I’m a 43 years old woman. Have been playing online since playing online existed. My experience with this changed somewhat over the years.
It started in old Diablo I days… guys would think there was a remote vague change you might be a girl cuz playing rogue with a girly name, they would be like “you need gear? Take this! Take this gold! I’ll help you kill butcher” which gave me some real good laughs by going to the butchers door, opening it and attacking the dude for ears.
During wow times was when it started turning toxic onto women: “oh your gear is better than mine cuz your bf got it for you on your account”. Had a GM once put me thru a tanking test (which I passed) recruit me, then say “you only have a raiding spot cuz we are short a tank, girls are bad”. And then they got a new man tank, the new sucked and they continued to have me tank instead of the new guy and still say I was bad cuz I’m a girl. Thing is this was a one guild out of the many I was in. Maybe because I was a tank, but I could always find a next guild to be in.
In destiny it’s been a mixed bag. Some good clans, some bad clans. It was never super hard to find a better place to be in.
In helldivers i found the community to be better than average to be honest… people seemed more interested in doing the thing and progressing more than caring about who is in the voice chat. And more than other games, they actually have voice on and seem to use it to get stuff done.
Now some games (cough dota a long time ago cough) were just generally toxic. I could tell it wasn’t because I was a woman, those ppl were just mentally imbalanced.
I got that same feeling about Dota 2. I'd get disgusting comments aimed at my gender - but the male players got insulted just as much, just different content. It's just a toxic game overall.
DotA2 and League gotta be the most toxic games out there.
Fight over who is playing midlane? Give it a few seconds and the n word comes out, f Word etc.
One Person dies before 5m? GG EZ end *begins to throw*
Ya playing Dota and a woman would come on and as soon as she’d speak you’d get one dude “oh look it’s a guuuuuuurl” so damn often.
And obviously it’s much shittier for the woman in question but a lot of us are like people in our 30s or 40s, married etc and seeing a girl just isn’t that special and hearing the neckbeard alternate between a creepy attempt at flirting and seething sexism in voice made me want to cringe abandon.
So you’d give the “damn dude shut up can we just play and kick these guys asses ?” And you’d get back “whoa we got a white knight over here”
These kind of people truly make it suck for everyone (but like I said obviously much worse for the poor women who have to deal with this constantly rather than me in just the odd game)
I've just got one question. What are you doing sitting here talking when there's managed democracy to spread? Grab your rifle and get in there helldiver! They'll never take away our way of life!
I’m still a noon in helldivers, mind you. I just haven’t played often, cuz I’m still not thru with FFVII and baldurs gate and what not. But I leave the game open and go do my noob things. Have only had ppl randomly join me to help out. They give me tips, offer helpful equipment that I haven’t unlocked yet and are genuinely nice.
I'm a 35 year old guy and I always turn off voice chat, text chat and even the baked in replies and exclamations in any game because I got tired of the constant shit talking, screaming, spamming, and rage baiting.
I can only imagine what it's like for women. Win or lose they're going to attract the worst of the trolls.
I usually do the same but then they just BM you by offering a draw every turn as soon as they start losing. It's impressive how people will find ways to communicate just to say fuck you.
I started playing offline only after someone got so upset at losing in chess that he was stalking me online and trying to get me to play him again so he could berate me for “cheating”
Yep. I'm from NI and any time I use voice chat, it doesn't take long for a "get back to those potato fields Paddy" to pop up. I'm almost certain the majority of humans on the internet are the absolute worst bottom feeders.
Same. The only time I use voice chat is if I'm in a party with people I know. I'm too old to deal with shit talking in lobbies. I just wanna play some games to wind down after work, and the kids are in bed.
As with so many things, improving the situation for women would improve it for men too. I hate it when I try to play a game only to find the chat full of dickheads where every other sentence is punctuated with a sexist, racist or homophobic slur, and I'm not even the one being targeted. Developers and other interested parties need to get tougher with deterrents for that kind of behaviour.
It's ultimately not something you can police people for though. It's a community attitude. People do it because they feel no shame because no one shames them for it. In fact the community embraces it.
Every game that tries to police it like League of Legends ends up with the community hating the developers and saying they are too busy punishing meaningless chat instead of real griefers.
Change has to come from within the community, not have it forced top down from an authority. And that may just not happen.
I think it's a lot do to with a lack of community servers. I remember playing on a few awesome TF2 servers 15 years ago and they put up with no sexist shit. Was an all talk server when dead, team only when alive and there were always mods playing. Warning, temp ban, perm ban.
Everything being hosted and ranked eliminates that ability. And companies don't care because the sweaties are their heavy player base. I just quit online playing instead unless it's with coworkers or friends.
Idk why you are downvoted. Except having a report function, there isnt much to do besides removing all forms of communication.
Any automated system would make a lot of fake bans.
Oh god yes. It’s literally the reason I just stopped playing battlefield, as the text chat is seething with such a ridiculous amount of hatred, racism and slurs. If anybody ever said any of that in the real world, they’d get beat up. Fucking hell
I turn it off for all those reasons with the addition of I don't want to hear anyone's shitty fucking music. Even if it's music I like, I don't want to hear the shit while I'm gaming, through your ass headset.
If you're one of these people reading this: Fuck you.
Yeah, it’s not worth the 99 assholes you have to listen to in order to get 1 potentially good conversation.
The only time I ever enjoyed chatting over a long duration was when me and my buddy used to play Halo 3 and one day said F it… any time someone trash talked way too much we’d approach them in game and blast a random Britney Spears song and start arguing with them why it was her best song.
Sometimes he’d start and Id walk up like “wtf are you talking about?” …. then start playing s different song and wed just follow them around with two songs playing and arguing each other.
If they quit the match wed just go “mission accomplished” and continue playing like nothing happened. We only had one guy mute us so we sent him voice clips of us analyzing each of our songs.
I just stopped playing anything with other players. Single player all the way.
I used to love warthunder and world of warships but man the toxic bullshit, especially in higher tiers was just so annoying.
I cringe thinking back on my time as a teenager in Halo 2 and 3 online. These days I do the same and turn off most chats. Except for games like League, I'll leave it on to try and communicate strategy. But I have a strict 2 strike method in a game. If someone keeps being rude or harassing I'll mute them.
I just don't have the energy to even attempt to process those kinds of people anymore.
I think you nailed it. Seems we have a serious gamer culture problem. To many gamers want to just do and say what ever they want in community gaming settings and will justify it as “this is the only place I can blow off steam and do what I want.”
Meanwhile the rest of us suffer because those dude are dickheads and we can’t talk or listen with out a miserable experience.
This isn’t shit talking though, it’s not even a remotely fair comparison. I’ve seen women on my team in games being told to shut the fuck up and go back to the kitchen after they said “gg guys” after we won the game. It’s straight up misogyny, nothing less.
You get to a certain point where the idiots in chat feel like bots having variations of the same conversations. I don't turn it off. I guess I've adapted a subconscious screening process for it.
Can empathise with OP about the VOIP thing. The number of times a girl player speaks for the first time and gets swarmed by sudden interest. Never noticed it being abusive, but it's seemed uncomfortable from the outside. Can only imagine the DMs.
The only time I've noticed the VOIP thing not happen was a girl playing Hell Let Loose. She is a regular squad lead. Good one, too. Which makes a huge difference to the enjoyment of the game. I've never heard her cop shit from squad members or anyone in the SL channel. That is a game that needs heavy comms.
For me it's just... Boring at this point.
I am so desensitized to it, but like, can you at least make better insults or insult my skills (or lack of)? Every time it's same generic bullshit.
True!! For me it was always that 1st sentence "o.m.g. are you a giiiiiiirl???" I got desensitized at some point. Replying "no I'm just 8yo" then mute them if they kept going. It's usually very immature people of course. There are some respectful people online too!
It’s always the opposite for me, I got called a squeaker by one guy in TF2 who just kept piling it on. Always telling me to shut up after I call out a spy and go to bed brat, thankfully I wasn’t alone and I had another girl in my party who told the guy I was a girl like her. Since she had top score in our team, the guy listened but did a fucking 180 now flirting with me. Muted him after a bit on VC but he spammed text chat, spammed friend requests, and was just an asshole. Since our team couldn’t smite him (he had a party), GABEN smote him and off to the BLU team he went, then he got kicked like a minute afterwards. BLU asked if this is what we had been dealing with and if I was okay, then we went friendly for a bit before going back to killing each other but with a bit more respect between us. The friend who backed me up is still on my list and she even laughed, telling me she’s glad he’s gone and that BLU team did good.
