless I’m missing something.
yes if they choose only one difficulty for everyone than you should simply accept bad players because they literally have no other options to play. git gud. bad players are an obstacle to work around
co-op games are specifically what i’m talking about. having the best team you can for your esports event or whatever makes sense. being (toxically) angry that your consequenceless game that you chose to be difficult was made more difficult because someone else is bad at it does not make sense. i mean being annoyed makes sense as it does with any obstacle in any game, but straight up insulting or berating the bad player is not remotely a reasonable thing to do
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?
saw a great and extremely long youtube video called “Why it’s rude to suck at Warcraft” about exactly this kind of stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU
I played a bit of the modern wow and it has the matchmaking system. They managed to get rid of all the whining and insults in chat, but it’s replaced by something so, so much worse.
You’ll do a dungeon for the first time, and you pull a mob around a blind corner, or walk the wrong way, or some shit like that. Suddenly and without any warning, you hit a loading screen and you’re standing back where you queued up. You have been silently, without a word between them or you, vote kicked by 3 out of the other 4 players.
Saw this video as well and I really liked it, really voiced a lot of the frustrations I had with the game that I couldn’t quite as accurately diagnose. Nothing about it has changed for the better either.
The social aspect of the game is even in the toilet now, nobody talks and recruitment for teams and guilds takes place almost entirely outside of the game as well.
there’s literally an hour and a half video about this kind of thing happening as a historical phenomenon that uses sources and if i distantly remember my first watch of it correctly basically only includes correct information. and g*mers still argue about it to this very day. wow. or should i say WoW.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I remember like 15 years ago being told by people putting together raids that they were only looking for people with achievements for content that had been out for a week.
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.
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 always hated when gamers would point to a person with a disability being able to beat Dark Souls or Sekiro or whatever and go “See, this disabled person could beat the game, therefore the accusations of ableism are invalid!”
i am lucky enough to have never encountered that particular brand of idiocy, its like arguing that we don’t need any public support at all for disabled people because some of them are world class athletes.
g*mers have gatekept elden ring by vehemently defending its inability to pause. it’s so weird
Catch me over here using the steam deck suspend feature as a pause.
If you care about bad players in video games, you’re not getting high enough
