I love that picture, simply because it's true!

I have never experienced this kind of behavior online... but I don't have a Live account and rarely play PC games.

The PSN is free of this kind of thing, but that's because barely anyone uses voice chat for some reason.

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 for the past couple weeks on PC, and so far I'm happy to say that I've only had a couple unpleasant experiences with the voice chat.

I think there are several reasons for this. For one, you're talking to your teammates, which eliminates the opportunity for vocal trash talk. And for another, you have to buy the means of communication yourself, which generally means you only hear people who are interested in playing the game, not being assholes.

And without trying to stir the flame-pot up, I tend to believe that there are just more assholes on XBL, period.

Ah, Penny Arcade. I remember this old comic. And the sad part was how true it was. The addition of voice chat ruined the UT2004 experience for me. I remember thinking how great it would be to be able to speak to your teammates. Boy was I wrong. I can't count the number of matches that were ruined by some jack ass on my team with a microphone, bitching about how badly he was doing because of how much everyone else on his team sucked. And this was back before headsets were as prevelent as they are now. o well. emo moment over.

I am a long time gamer and the way people act online drives me away.

Private voice chats for PC games are just about the only time I do use such things, as I can trust my friends.
Text boxes in things like Warcraft 3 aren't that bad and a lot easier to ignore when there is a bigot involved.

Though when showing things off to new gamers, or old gamers returning, nothing ruins the experience more when someone swears and throws out racial slurs at them in a simple game online.
Yes you can mute them or put them on ignore, but one can forget or get in the habit of not muting people until they act up. By which time, it already harms the fun and experience.

Yes there are those who enjoy talking like that and that is where some of their fun comes in, but I'm not one of them nor are many people. It's really just the few, not the majourity.

Perhaps someday Xbox Live and Xfire and all those other services will come up with a rating system that lowers people for such acts.
That way if they do it a lot, you can just look at their rating and say no to playing with them. Or if it gets low enough, have it automatically mute them while leaving everyone else alone.

Or I can find a genie and wish for such people to become mature enough. It's just as likely to come true and work.

Eh, I've never been bothered by all the shit-talk that goes on on Live. I actually find it has the reverse effect on me in that through the shit-talk, you can determine who's an idiot and who's just being funny. I've made plenty of great friends on XBL that I game with on a regular basis and we all just make fun of each other. I rarely have a session where I don't laugh myself to tears.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why we are not all friends in real life! People can't stand random strangers on the street why would they stand random people online? Playing the same game isn't going to bridge that gap.

You know, I can say that it all depends on what games you play online.

Personally I could never see myself playing any game with voice chat unless it was through a Ventrillo server or something like that because of the lack of respect that EVERYONE shows online with most games.

It really boils down to "age".
Now don't get me wrong, there are many older people who don't know how to conduct themselves online, but often when you hear one of those annoying voice chat video's uploaded on YouTube, its from younger people who simple have never been kicked around by their parents.

So, yeah, It doesn't surprise me that this sort of behavior is affecting the entire industry.

Ahh growth - something only suits care about.

Keeping gamers as the audience for games is fine by me. These arseholes just want to pander to non-gamers because they're more clueless & easier to rip off.

While it is very prevalent in Xbox Live, and I have gotten into arguments with these exact douche bags at times putting me on their level. I personally can't imagine not having voice chat in my games as I've been using it on live for four years or so now.

I have a solid amount of people that are great, people I know in real life and just people I've known online for awhile that make the online voice worth it, regardless of how many bad experiences there are.

The simple fact that most games have an easily accessible mute button have fixed this issue for me. Not to mention you can and always have been able to mute these douche bags on Xbox Live, I just believe most people are to lazy to do it, thus they have no reason to be bitching about it in the end from my view.

So nintendo did the right thing HHHHHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

XBL needs the ability for people to tag people as potential racists or bigots. Enough tags of the same type on the same person equals a permanent ban on their Live account.