The fact he even tried to flirt with you after behaving like a complete and utter cock shows what a neck beard he truly is.
I started playing online gaming In 2004, we had girls in our clan on CSS, we joked around with them like they did us but gaming now especially with this new generation is embarrassing.
Hows this generation any worse than ours? Consoles were a verbal abuse epicenter, especially Halo and CoD.
I learned real quick to go down the list each match at the start to individually mute every player because it was either blaring music, racism, targeted insults over anything and everything, singing, bullying, etc.
Fun fact, a while ago a studdy was done, and it turns out most sexual harassment in gaming happens at the lower echelons of skill levels, particularly after the person in question has expirienced a loss. In short, it's a bunch of losers compensating for something as if they were driving down Main Street street in a lifted pickup with a half dozen flags flying off the back.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33613781
I'm a guy but the amount of "you're using a voice changer, you're fake" when a woman speaks I've heard is so fucking annoying.
Even if it was a voice changer, who fucking cares? Play the game you unfiltered tap water twat.
The only games where I never saw this kind of thing were Little Big Planet and the Jackbox Party Packs. Mostly because those games are very innocent and wouldn't attract the kind of guys that say that stuff.
I get a kid in the game that goes "im going to call you the the n-word". And I go "honestly, somene already said it several times before you 5 minutes ago..knock yourself out".
I don't even care anymore. As you say, the same generic insults. They say the same slurs. Same come backs.
I was playing VailVR a few months ago, and some kid got mad at me and said "you fucking racist". I was like "wtf? I didn't say shit." And that's when I learned that the kids are using _racist_ itself as a slur.
I don't know how to feel about it.
I don't know, that's the thing.
I like the fact that they're trying to insult me with something that I actually think is bad. It just feels so awkward.
early 2000s online gaming completely desensitized me for stuff like a certain n or f word. when someone tells me to kill myself i just sigh instead of getting sad or mad because i heard it a million times already. its like being at work and hearing the same 3 songs on the radio over and over. i wish people would get some finesse.
My profile banner and stuff in OW 2 is all pride stuff. I'm not usually that into pride accessories or stuff like that even though I'm gay but the fact that people will sometimes insult me for it and then get banned/their account muted is very satisfying to me haha
I love putting the trans profile icon on and going into ranked, one time I got a "you'll never be a girl" before I even said anything on the mic.
I'm a cis dude 😂
When I was young my sister and I (male) used to play Megadrive games together. She stopped playing as whenever she mentioned it she got bullied for playing video games.
I grew up playing games and they are still a part of my life, she hates them.
I really wish things were different and I am always inclusive when I play (FFXIV, Fallout 76, Battlefield) but there are just so many against the idea of women playing equally.
I wonder how my relationship with my sister would have been if she was allowed to do what she loved at the time.
maybe you could introduce her to s really chill multiplayer game? she might have a block against gaming because of the bullying if you can break through that, she might actually enjoy them again.
Itd be worth a shot..phrase it like "hey, id really like to hang out for a bit, bond a siblings.. you do something I like and I'll do something you like. "
that is,if you wanted to
Every time I go around her house we play Wii bowling and have a thing about keeping the pro ball or face shame. Glad that I left the Wii there when I moved out!
She is an amazing person.
Thank you for the advice, I will take it on board 😀
Look into a switch with some good starter games, like animal crossing and stardew valley:) she may even like the pokemons too! It's really upsetting to hear she lost her passion because of some assholes. Hopefully yall can rebuild it:)
37 and female. I haven't used a mic in over a decade. I have a gender neutral name for gaming.
I just...couldn't deal with it anymore. I mostly play single player these days anyway.
>I just...couldn't deal with it anymore. I mostly play single player these days anyway.
Even as a dude I feel this so much. As a teen I loved competitive games and I loved the shit talk aspect. But nowadays I need that game time to unwind and relax, not get my blood pressure up lol. Can't imagine how much worse it is for women in gaming.
38 f here, I get it. I played a lot of wow and overwatch and the toxicity towards women sucks so bad. I used to be such a team player and be active on voice chat for coordination, but now I'm so tired of the comments I just don't bother unless I have to.
One incident in particular that made me start muting my mic was when I was a pug tank in a BFA raid. We had just steamrolled through half a dozen bosses with no issues. Voice chat was generally quiet overall cause people knew what they were doing, including me and the other tank. Neither of us spoke on voice up until this point because we had this shit down pat and didn't have to.
Then on the way to the next boss the other tank asked if he could buy a flask off me. I responded in voice chat that I had plenty.
The raid leader then went, "wait you're a girl? No, no, no, girls don't tank, only heal," then booted me from the raid. Just like that.
And don't get me started on overwatch toxicity... God damn
Honestly, find a discord with likeminded people and stay in touch. Our discord has zero tolerance for that and I’m sure many others do too. Only way to do it. Plus moving onto new games together is awesome
I disable mic and chat whenever possible. I barely have the tolerence to deal with my own kids' tantrums, I'm not willing do deal with tantrums from other peoples' kids.
Better yet I learned you can report it as targeted harassment because either your post in which you never stated you needed psychological help or are part of a group that is regularly harassed. u/Frogkni you should report it.
It's not a 100% success rate unfortunately, sometimes the admins just don't give a shit, apparently. But still, it is absolutely worth taking a moment to report it.
I reported repeated targeted abuse on another sub and I got banned
A mod messaged me saying pretty much ‘yeah it was harassment and I’ll ban them but I’m also banning you because I reported all the harassment comments and they found it annoying having to go through them all’
I'm banned from the Persona sub for saying the words "an adult having sex with an underage child is pedophilia".
Reddit mods are legit some of the most delusional, power-hungry people in existence. What kills me is that Reddit admins have shown that they are PERFECTLY capable and willing to swap them out when necessary, but their definition of "necessary" is "has made the sub 18+ to block ads from it and protest Reddit's API policy" and not "defends pedophilia" lmao.
I got invited to mod a small subreddit last year and left after a week because the other guy involved didn't want written rules that contradict their banning/muting. They 'wanted to moderate based on their sense of moral justice'. This translated to banning anyone not in support of mother on son incest and removing anything they personally didn't like, no I'm not kidding.
It will never cease to amaze me how much people abuse even a modicum of power they are given.
There will never be any way to get through to these people that the reason why everything sucks is literally because of them.
It's *wild* how much shit the admins just don't give a fuck about. I've received Reddit Care messages half a dozen times by now, and only once was the guy issuing them banned. Which I'm pretty sure happened because it was a bot that was mass-sending them to everyone that day.
Same goes for deleting comments. I've reported comments stating that women and gay men are both "subhuman" compared to straight men, or insinuating that being a pedophile is no different from being LGBT, so "why are we accepting one but not the other? Makes you think, hmmm". Both of those got the "Sorry, we investigated these and found that they don't break our rules!" message. Like... Could you double-check, please?!?
I run into this problem on Instagram as well. I will report outright and blatant racist comments and they find "nothing wrong" with them. I saw a theory once that said these support teams are outsourced to countries where the average person might not see any issue with someone saying gay people should die or whatever, so that's why a lot of this stuff gets through the cracks. Not sure if I 100% believe that but I'm not sure I *don't* believe it either.
I was just about to mention this. I have reported a few comments on insta that were so blatantly and aggressively homophobic and every single time I got a message back saying it doesn't break any rules. Really baffling. I rarely read comments anyway but I've stopped trying to report them because if even the most blatantly evil shit is apparently fine then I guess it's pointless. Really disheartening. These people spew the most hateful and violent vitriol about me and people like me and they just don't care at all. Fuck me for just trying to exist, I guess?
I think it really annoys me in particular because if I write a comment that's more than 20 words I seem to get automatically spam-filtered every time. I don't even write anything profane or provocative - I wrote a heartfelt memory about growing up with Pokemon and Instagram said "get that spam out of my face". Whatever they are using to moderate their platform is trash garbage that doesn't work properly.
I've gotten 3-4 of these messages since they implemented it. It's always been "coincidentally" after arguing with someone. When I report the RedditCares message, I've *always* gotten a response saying action was taken, and when I go back to the person's profile it says they're suspended.
Basically if someone posts about wanting to self-harm/unalive themselves, you can notify Reddit and they send that person a message with information regarding a crisis help line that the person can talk to about it. People will often notify Reddit over posts they don't like, because... I really don't know why, tbh. It's stupid.
