One week ago, two Guild Wars 2 narrative designers, Jessica Price and Peter Fries, were fired after Price called out a player of the game on Twitter, prompting widespread backlash. Since then, mobs have tried to employ similar tactics against more women, and game development studios have had to take a hard look at…
Overwatch players needed something to incentivize good sportsmanship and, yesterday, they got it. Blizzard’s latest Overwatch patch is toning down the hierarchy of skill and introducing a hierarchy of decency.
Conan Exiles officially launched last month, and was playable in early access for more than a year before that. Unfortunately, the game still contains no means of reporting other players for griefing, abuse, or racism.
Everybody’s fantasized about owning jerks in games so hard that they drop off the face of the internet. It’s an appealing idea, but Bully Hunters, a group that’s trying to fight harassment by diving into games and killing harassers, has become an object lesson in why that idea works better as an idle fantasy.
For years now, gaming companies like Riot, Blizzard, and Twitch have been fighting online abuse and harassment in their own ways, to mixed results. Now they’re trying something different: Working together.
Twitch is taking extra steps to clean up their community and combat harassment on the platform. A revised set of community guidelines focuses on harsher penalties and cracking down on sexual content with measures including permanent bans and off-site harassment moderation.
In the near future, Blizzard is adding built-in voice chat to Heroes of the Storm. Announced at BlizzCon last year, it’s been a long time coming to a game that’s been out since 2015. Some players, however, are worried that voice chat will cause more problems than it’ll solve.
Overwatch, a team-based shooter about working together, isn’t always the friendliest of places. From random quitters to that one guy who won’t stop calling me a cuck, players often find ways to be toxic. To combat the issue, Blizzard is now banning players misbehaving on social media.
GTA Online is home to a community of people who dress up as animals and commit virtual crimes together. The Furry Army, which boasts a roster of nearly 200 members, is led by a red fox-cheetah hybrid, Vik Nightfox. Like anyone else, these players want to have fun in the wild streets of Los Santos, but the furry…
Twitch’s latest update introduces a tool that lets a streamer instantly transport their viewers to somebody else’s channel. Known as “raiding,” this has been used in the past to harass people. Now that Twitch is making raids an official part of the platform, however, some streamers think the new feature will make it…
The influential gaming forum NeoGAF is imploding in the wake of an accusation of sexual misconduct against the long-running site’s owner. Yesterday, around a dozen of NeoGAF’s moderators—more than half, according to two sources—quit their posts there, and the website has been down for over half a day following a…
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot more “Great ult!” and “Thanks for switching!” in Overwatch than “Get wrecked, you useless piece of s***.” After toxicity in Overwatch’s competitive mode reached critical saturation last season, this season, which began September 1st, has felt markedly more positive.
Overwatch has serious issues with toxic players, and in recent months, those problems only seem to have gotten worse. Blizzard swears up and down that it’s working to improve player behavior, but according to game director Jeff Kaplan, those efforts are taking a direct toll on other aspects of the game’s development.
Earlier this week Kotaku UK ran an article from Charleyy Hodson about the sexual harassment she recently faced on Twitch while livestreaming in the site’s IRL category. Everyone seems to agree there’s a problem, but it’s not so easy to find consensus on how platforms like Twitch should be tackling it. Given the focus…
Blizzard announced increased penalties for toxic Overwatch players yesterday, effective immediately. Kotaku has reported that Overwatch’s previous reporting system was toothless, which may have inspired the game’s recent toxicity epidemic. We’re monitoring to see whether Blizzard will take real action.
Call of Duty commentator Jack Campbell left his esports career behind last month in the wake of the internet’s response to leaked screencaps that implied he had a foot fetish. In his goodbye video, Campbell explained, “This has now affected my personal life, my family, and me personally… It’s too much for me now, and…
“I think we’d do better with a healer,” I suggested to my Overwatch team earlier this week. We were in the spawn room defending the Temple of Anubis and, without a healer, we would quickly forfeit the objective. Not even the slightest pause passed before a teammate told me that, instead, “What we need is another man.”
On Sunday night, Call of Duty commentator Jack Campbell announced his departure from the esports scene and his plan to deactivate his Twitter account. Campbell’s love life has become a topic de rigeur for Call of Duty fans in the past month, in spite of Campbell’s attempts to stave off fans’ speculation. The situation…
When a player reports an abusive teammate in Overwatch, the most common response is rarely fear, regret, or even an apology. It’s “go ahead!” Overwatch’s reporting system is opaque, like any game’s, but word on the street is that it’s toothless.
Trash talking is divisive among gamers. If you go too far, you run the risk of sending your friend home crying and never again playing another round of Mario Party against them. Or, if you’re conflict-averse, a few unsavory words over Madden could make you think worse of your good buddy. Some stand by trash talk as a…