Freedom of Speech is great, but I don't believe everyone deserves their right to the first amendment, and bigots, fascists, etc fall into that grouping. They are scum, and the more they're allowed to spew their senseless hatred without any kind of stopgap mechanism to clamp it down the more they're simply going to do it. Microsoft is a private company, running a private service, and they can set whatever rules they want. It's not like they're going to be getting complaints from racists, anyway, since racists are generally cowards.

@Asbestos_Underwear: There's a significantly larger connection in the latter case, simply because the two people, while strangers, are obviously playing the same game. It should instill a sense of kinship. But there will always be painfully obvious exceptions to this.

The amount of inane babbling you hear on Warhawk is quite annoying. I'd rather hear someone getting shot in the face than some 15 year old sounding like he's shouting underwater. The only satisfaction I get out of it is finding the person gabbling away and shooting them. The cry of "Fuck head" is always good to hear even if its barely intelligible.

I believe it. The assholes I've met online have certainly put me offline multiplayer gaming outside of a select group of friends and games that I really love (most of them really old). I just don't have the energy to deal with jerks online.

This is the entire reason that I don't play CS anymore. I hate being told how to play the game by people lower on the kills list than I am. I also can't stand 12(just a figurative number)year-old children cussing...all the time. Now, I'm no saint, so I occasionally swear...but really, is saying "fuck" every other word necessary?

I generally like playing TF2, because it seems that the audience playing the game is more mature. Now, maybe that is just because I've been lucky...but it just doesn't seem to happen as often.

I still remember swearing of GOW when my team started killing me, then accusing me of team killing and demanding that I rip off my own cock and fuck myself.

I remain safe in my orange box.

Tragedy of The Commons is a b**ch
[en.wikipedia.org]

@cheez: I regularly hear idiots on TF2, and to be honest, I enjoy a bit of it. If I hear some 15/16/17 year old whine-whine-whine and insult our engineers because they can't build fast enough and how the medics aren't backing him up, I chuckle. When a guy like that starts an argument with another guy that sounds to be about his mid 20s, it's even better. The one thing I cannot stand is hearing a 12 year old try to lead the team, but thankfully it seems most players of TF2 for PC are late teens to early thirties.

Also, alltalk servers are the best, especially if they permit you to play some music. Oh god, I love hearing Cotton-eye Joe during a good game of TF2.

@nypad5:
How dare you point out the hypocrisy of hating both XBox's inclusion of voice chat and the Wii's exclusion of it.

Give a monkey a gun and it will probably shoot someone

I bought a house a year ago, and I'm selling it and moving, despite the economy and the real possibility that I'll lose money because I live next to gaping assholes from hell, and it makes my home life intolerable.

I moved here because I was living a condo with a homeowners association who were a bunch of gaping assholes from hell.

I'm moving to a new place where, I'm 90% sure there are more assholes, but it's my fervent hope that they are not so gaping.

Assholes are hurting every industry. As well as everything else. It's no excuse.

(and yes, I *havE* considered the possibility that I'm the common denominator in all these instances... after careful review, I don't think I'm the problem, though, since assholes never move away)

Um yeah, that's kinda why I make a point of avoiding Xbox Live. And that equation up there isn't exactly accurate. You don't magically turn into a fuckwad when given anonymity. People like that are generally ignorant assholes every day of their lives, it just gets exacerbated to soul-crushing proportions on the internetz.

Swearing and stuff doesn't bother me on Live. I just takey off the headset or mute the perp and problem solved. What pisses me off more, and completely unrelated, is (in FPSes) playing vs. clans. All. The. Time. Or at least in COD4 or previously in RB6V.

Anyway, Nintendo has the right idea. Undiscriminating castration of communication. The non-gamer won't feel a thing.

@Dits:

More than likely it'll shoot itself.

Damn this article hit so close to home. God knows how many times I've run into people like these that just piss me the F off. Unsurprisingly the worst people on the 'net is definetly the Halo 3 "community." Hell I even have a good friend who talks shit all over live just for the sake of doing so. He calls it "hilarious"...I call it stupidity. However yes, Bill Fulton is 110% correct. And nice use of PA there lol.