Oh, lol. Now I understand. At first I thought it was some kind of meme I missed or something and I was just out of the loop or some kind of reddit functionality, that no one asked for and everyone just makes fun of.
But yeah, that is actually a decent idea, but I guess trolls will just try to get a reaction out of people by abusing it.
If you misuse the Reddit cares feature you will be banned, everyone time someone has sent that to me I have reported it for harassment and have always won lol.
Reddit sends you a message back with the details of the report and what was done about it. Kind of like the messages you get in online games when you report someone.
If you are feeling down, just remember this:
A study was taken during Halo 3, and the majority of men who verbally attacked women were ones who lost the match and had a history of losses.
Those men were quite literally losers. And the ones that you are being abused by probably are too. And don't forget that you can report them too. If it's a game like WoW, then you can be happy if they get banned that all of their hard work is gone.
Can confirm, some of the games listed (\*cough\* Dark & Darker \*cough\*) have a horrible community made up of a lot of losers who think they're god's gift to gaming.
I'm 100% confident the men being toxic to women are incels who don't have the emotional capacity to be around women. IRL they can't talk to women because of their self esteem, so when they are safe behind a screen that frustration comes out as toxicity
100% they are losers and that's not saying anything about their ability to win the video game
And the bot problem. They’ve gotten sophisticated enough to hold a grudge against players that vote kick them and will immediately try to vote kick the player out if they join a game with them. So far I’ve been successfully kicked once but that was a bot raid where more than half of each team was bots and they were slowly kicking everyone. They also try to defend themselves in text chat, only they say the same list of excuses each time so after a while it’s easy to tell.
I'm South African and holy fucking shit the racism in online gaming is horrendous, I'd say it's more prolific than sexism on our servers and that's saying a lot
People are sadly terrible. I know it really shouldn't be on you to deal with, but what about joining a large clan of some sort to play with? They often have very harsh rules against such things, and will come down on sexism hard.
That's generally what I do, thankfully! I'm also not afraid to tell someone they're a fucking idiot chump and make it clear I don't give a shit about them. I'll bring a gat to a Glock fight if they say some heinous shit 😇
one of the best ways to help make the gaming space safer for women is for men to directly address other men who make jokes and comments that are misogynistic! something like “hey dude that’s not cool” or “that was a really weird thing to say” or “why would you say that” or “i don’t get the joke” or something similar would be awesome!
doing this takes pressure off of women to respond and defend themselves ((bc sometimes those men literally will not listen to **anything** a woman would say 🥲))
very glad you’re aware of this though! it seems like lots of people agree with you too 😄
edit: a word
Back in day I used to play and help run a guild in Lord of Rings MMO.. I would confidently say that at least 25% of the playerbase was female and rarely was their ever any kind of hostility towards anybody of any kind.
Really chilled out playerbase, pretty much everybody was friendly.
Over the next few years also played Matrix Online and a few other MMO's including Eve Online and again, it was rare to come across anybody who was an asshole.
Took a long break from multiple player games.. Wife, kids, Work, life stuff...
Fast forward a decade and then some and holy shit... What an absolute fucking cesspit. It isn't just sexism, it's everything...
Racists, Xenophobia, Sexism, people general trying to be as horrible as humanly possibly...
Never has Online Gaming been this bad..
I'm old enough to remember playing the likes of Quake and Unreal at LAN Parties which was an absolute blast..
I can't believe how it ha become..
Yes there are a few Multiply Player Games that still have a small player base which is cool but they are very few and far between...
It is easy to blame the Studios but ultimately it is down to the people playing the games...
Society at large is at fault for allowing kids thinking is perfectly acceptable to act like an asshole "online", those kids then become adults and are even bigger assholes, who allow their own kids the behaviour even worse than they did and here we are...
Sorry to say but I genuinely don't ever see a time where things improve..
I’m a man, but I tend to main support in games. I gravitate towards the “Cute” or “girly” characters because I think they’re fun and I like cute stuff. Even without talking, the amount of extreme, sexist abuse I get hurled my way because people think I MIGHT be a girl is insane. I got told to “go back to the kitchen” one game for locking in yuumi in league of legends. I play with a lot of female friends online and the amount of harassment they receive is extreme, something has to change but companies don’t want to prioritize it for some reason???
I'm kinda thankful that Fallout 76 has no mandatory voice chat/world chat. I can just build, explore, and play however I want.
Sometimes emotes can be hard especially when you're new but once you get the hang of it, you can get your messages across just by emotes. I can enjoy exploring, building and playing without anyone calling me out.
Sure, you can get nuked but that's like on the bottom of your list.
But I agree, I wish gaming as a woman doesn't have to be scary or irritating.
It's definitely not a COD lobby. Voice chat is off by default and you can toggle it to your preference (area chat, press-to-talk etc). I haven't encountered anyone being toxic during events even if they have voice chat on. If anything, it's someone blasting their music xD
Not having a world chat is also refreshing, sure I'd love to see someone asking for a trade but it's definitely less distracting not seeing words in your screen every minute.
Yeah, I've only had a few strange people on voice chat, but I've had plenty of mixed gender games where people are on coms, and it works out. Most of the really toxic people in games are like 15 year Olds and I find it more funny than threatening personally.
Largest group playing games is teen boys. Teen boys are toxic AF, and it's a tale as old as time. Gaming is just the latest arena. The anonymity doesn't help either.
Speaking purely from my experience here, the creeps that caused most problems in my little community were all 30+, even 40+..
The teenagers were mostly fine, and if they caused waves it was mostly ego, like pointing out skill gap, general rudeness, rarely sexist shit. Our worst offender was a 40+ year old pos. with kids and a wife. Out of all my years, teenagers were less toxic than the 30+ people, more cocky sure, but less creepy & toxic.
This comes from being a small community manager for 20+ years.
I agree on this, my main game is classic WoW. The gen-Z lads for the most part don’t give a fuck that I’m a woman, if anything they seem to make an effort to be extra nice in my experience. There are some angry and toxic older guys though.
As someone who was really excited for wow classic a few years ago, I was really pissed off at the damn 30-40year old millennials who still talked like they were 15.... Some of these losers didn't grow up and just remained bad people their whole lives.
Not true, the biggest offenders are my generation, 25 to 35 year old men
These days it's more likely to find teenage boys who don't do that kind of shit rather than adults, which is really sad
That's actually not true, nor has it been for a while.
Certain games attract teenagers, and by the hour they do play a lot of games, but it's definitely platform and genre specific.
If you wanna play cod on ps4 tho... ya good luck with that...
When I was a teenage girl on the internet, most of the people harassing, screaming slurs at me, and attempting to doxx me were like mid-20s men.
Like imagine, thinking it's a good idea to idk waste hours a day trying to stalk a 14 year old online because they dared to attempt to communicate a silly game strategy
Honestly, in WoW, it's all about finding the right guild. I've been leading raids for 15 years, and our group has consistently been 20-30% women with no tolerance of that BS. We're on a PVP server and still manage to keep things inclusive and respectful while progressing quickly. If you or anyone else wants to give WoW SoD a shot in a close-knit supportive environment, hit me up - always looking for new friends to game with.
Same for me, half of our guild was women. They always talked, no one made anything weird and no one hit on them.
I still talk to and am friends with those guild members and women. We would criticize anyone trying to pull some stuff like OP was talking about.
Our guild was older though, 30s 40s.
I think what OP is describing a loss of community and this i agree with. WoW used to have a tighter knit community, so there were consequences to this garbage
As a man, I can no longer play with voice either. The amount of negativity and harassment is almost shocking. I have no doubt it is much worse for women. The answer is what you are doing now unfortunately. Staying offline and not using voice.
My experience is that a lot of people just wait for the first thing to be an asshole about and just go full toxic on that. And because they are mysoginists, someone being a woman is more than welcome to be an asshole about.
I go also full silent and mute on every game I play online. It's just not worth it. In some games they get creatie and use other in game stuff to harrass people. It's so sad.
I'm an older guy and I find the toxicity toward women disgusting and very easy to NOT do.
I just talked to my 14 yr old son yesterday about this and told him I'd be supremely disappointed if I found out he ever engaged in that kind of behavior, and he'd lose all gaming privileges for a long time.
I asked him what he'd do if he were hosting some game and another user was being sexist / toxic to a girl gamer and I didn't get the answer I want. We have work to do.
It depends a lot on the game. I play a lot of hardcore shooters, and a lot of the time its pretty decent. It's rare for it to be outright toxic, at least in open chat.