I don't have a problem with ranked matches in Halo 3 as that requires a paid gold subscription.
It's the social matches that are crap, full of obnoxious kids with unlimited free 48hr trials.

I have actually only had this problem on the 360, and i play a lot of TF2 on the PC and previously Counterstrike, Starcraft and Dawn of war. I guess it's because they've gone to such amazing lengths to make online play and voice comms easy to hook up even the most worthless dregs of society manage to get it going.

I've been playing games for almost 20 years now, and there's something about online play that has always kind of freaked me out to be honest. I absolutely love multiplayer with friends, but playing random dudes just really pushes my wrong buttons. This goes for MMORPGs as well; WOW made me dislike people more than i thought was possible.

In that sense, i'm mostly pissed at Nintendo for not tying the system friend code into their online play because it's simply a really fucking stupid idea, but not being able to talk to randoms online on the Wii honestly doesn't bother me in the slightest, mostly because playing randoms is.. Well.. Shit.

The Wii's primary mistake for me is making it hard for me to keep in touch with people i have already done the awkward process of exchanging codes with. It's just a crap extra step.

The Wii's primary online boon is that there is exactly no online harassment, which is pretty cool honestly.

I LOVE when people talk trash online. It's hilarious to play CS:S with alltalk on (so the teams can hear eachother), and hear the universal warcry of online gaming: "YOU JUST GOT LUCKY, FAGET" right after i killed someone.

It just motivates me to do my best to annihilate those morons ^^

Oh and to the Nintendo fanboys desperately claiming that the Wii's lack of voice chat is a GOOD thing... Why not just have an option to turn off voice chat instead? That way, the few people who don't want it, can turn it off and the rest of us can enjoy the feature.

@Sunjammer: Playing on a server in the Source engine (Counterstrike and whatnot) is always a treat, mostly because if you step out of line, server admins sometimes have their own programmed punishment codes in place to turn the malefactor into a chicken for the rest of the round. :3

If you dont want voice chat... plug in the headset and set it down. There you go.

@Stefanten: Nobody's saying the Wii's lack of voice chat is good. Nintendo has always separated playing with randoms versus playing with friends by a fairly enormous margin. I think that when playing with friends there's no excuse for the exclusion of voice chat.

QQ.

Also, good job not giving credit to PA for that comic, Kotaku. Granted, most of us know where it's from, but you sure as shit didn't make it so you should at least post a link when you use it.

@Krackatoa: I guess that's the bonus of having SERVERS and not just random dudes that host games, eh?

That may explain why i've had such a good time with PC FPSes compared to consoles; communities build around servers, not people. You get a kind of collective ownership going, and then justice will kind of dispense itself.

@cheeze:
Just because members of the KKK play Gears, does not make them any more sympathetic, nor do I feel an increase in kinship.

The other way around, those hating on gay people will also not rethink their stance.

Aside from these extreme examples, people will be much like the same on trivial subject matter.

@Sunjammer:
So true. I dont care much for voice chat with strangers but why does Nintendo have to do everything so painful and difficult even with your friends you have in your console after already going through the initial hassle (and not the last of the hassles) of inputing 16 digit friend codes and anditional 12 digit FCs for each new online game?

I almost always only play with my friends on Live, we have a pseudo clan of mates who play for fun. We're not into this highly competitive crap, we just have a laugh and play games together. Without voice chat online gaming feels hollow, dead and might as well be playing against bots. That's the feeling I get when playing online on the PS3, I love Warhawk but it just feels a bit pointless with hardly any human interaction.

It's not like it's hard in CoD4 & Halo3 to mute people. Or if it really gets on your nerves then you just change your privacy options for voice to Friends only and never have to put up with assholes ever again.

When I play on my own, without my clan guys I usually won't even put my headset on. Simple solution.