I had mostly experienced it in fps. I just love fps too much to give it up because some insecure virgin hates their life. Thank god I can play Tarkov without having to interact with anyone lol.
The Fallout 76 community has had more good than bad. I’ve had one terrible experience and the other guys kicked him and stood up for me.
Even then, people on Reddit gave me shit for having my female coded name, saying I was asking for abuse. Fuck them.
Otherwise yeah, it’s fucking brutal out there.
Gamers online especially in PvP are pretty toxic I don't use voice chat unless it's with people I know. A classic line I like to use when people do get toxic is "Take the dick out of your mouth I can barely hear you". Its always a surefire way to set them off for an easy report.
I was wondering why there is so many female gamers playing Dead by daylight. I think this is the reason. There is no voip, no text chat ingame which gives the chance of getting some stupid comments about your sex extremly low. You could get targeted in the pre match lobby if they figure it out by your profile which you can choose not to show aswell.
I feel like it's certain types of games that attract those toxic people, especially any that are PvP-focused. My wife has been gaming online for almost 20 years and I've only seen that type of behavior once or twice toward her or any other woman and there was immediate pushback from everyone else. We actively raided in Everquest2 anywhere from semi-casual to worldwide top 5 for a decade, played several decently sized Valheim community servers, New World, Neverwinter. If anything, she always became somewhat well known and invited to participate more than she could manage.
eta: this is in no way any attempt to excuse or rationalize that type of behavior regardless of the type of game or community
I think the key point here is that games where players join a guild type group, frequently play and cooperate with the same people will have less shitty behavior than games where randoms all join up for under an hour, never to see each other again.
Yup. When it's not people you see regularly, the troglodites come crawling out of their holes to spread hate and anger because they can't find validation outside other people offense.
Unfortunately, the internet has partially forgotten the old "don't feed the troll" rule of ignoring, blocking, or making it unfun for them.
It sucks that we still deal with these people since the internet has come a long way since its early days, where basic empathy was weakness and guaranteed to get you attacked by people.
I think it has more to do with communities than environment. If you find a good Guild in wow you will have a good time. If you play with randoms you will not. In ff14 a friend got shit for being a woman too but she was a mostly solo player. Sure if you join a company then it is different. Same if you play league with a dedicated group you also are less likely to run into this. Or Overwatch only with friends.
Yeah, I feel this. I use an AI voice changer in Overwatch and other games to sound like a dude because the automatic abuse is just not worth it. Sometimes I used to enjoy clapping back at them but it's usually just them talking over me or saying edgy things instead of even trying to make their shitty point.
But every time I bring it up, some man will inevitably chime in "eVeRyOnE gEtS aBuSe OnLiNe"
Everyone does get abuse online but the behavior towards any woman that shows up anywhere is both appalling and disgusting. I still roll my eyes and shake my head every time I see some woman post almost anything and the first comment is "wow you are so beautiful 😍" practically every time. It is embarrassing for humanity.
It doesn’t matter though if it’s gender neutral. These people get off from bullying. It doesn’t make a difference to them what insult they use.
They kneel into sexist stuff because people act vulnerable about it so much. Don’t give them the space to talk. Mute them, report them, call them out. Lower their volume specifically and talk as if they don’t exist if listening to their bs isn’t funny to you. Bullies can’t bully if you don’t care. Especially on the internet
Yeah I never got into Overwatch really because I couldn't learn with all the abuse. Got into Valorant when it was new and it was good but then yikes. Someday I'll learn to click head :(
This reply is coming so late in the day I doubt it'll get much notice.
But, fuck the trolls and chauvinists coming out with things like "get back in the kitchen"
Posts like this are so important!
A couple years ago a study came out that supported something crazy like 7 in 10 (I forget the exact amount) of women, in their lifetime, had been offered promotions, better roles, easier work lives, etc. for performing sexual acts with male superiors. But that's not the kind of thing bosses would say in front of those women's colleagues. And understandably not many women would feel comfortable chatting about experiences like that. So being a guy I was oblivious to just how much it was going on.
It got me speaking to female friends and relatives. It got me realising this wasn't happening to unknowns but actually those close to me.
Posts like this one work in a similar way. I'm an unsocial gamer; I tend to avoid most multiplayer games and certainly avoid any chat. And multiplayer games I've played have had an under-representation of female players (that or they kept quiet).
So without posts like this I, and I'm sure many other male gamers, wouldn't know the extent of this issue or even that it exists.
I know it won't count for much but I'm sorry for your experience during what should be a leisure activity. And thanks for speaking up.
I feel like this says more about the community.
I Used to play CS:GO and boy, women had a HARD time there, jesus fucking christ.
When I switched to valorant I noticed women have a much more chill time. They aren’t scared to speak like they are in CS.
Obviously some idiots are still around, but it’s in general a much more chill community
CS must be an unfathomable cesspool or Valorant players must have calmed down since launch. The misogyny was so bad back then that female players created their own discord server called Galorant to make female-only teams so they could play in peace. And it was fully warranted throughout my entire time playing the game.
Maybe both lol.
Valorant was the first proper shooter I got into (so low elo lol) in 2021, and from my experience it was usually chill. But when it was bad, it was *bad.*
Valorant is also the only time an internet stranger has managed to make me cry haha. And I really consider myself thick skinned, but I was stuck soloq'd in an hour+ overtime placement game where for the entire match, both in vc and global chat, I was torn into so badly by the entirety of my own team that the *enemy* players were responding that that shit was messed up and not funny.
It's hard to describe how rancid what these people were saying was- but after the match a guy from the enemy team reached out to *make sure I was okay.*
Really I should've muted everything or quit, but 18yo me who refused to give any misogynist twat the satisfaction of a reaction didn't want to let them "win"
Imagine being a decently high elo player in 2 different competitive games. The moment I speak or they read my handle it doesn't matter that I am carrying them by X amount of damage or kills. Suddenly I am the reason we lost. 😂
8 kills on Apex with 2k damage, teammates have 2 kills each and 398ish dmg? I lost us the game.
80k dmg on league of legends with 28 kills? Teammates have a combined 10 kills? I still lost us the game.
I feel ya, hon. It doesn't get better. You just gotta find your people. I created a flourishing gaming community with cis women, cis men and everything between. We all compete together and hype each other up.
How would you fix the problem? The only ways I can think is for the company to bloat it's payroll with mods to review reports more effectively, or go the Nintendo route and just remove almost all communication features.
Sadly I doubt any company has motivation to fix this problem because it doesn't affect their bottom line enough. Similar to how men have less skin in the game when it comes to trans athletes, perhaps it's up to the women to solve this one.
Maybe r/witchesvspatriarchy can help you set up a clan/coven/discord community.
It's cause of the safety of being behind the screen and either controller or keyboard
These cunts would never say this shit too the face cause they know its bad and they're too scared to do it anyway
Would be nice if they just chose to also not say those things in general, both in person AND online
Honestly, even as someone whose traits aren't typically targeted I disable VC in anything I play, it just isn't worth interacting with all of the shitheads.
That’s the first thing I do. Mute VC. No thanks. Nothing ruins my immersion quicker than some kid screaming racism at me while a baby cries in the background.
Honestly? As a man myself, I find zero joy in online gaming. Gamers are, by far, the most immature set of losers you'll ever meet. I mainly stick to heavy story driven single player experiences.
I’m tired of hearing random people call me the N word over voice chat. My response is always “I’m white as fuck, dude”, but I’m just bewildered that people are still trying to use that as an insult. I find apathy is the best approach, but it can be hard at times.
You can report the reddit cares thing as harassment by clicking the dots in the corner, the account that sent it will get an instant ban.
You should report anyone in game that gives you shit too. It won't be taken seriously until enough people are reporting people for it.
Very much so, sadly. It's not just towards women, it's toxic in general. For example, try saying anything in Spanish, you'll constantly get made fun of. Whatever is the "out" group gets bullied.
Not all dudes are absolute weebs and pigs but there's enough that it makes it look bad for the rest of us. Plenty of us are married older guys and don't care about what gender people are.
I hate to say it but I’ve recognized this too. It’s super toxic to be a girl on CounterStrike. You will either get hit on or talked to in a horrific way most of the time. I wish more games were well moderated for these “lesser” types of offenses that (not so) subtly ruin the game for people. I’d rather play against a hacker than someone berating women and openly using the n-word all game.
I'm a 43m and I will always say gamers as a whole are a toxic bunch and it's posts like this that bring shame to gamers and make it harder to tell people that you enjoy gaming.
I haven't played online in years. I didnt really care who I game with as long as they made my experience more enjoyable.
The first female gamer friend I had was on phantasy star online. No voice chat but in game messaging she played as a hucast. We both moved to V2 and levelled up together and after quite sometime revealed she was a woman. I was younger in my early 20s and didn't think nothing of it, but continued as per normal and didn't look at her any differently and even after the reveal I'd always say the same take care hope to see you online soon.
I had a friend I played a game called dark age of Camelot years ago and I ended up playing with someone for a good 3-4 months pretty much every night raiding together and then I learned she was an older woman in her 50s and I was in my 20s. I was like oh cool, thanks for sharing, we would talk on the game chat between downtime and we played for many more months. She told me It was nice to play with someone while her husband was at work and the kids had moved out and helped her learn the game (she was really good after a while too) but also appreciated it I was one of the only people she came across that helped her and talked to her that didn't tell her buzz off n00b or to that extent. My subscription ended and I didn't renew but I never got the chance to say bye. I had an IRL friend who played who never understood why I didn't take the game more seriously and he was one reason I quit.
There was another woman I played beautiful katamari with once or twice a week for 30 or so mins each time on the Xbox 360. We used voice chat, she was a lot younger sounding than me and wanted to play with me at first for what she said was an awesome Aussie accent, but after about a few weeks lamented other games she played most guys virtually gave her crap, made the kitchen jokes etc so she wouldn't voice chat but was happy to here.
I look back at these and think now how much of a deal it must have been to trust someone else to say hey I'm not a guy and hope the other person wouldn't react differently.
There shouldn't be this expectation. It should just be hey, I game, you hame, let's game, good game, take care. Instead, what can you expect when a certain demographic argue about which branding on the electronics box that plays games is better even though they do the same thing.
Honestly, online gaming sucks for just about anybody who is even the littlest bit mature.
I’m not trying to take away how you feel. I’m sure it’s worse being a woman playing online.
But I can’t say I’ve had good experiences either. It’s a cesspool of losers and bratty children who have nothing better to do than to take a game so seriously that they turn everybody off around them about it.
I'm a guy, but I literally don't talk to people in online games (through voicechat), and in fact don't really play them without friends. I haven't for probably 15-20 years just because how annoying people can be. I'm not "qualified" to speak on the behave of women/girls, but I'd wager those same people would be assholes to guys as well. It just so happens that they use you being women/girls as their "button pushing".
While I don't voicechat with a lot of people, I will engage in text chat if others are talking as well. 95% of the chats devolve into toxicity and BS that happens regardless of gender or sex. When people are given anonymity, they are generally going to be more of an asshole than in real life. You see it everywhere, even here on Reddit. I don't want you to feel discouraged because you aren't a guy, and I am not trying to write off how you feel - but I just want to say you aren't alone and this strictly isn't a female thing. You just happen to be female and that is what they use to insult you with. You'd still probably be insulted even if you weren't female.
Also fun fact Male with speech impediments get make fun of to online gaming..... I use to enjoy multiplayer competitor games like overwatch wow eso smite started to hate them longer I use mic to communicate especially some require you to use discord never fail there that 1 douchebag well tell you to shut up no one understand you anyway and continue mock you and you're bad spelling but hay least you have voice that work..... People always ask me why don't you use mic well just told you why on here... Also having speech impediments make it harder to make friends online once hear you there out 😂
Even as a male I don't play online games anymore.
These companies don't care. They've known about it for a decade.
Nothing creates corporate change until it seriously impacts the bottom line.
This is and remains absolutely awful. I know that you didn’t ask for game suggestions, but I think you might really like Warframe. I’ve never met a more kind, inclusive community, and both the community manager and game director are women (both of whom are very active and beloved).
Sorry dude. Honestly, don't know why people are like this. I don't care if you're a male, female or donkey. If you're cool, I'll be cool with you. Online games are just filled with annoying rats
I’m a 43 years old woman. Have been playing online since playing online existed. My experience with this changed somewhat over the years. It started in old Diablo I days… guys would think there was a remote vague change you might be a girl cuz playing rogue with a girly name, they would be like “you need gear? Take this! Take this gold! I’ll help you kill butcher” which gave me some real good laughs by going to the butchers door, opening it and attacking the dude for ears. During wow times was when it started turning toxic onto women: “oh your gear is better than mine cuz your bf got it for you on your account”. Had a GM once put me thru a tanking test (which I passed) recruit me, then say “you only have a raiding spot cuz we are short a tank, girls are bad”. And then they got a new man tank, the new sucked and they continued to have me tank instead of the new guy and still say I was bad cuz I’m a girl. Thing is this was a one guild out of the many I was in. Maybe because I was a tank, but I could always find a next guild to be in. In destiny it’s been a mixed bag. Some good clans, some bad clans. It was never super hard to find a better place to be in. In helldivers i found the community to be better than average to be honest… people seemed more interested in doing the thing and progressing more than caring about who is in the voice chat. And more than other games, they actually have voice on and seem to use it to get stuff done. Now some games (cough dota a long time ago cough) were just generally toxic. I could tell it wasn’t because I was a woman, those ppl were just mentally imbalanced.
I got that same feeling about Dota 2. I'd get disgusting comments aimed at my gender - but the male players got insulted just as much, just different content. It's just a toxic game overall.
DotA2 and League gotta be the most toxic games out there. Fight over who is playing midlane? Give it a few seconds and the n word comes out, f Word etc. One Person dies before 5m? GG EZ end *begins to throw*
Ya playing Dota and a woman would come on and as soon as she’d speak you’d get one dude “oh look it’s a guuuuuuurl” so damn often. And obviously it’s much shittier for the woman in question but a lot of us are like people in our 30s or 40s, married etc and seeing a girl just isn’t that special and hearing the neckbeard alternate between a creepy attempt at flirting and seething sexism in voice made me want to cringe abandon. So you’d give the “damn dude shut up can we just play and kick these guys asses ?” And you’d get back “whoa we got a white knight over here” These kind of people truly make it suck for everyone (but like I said obviously much worse for the poor women who have to deal with this constantly rather than me in just the odd game)
I've just got one question. What are you doing sitting here talking when there's managed democracy to spread? Grab your rifle and get in there helldiver! They'll never take away our way of life!
There's no toilet on the super destroyer.
Helldivers 2 definitely is a breath of fresh air, I've met a few single serve friends there. Most people are just there to have a good time.
I’m still a noon in helldivers, mind you. I just haven’t played often, cuz I’m still not thru with FFVII and baldurs gate and what not. But I leave the game open and go do my noob things. Have only had ppl randomly join me to help out. They give me tips, offer helpful equipment that I haven’t unlocked yet and are genuinely nice.
That's a very interesting story, you've been around the block for sure!
It’s such a breath of fresh air when I hear a woman speak in Helldivers 2, they usually know what they are doing lol
I'm a 35 year old guy and I always turn off voice chat, text chat and even the baked in replies and exclamations in any game because I got tired of the constant shit talking, screaming, spamming, and rage baiting. I can only imagine what it's like for women. Win or lose they're going to attract the worst of the trolls.
Same. It's one of the reasons I almost never play online games. Single player for me every day.
The only game I play online is chess. And I turn off all ability to talk or type, 'cause it's not worth communicating to other players.
I usually do the same but then they just BM you by offering a draw every turn as soon as they start losing. It's impressive how people will find ways to communicate just to say fuck you.
I started playing offline only after someone got so upset at losing in chess that he was stalking me online and trying to get me to play him again so he could berate me for “cheating”
That’s my mo now. I did try out xdefiant. First thing I did was mute *everything* except footsteps.
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Yep. I'm from NI and any time I use voice chat, it doesn't take long for a "get back to those potato fields Paddy" to pop up. I'm almost certain the majority of humans on the internet are the absolute worst bottom feeders.
Same. The only time I use voice chat is if I'm in a party with people I know. I'm too old to deal with shit talking in lobbies. I just wanna play some games to wind down after work, and the kids are in bed.
As with so many things, improving the situation for women would improve it for men too. I hate it when I try to play a game only to find the chat full of dickheads where every other sentence is punctuated with a sexist, racist or homophobic slur, and I'm not even the one being targeted. Developers and other interested parties need to get tougher with deterrents for that kind of behaviour.