I love Xbox Live and there are some nice people on there, but it is disappointing to see so many people with such a basic lack of civility, humility, manners, sportsmanship etc. It's primarily an age thing I think - playing with more grown-up gamers is often much more relaxed and good natured. This is one of the reasons I'd love an age filter for Xbox Live, above all other possible features.

Halo 3 particularly, despite being such a brilliant game online, seems to attract ignorant idiots. That said, the ability to quickly mute someone who is obnoxious, or to limit your voice comms to your own team and party only, really helps a lot.

Without wishing to cause offence, most of the nicer people I've played with on Xbox Live are from Europe - German, French, Dutch, Swedish etc. It's not because we're somehow magically nicer, it's just an age thing - it seems as though the average age of European Xbox 360 owners is higher than in the US. Of course it's not the case that American gamers are all appalling, obnoxious people - I've played with some really cool guys from the US - but it does seem as though the average age of Xbox 360 owners in the US is much much lower.

I know many people who are put off the idea of playing online because they'd have to play with a bunch of loud, stupid kids.

@Asbestos_Underwear: Ah, but now you're changing the parameters. You were originally relating meeting complete strangers through a particular game to meeting complete strangers on the street. I'm saying that the comparison doesn't hold, because you already have a point of commonality in the former case.

This doesn't mean you're going to like everybody who plays that game. It means you simply have a potential bonding point.

If only the XBL feedback/rating system was not as broken as it is. Seriously, they should fix that and then come up with cool things you can do when you have a 5 star rating that you can't do when you have a smack-talker's 2-star rating. That would be a big step in the right direction.

I no longer use my headset. It's not that I'm easily offended, it's just that it gets tiresome to listen to the same old crap from everyone.

90%+ of the talk on xbox live is mindless drivel.

This is something I've actually been thinking about lately myself, and I think I've found a solution. It starts with an observation though. I have noticed that in many FPS games that I play, the most enjoyable online experience comes from the games which let players set up their own lobbies. In other words, I have found games of Ghost Recon to be more pleasant than Halo 3 or CoD4.

It is my belief that if game makers are serious about this issue, they will make sure that their games utilize the host lobby system. It works. If people come into your online game talking trash or spouting vulgarities, the host can take them out of the game at any time. For this reason alone, most people online tend not to act like jerks in these situations. The trash-talkers learn that if they act like a fool online, they run the risk of getting booted right then and there.

This doesn't always guarantee that you will find a lobby of nice people to play with, as there are some hosts who won't have a problem with bad behavior, but there is a flip-side to that also. If people come to know that this gamer is a jerk who plays with other jerks, then when searching for a game online, they can avoid joining rooms hosted by that person.

Either way, it works. I used to play a lot of Ghost Recon online and there were plenty of times that I would host a lobby and have people join in for 5+ hour long sessions. We were total strangers online who'd play for hours on end (we even allowed short breaks every so often) and just had fun playing the game we enjoyed without any punks, sore losers, racists, etc. spoiling the fun. You can't get that in a game that doesn't use the host lobby system.

I don't use voice chat at all when playing online. It really does spoil the experience.

Unfortunately, things are difficult without voice chat in some games, so I just avoid online multiplayer altogether in those cases.

I've actually found myself playing a lot more PC games online lately. Text chat has the benefits of being able to communicate without the most annoying aspects of voice chat. There are still racist, sexist or homophobic messages, but they are much easier to ignore in textual form.

Things used to be better when I would play with friends from University, but we rarely have time to get together on the same server (or XBL) and play these days. So I spend most of my time playing with "strangers", which really can be excruciating if voice chat is enabled.

I have never been this proud to be a PC gamer in my entire life. FINALLY, we have a COOLER reason why the industry is dying than "you suck". We are actually smack talking the industry to hell! VICTORY. :P

@Xiedo:

Totally just sick of all the clans. I stopped COD 4 all together because of it. You can't play with them because they do nothing, but berate you and when you play against them there is nothing, but a frothy spewing of insults at the end of the match. RB6V 2 is following suite, nothing but clans in verses now.

If compan