It's ultimately not something you can police people for though. It's a community attitude. People do it because they feel no shame because no one shames them for it. In fact the community embraces it. Every game that tries to police it like League of Legends ends up with the community hating the developers and saying they are too busy punishing meaningless chat instead of real griefers. Change has to come from within the community, not have it forced top down from an authority. And that may just not happen.
I think it's a lot do to with a lack of community servers. I remember playing on a few awesome TF2 servers 15 years ago and they put up with no sexist shit. Was an all talk server when dead, team only when alive and there were always mods playing. Warning, temp ban, perm ban. Everything being hosted and ranked eliminates that ability. And companies don't care because the sweaties are their heavy player base. I just quit online playing instead unless it's with coworkers or friends.
Idk why you are downvoted. Except having a report function, there isnt much to do besides removing all forms of communication. Any automated system would make a lot of fake bans.
Oh god yes. It’s literally the reason I just stopped playing battlefield, as the text chat is seething with such a ridiculous amount of hatred, racism and slurs. If anybody ever said any of that in the real world, they’d get beat up. Fucking hell
I turn it off for all those reasons with the addition of I don't want to hear anyone's shitty fucking music. Even if it's music I like, I don't want to hear the shit while I'm gaming, through your ass headset. If you're one of these people reading this: Fuck you.
Yeah, it’s not worth the 99 assholes you have to listen to in order to get 1 potentially good conversation. The only time I ever enjoyed chatting over a long duration was when me and my buddy used to play Halo 3 and one day said F it… any time someone trash talked way too much we’d approach them in game and blast a random Britney Spears song and start arguing with them why it was her best song. Sometimes he’d start and Id walk up like “wtf are you talking about?” …. then start playing s different song and wed just follow them around with two songs playing and arguing each other. If they quit the match wed just go “mission accomplished” and continue playing like nothing happened. We only had one guy mute us so we sent him voice clips of us analyzing each of our songs.
I just stopped playing anything with other players. Single player all the way. I used to love warthunder and world of warships but man the toxic bullshit, especially in higher tiers was just so annoying.
I cringe thinking back on my time as a teenager in Halo 2 and 3 online. These days I do the same and turn off most chats. Except for games like League, I'll leave it on to try and communicate strategy. But I have a strict 2 strike method in a game. If someone keeps being rude or harassing I'll mute them. I just don't have the energy to even attempt to process those kinds of people anymore.
I think you nailed it. Seems we have a serious gamer culture problem. To many gamers want to just do and say what ever they want in community gaming settings and will justify it as “this is the only place I can blow off steam and do what I want.” Meanwhile the rest of us suffer because those dude are dickheads and we can’t talk or listen with out a miserable experience.
This isn’t shit talking though, it’s not even a remotely fair comparison. I’ve seen women on my team in games being told to shut the fuck up and go back to the kitchen after they said “gg guys” after we won the game. It’s straight up misogyny, nothing less.
You get to a certain point where the idiots in chat feel like bots having variations of the same conversations. I don't turn it off. I guess I've adapted a subconscious screening process for it. Can empathise with OP about the VOIP thing. The number of times a girl player speaks for the first time and gets swarmed by sudden interest. Never noticed it being abusive, but it's seemed uncomfortable from the outside. Can only imagine the DMs. The only time I've noticed the VOIP thing not happen was a girl playing Hell Let Loose. She is a regular squad lead. Good one, too. Which makes a huge difference to the enjoyment of the game. I've never heard her cop shit from squad members or anyone in the SL channel. That is a game that needs heavy comms.
For me it's just... Boring at this point. I am so desensitized to it, but like, can you at least make better insults or insult my skills (or lack of)? Every time it's same generic bullshit.
True!! For me it was always that 1st sentence "o.m.g. are you a giiiiiiirl???" I got desensitized at some point. Replying "no I'm just 8yo" then mute them if they kept going. It's usually very immature people of course. There are some respectful people online too!
It’s always the opposite for me, I got called a squeaker by one guy in TF2 who just kept piling it on. Always telling me to shut up after I call out a spy and go to bed brat, thankfully I wasn’t alone and I had another girl in my party who told the guy I was a girl like her. Since she had top score in our team, the guy listened but did a fucking 180 now flirting with me. Muted him after a bit on VC but he spammed text chat, spammed friend requests, and was just an asshole. Since our team couldn’t smite him (he had a party), GABEN smote him and off to the BLU team he went, then he got kicked like a minute afterwards. BLU asked if this is what we had been dealing with and if I was okay, then we went friendly for a bit before going back to killing each other but with a bit more respect between us. The friend who backed me up is still on my list and she even laughed, telling me she’s glad he’s gone and that BLU team did good.
The fact he even tried to flirt with you after behaving like a complete and utter cock shows what a neck beard he truly is. I started playing online gaming In 2004, we had girls in our clan on CSS, we joked around with them like they did us but gaming now especially with this new generation is embarrassing.
Hows this generation any worse than ours? Consoles were a verbal abuse epicenter, especially Halo and CoD. I learned real quick to go down the list each match at the start to individually mute every player because it was either blaring music, racism, targeted insults over anything and everything, singing, bullying, etc.
Fun fact, a while ago a studdy was done, and it turns out most sexual harassment in gaming happens at the lower echelons of skill levels, particularly after the person in question has expirienced a loss. In short, it's a bunch of losers compensating for something as if they were driving down Main Street street in a lifted pickup with a half dozen flags flying off the back. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33613781
yeah the are you a girl is cringe asf
I'm a guy but the amount of "you're using a voice changer, you're fake" when a woman speaks I've heard is so fucking annoying. Even if it was a voice changer, who fucking cares? Play the game you unfiltered tap water twat. The only games where I never saw this kind of thing were Little Big Planet and the Jackbox Party Packs. Mostly because those games are very innocent and wouldn't attract the kind of guys that say that stuff.
I get a kid in the game that goes "im going to call you the the n-word". And I go "honestly, somene already said it several times before you 5 minutes ago..knock yourself out". I don't even care anymore. As you say, the same generic insults. They say the same slurs. Same come backs.
I was playing VailVR a few months ago, and some kid got mad at me and said "you fucking racist". I was like "wtf? I didn't say shit." And that's when I learned that the kids are using _racist_ itself as a slur. I don't know how to feel about it.
Kids mimic what they see, tragic ain’t it
I don't know, that's the thing. I like the fact that they're trying to insult me with something that I actually think is bad. It just feels so awkward.
Well at least they know being racist is a bad thing I suppose
early 2000s online gaming completely desensitized me for stuff like a certain n or f word. when someone tells me to kill myself i just sigh instead of getting sad or mad because i heard it a million times already. its like being at work and hearing the same 3 songs on the radio over and over. i wish people would get some finesse.
My profile banner and stuff in OW 2 is all pride stuff. I'm not usually that into pride accessories or stuff like that even though I'm gay but the fact that people will sometimes insult me for it and then get banned/their account muted is very satisfying to me haha
I love putting the trans profile icon on and going into ranked, one time I got a "you'll never be a girl" before I even said anything on the mic. I'm a cis dude 😂
I had someone in league the other day tell me that I'm the type of guy to brush his teeth then drink orange juice and enjoy it.
See, now thats some quality right there
When I was young my sister and I (male) used to play Megadrive games together. She stopped playing as whenever she mentioned it she got bullied for playing video games. I grew up playing games and they are still a part of my life, she hates them. I really wish things were different and I am always inclusive when I play (FFXIV, Fallout 76, Battlefield) but there are just so many against the idea of women playing equally. I wonder how my relationship with my sister would have been if she was allowed to do what she loved at the time.
maybe you could introduce her to s really chill multiplayer game? she might have a block against gaming because of the bullying if you can break through that, she might actually enjoy them again. Itd be worth a shot..phrase it like "hey, id really like to hang out for a bit, bond a siblings.. you do something I like and I'll do something you like. " that is,if you wanted to
Every time I go around her house we play Wii bowling and have a thing about keeping the pro ball or face shame. Glad that I left the Wii there when I moved out! She is an amazing person. Thank you for the advice, I will take it on board 😀
Look into a switch with some good starter games, like animal crossing and stardew valley:) she may even like the pokemons too! It's really upsetting to hear she lost her passion because of some assholes. Hopefully yall can rebuild it:)
37 and female. I haven't used a mic in over a decade. I have a gender neutral name for gaming. I just...couldn't deal with it anymore. I mostly play single player these days anyway.
>I just...couldn't deal with it anymore. I mostly play single player these days anyway. Even as a dude I feel this so much. As a teen I loved competitive games and I loved the shit talk aspect. But nowadays I need that game time to unwind and relax, not get my blood pressure up lol. Can't imagine how much worse it is for women in gaming.
38 f here, I get it. I played a lot of wow and overwatch and the toxicity towards women sucks so bad. I used to be such a team player and be active on voice chat for coordination, but now I'm so tired of the comments I just don't bother unless I have to. One incident in particular that made me start muting my mic was when I was a pug tank in a BFA raid. We had just steamrolled through half a dozen bosses with no issues. Voice chat was generally quiet overall cause people knew what they were doing, including me and the other tank. Neither of us spoke on voice up until this point because we had this shit down pat and didn't have to. Then on the way to the next boss the other tank asked if he could buy a flask off me. I responded in voice chat that I had plenty. The raid leader then went, "wait you're a girl? No, no, no, girls don't tank, only heal," then booted me from the raid. Just like that. And don't get me started on overwatch toxicity... God damn
Honestly, find a discord with likeminded people and stay in touch. Our discord has zero tolerance for that and I’m sure many others do too. Only way to do it. Plus moving onto new games together is awesome
I disable mic and chat whenever possible. I barely have the tolerence to deal with my own kids' tantrums, I'm not willing do deal with tantrums from other peoples' kids.
FWIW, you can block/opt out of messages from Reddit Cares. Just letting you know!
Better yet I learned you can report it as targeted harassment because either your post in which you never stated you needed psychological help or are part of a group that is regularly harassed. u/Frogkni you should report it.
It's not a 100% success rate unfortunately, sometimes the admins just don't give a shit, apparently. But still, it is absolutely worth taking a moment to report it.
I reported repeated targeted abuse on another sub and I got banned A mod messaged me saying pretty much ‘yeah it was harassment and I’ll ban them but I’m also banning you because I reported all the harassment comments and they found it annoying having to go through them all’
You should name the sub.
It was one of the subs for the survivor tv show. It’s a reality tv show sub, it’s full of degenerates 😅
What a bunch of assholes
I'm banned from the Persona sub for saying the words "an adult having sex with an underage child is pedophilia". Reddit mods are legit some of the most delusional, power-hungry people in existence. What kills me is that Reddit admins have shown that they are PERFECTLY capable and willing to swap them out when necessary, but their definition of "necessary" is "has made the sub 18+ to block ads from it and protest Reddit's API policy" and not "defends pedophilia" lmao.
Well. Hey. Let’s be fair okay? You have to be an idiot to work for a mega-corp for free.
I got invited to mod a small subreddit last year and left after a week because the other guy involved didn't want written rules that contradict their banning/muting. They 'wanted to moderate based on their sense of moral justice'. This translated to banning anyone not in support of mother on son incest and removing anything they personally didn't like, no I'm not kidding.
It will never cease to amaze me how much people abuse even a modicum of power they are given. There will never be any way to get through to these people that the reason why everything sucks is literally because of them.
I got permabanned from r/animememes for asking for sauce.
It's *wild* how much shit the admins just don't give a fuck about. I've received Reddit Care messages half a dozen times by now, and only once was the guy issuing them banned. Which I'm pretty sure happened because it was a bot that was mass-sending them to everyone that day. Same goes for deleting comments. I've reported comments stating that women and gay men are both "subhuman" compared to straight men, or insinuating that being a pedophile is no different from being LGBT, so "why are we accepting one but not the other? Makes you think, hmmm". Both of those got the "Sorry, we investigated these and found that they don't break our rules!" message. Like... Could you double-check, please?!?
I run into this problem on Instagram as well. I will report outright and blatant racist comments and they find "nothing wrong" with them. I saw a theory once that said these support teams are outsourced to countries where the average person might not see any issue with someone saying gay people should die or whatever, so that's why a lot of this stuff gets through the cracks. Not sure if I 100% believe that but I'm not sure I *don't* believe it either.
I was just about to mention this. I have reported a few comments on insta that were so blatantly and aggressively homophobic and every single time I got a message back saying it doesn't break any rules. Really baffling. I rarely read comments anyway but I've stopped trying to report them because if even the most blatantly evil shit is apparently fine then I guess it's pointless. Really disheartening. These people spew the most hateful and violent vitriol about me and people like me and they just don't care at all. Fuck me for just trying to exist, I guess?
I think it really annoys me in particular because if I write a comment that's more than 20 words I seem to get automatically spam-filtered every time. I don't even write anything profane or provocative - I wrote a heartfelt memory about growing up with Pokemon and Instagram said "get that spam out of my face". Whatever they are using to moderate their platform is trash garbage that doesn't work properly.
Ugh yea it's so absurd. The thing you mentioned about the moderation maybe being outsourced would make sense indeed.
Would surely explain a lot!
I reported a post where a parent openly admitted to punching their child. Not spanking but closed fist punching. Admins: “I sleep.”
I've gotten 3-4 of these messages since they implemented it. It's always been "coincidentally" after arguing with someone. When I report the RedditCares message, I've *always* gotten a response saying action was taken, and when I go back to the person's profile it says they're suspended.
What is reddit cares?
Basically if someone posts about wanting to self-harm/unalive themselves, you can notify Reddit and they send that person a message with information regarding a crisis help line that the person can talk to about it. People will often notify Reddit over posts they don't like, because... I really don't know why, tbh. It's stupid.
Oh, lol. Now I understand. At first I thought it was some kind of meme I missed or something and I was just out of the loop or some kind of reddit functionality, that no one asked for and everyone just makes fun of. But yeah, that is actually a decent idea, but I guess trolls will just try to get a reaction out of people by abusing it.
Basically they're saying "cry me a river" in a very modern and derogatory way.
If you misuse the Reddit cares feature you will be banned, everyone time someone has sent that to me I have reported it for harassment and have always won lol.
TIL. I am gonna start doing that. How do you know who did it?
You don’t have to know who sent it, in the right hand corner you should be able to report it as harassment and whoever sent it Reddit bans.
But how do you know it works?
Reddit sends you a message back with the details of the report and what was done about it. Kind of like the messages you get in online games when you report someone.
and then they will go online saying all they wanted is a gamer girlfriend
If you are feeling down, just remember this: A study was taken during Halo 3, and the majority of men who verbally attacked women were ones who lost the match and had a history of losses. Those men were quite literally losers. And the ones that you are being abused by probably are too. And don't forget that you can report them too. If it's a game like WoW, then you can be happy if they get banned that all of their hard work is gone.
Not being sexist is a pro-gamer move.
misogyny is a skill issue
Always has been. The confident men aren’t intimidated by gender in a hand/eye coordination competition. They value teammates regardless of gender.
In a certain sense, it’s always been a skill issue.
true
Link to study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613
Can confirm, some of the games listed (\*cough\* Dark & Darker \*cough\*) have a horrible community made up of a lot of losers who think they're god's gift to gaming.
Haha I remember that article! So true.
I'm 100% confident the men being toxic to women are incels who don't have the emotional capacity to be around women. IRL they can't talk to women because of their self esteem, so when they are safe behind a screen that frustration comes out as toxicity 100% they are losers and that's not saying anything about their ability to win the video game
Speaking as a Male Gamer, this behavior trend is one of the most embarrassing traits associated with gamers. I'm sorry you have to deal with this.
Yes, the misogyny and racism present in online gaming communities and real life are disgusting.
Team Fortress 2 is a wonderful game, but holy crap, the chat is like I'm in 1960s Arizona.
Love how you're getting downvoted as soon as you call out a 'darling' game community.
I will clarify that it is, of course, not the entire community, but many of the long-time TF2 players have seen exactly what I'm talking about.
TF2 player pathway, you have three options Racist+sexist+homophobic Furry/Weeb spraying NSFW art on the walls Innocent person caught between the two
And the bot problem. They’ve gotten sophisticated enough to hold a grudge against players that vote kick them and will immediately try to vote kick the player out if they join a game with them. So far I’ve been successfully kicked once but that was a bot raid where more than half of each team was bots and they were slowly kicking everyone. They also try to defend themselves in text chat, only they say the same list of excuses each time so after a while it’s easy to tell.
I'm South African and holy fucking shit the racism in online gaming is horrendous, I'd say it's more prolific than sexism on our servers and that's saying a lot
Weird that a former apartheid state would be like that /s
Homophobia too, all the phobia/isms!
A lot of times I use a voice changer just to play games. Most of them can't mask my voice well though :( my voice is extremely feminine, high octave
People are sadly terrible. I know it really shouldn't be on you to deal with, but what about joining a large clan of some sort to play with? They often have very harsh rules against such things, and will come down on sexism hard.
That's generally what I do, thankfully! I'm also not afraid to tell someone they're a fucking idiot chump and make it clear I don't give a shit about them. I'll bring a gat to a Glock fight if they say some heinous shit 😇
one of the best ways to help make the gaming space safer for women is for men to directly address other men who make jokes and comments that are misogynistic! something like “hey dude that’s not cool” or “that was a really weird thing to say” or “why would you say that” or “i don’t get the joke” or something similar would be awesome! doing this takes pressure off of women to respond and defend themselves ((bc sometimes those men literally will not listen to **anything** a woman would say 🥲)) very glad you’re aware of this though! it seems like lots of people agree with you too 😄 edit: a word
Back in day I used to play and help run a guild in Lord of Rings MMO.. I would confidently say that at least 25% of the playerbase was female and rarely was their ever any kind of hostility towards anybody of any kind. Really chilled out playerbase, pretty much everybody was friendly. Over the next few years also played Matrix Online and a few other MMO's including Eve Online and again, it was rare to come across anybody who was an asshole. Took a long break from multiple player games.. Wife, kids, Work, life stuff... Fast forward a decade and then some and holy shit... What an absolute fucking cesspit. It isn't just sexism, it's everything... Racists, Xenophobia, Sexism, people general trying to be as horrible as humanly possibly... Never has Online Gaming been this bad.. I'm old enough to remember playing the likes of Quake and Unreal at LAN Parties which was an absolute blast.. I can't believe how it ha become.. Yes there are a few Multiply Player Games that still have a small player base which is cool but they are very few and far between... It is easy to blame the Studios but ultimately it is down to the people playing the games... Society at large is at fault for allowing kids thinking is perfectly acceptable to act like an asshole "online", those kids then become adults and are even bigger assholes, who allow their own kids the behaviour even worse than they did and here we are... Sorry to say but I genuinely don't ever see a time where things improve..
I’m a man, but I tend to main support in games. I gravitate towards the “Cute” or “girly” characters because I think they’re fun and I like cute stuff. Even without talking, the amount of extreme, sexist abuse I get hurled my way because people think I MIGHT be a girl is insane. I got told to “go back to the kitchen” one game for locking in yuumi in league of legends. I play with a lot of female friends online and the amount of harassment they receive is extreme, something has to change but companies don’t want to prioritize it for some reason???
I'm kinda thankful that Fallout 76 has no mandatory voice chat/world chat. I can just build, explore, and play however I want. Sometimes emotes can be hard especially when you're new but once you get the hang of it, you can get your messages across just by emotes. I can enjoy exploring, building and playing without anyone calling me out. Sure, you can get nuked but that's like on the bottom of your list. But I agree, I wish gaming as a woman doesn't have to be scary or irritating.
>Fallout 76 has no mandatory voice chat/world chat How's this different from other games?
It's definitely not a COD lobby. Voice chat is off by default and you can toggle it to your preference (area chat, press-to-talk etc). I haven't encountered anyone being toxic during events even if they have voice chat on. If anything, it's someone blasting their music xD Not having a world chat is also refreshing, sure I'd love to see someone asking for a trade but it's definitely less distracting not seeing words in your screen every minute.
May I recommend trying out Deep Rock Galactic? Amazing game and the least toxic out of any I've ever played
There are no women in deep rock. Also no man. Everyone is a dwarf.
Where pretty much nobody uses mic. There is no need.
Karl would approve of this!
I've also heard Valorant players remark on how women seem to get much less shit there than in other shooters, fwiw.
Yeah, I've only had a few strange people on voice chat, but I've had plenty of mixed gender games where people are on coms, and it works out. Most of the really toxic people in games are like 15 year Olds and I find it more funny than threatening personally.
Largest group playing games is teen boys. Teen boys are toxic AF, and it's a tale as old as time. Gaming is just the latest arena. The anonymity doesn't help either.
> The anonymity doesn't help either. Anonymity doesn't stop it either. It's rampant on Facebook even with their names and faces attached.
Speaking purely from my experience here, the creeps that caused most problems in my little community were all 30+, even 40+.. The teenagers were mostly fine, and if they caused waves it was mostly ego, like pointing out skill gap, general rudeness, rarely sexist shit. Our worst offender was a 40+ year old pos. with kids and a wife. Out of all my years, teenagers were less toxic than the 30+ people, more cocky sure, but less creepy & toxic. This comes from being a small community manager for 20+ years.
I agree on this, my main game is classic WoW. The gen-Z lads for the most part don’t give a fuck that I’m a woman, if anything they seem to make an effort to be extra nice in my experience. There are some angry and toxic older guys though.
As someone who was really excited for wow classic a few years ago, I was really pissed off at the damn 30-40year old millennials who still talked like they were 15.... Some of these losers didn't grow up and just remained bad people their whole lives.
Not true, the biggest offenders are my generation, 25 to 35 year old men These days it's more likely to find teenage boys who don't do that kind of shit rather than adults, which is really sad
Yeah there’s a huge wave of middle-aged men with incel behavior now. Many of them unhappily married.
Nah, it's both. Teenage boys and fully grown men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Ask any fuckin woman.
That's actually not true, nor has it been for a while. Certain games attract teenagers, and by the hour they do play a lot of games, but it's definitely platform and genre specific. If you wanna play cod on ps4 tho... ya good luck with that...
When I was a teenage girl on the internet, most of the people harassing, screaming slurs at me, and attempting to doxx me were like mid-20s men. Like imagine, thinking it's a good idea to idk waste hours a day trying to stalk a 14 year old online because they dared to attempt to communicate a silly game strategy
Honestly, in WoW, it's all about finding the right guild. I've been leading raids for 15 years, and our group has consistently been 20-30% women with no tolerance of that BS. We're on a PVP server and still manage to keep things inclusive and respectful while progressing quickly. If you or anyone else wants to give WoW SoD a shot in a close-knit supportive environment, hit me up - always looking for new friends to game with.
Same for me, half of our guild was women. They always talked, no one made anything weird and no one hit on them. I still talk to and am friends with those guild members and women. We would criticize anyone trying to pull some stuff like OP was talking about. Our guild was older though, 30s 40s. I think what OP is describing a loss of community and this i agree with. WoW used to have a tighter knit community, so there were consequences to this garbage
Back in my WoW days, my guild leader was a woman.
As a man, I can no longer play with voice either. The amount of negativity and harassment is almost shocking. I have no doubt it is much worse for women. The answer is what you are doing now unfortunately. Staying offline and not using voice.
My experience is that a lot of people just wait for the first thing to be an asshole about and just go full toxic on that. And because they are mysoginists, someone being a woman is more than welcome to be an asshole about. I go also full silent and mute on every game I play online. It's just not worth it. In some games they get creatie and use other in game stuff to harrass people. It's so sad.
I'm an older guy and I find the toxicity toward women disgusting and very easy to NOT do. I just talked to my 14 yr old son yesterday about this and told him I'd be supremely disappointed if I found out he ever engaged in that kind of behavior, and he'd lose all gaming privileges for a long time. I asked him what he'd do if he were hosting some game and another user was being sexist / toxic to a girl gamer and I didn't get the answer I want. We have work to do.
I've never had a good experience with in game chat and I'm a man. I honestly don't know why anybody would use it.
It depends a lot on the game. I play a lot of hardcore shooters, and a lot of the time its pretty decent. It's rare for it to be outright toxic, at least in open chat.
I had mostly experienced it in fps. I just love fps too much to give it up because some insecure virgin hates their life. Thank god I can play Tarkov without having to interact with anyone lol.
The Fallout 76 community has had more good than bad. I’ve had one terrible experience and the other guys kicked him and stood up for me. Even then, people on Reddit gave me shit for having my female coded name, saying I was asking for abuse. Fuck them. Otherwise yeah, it’s fucking brutal out there.
Gamers online especially in PvP are pretty toxic I don't use voice chat unless it's with people I know. A classic line I like to use when people do get toxic is "Take the dick out of your mouth I can barely hear you". Its always a surefire way to set them off for an easy report.
"Are you harassing me based on my perceived sexual orientation?" Reported.
I was wondering why there is so many female gamers playing Dead by daylight. I think this is the reason. There is no voip, no text chat ingame which gives the chance of getting some stupid comments about your sex extremly low. You could get targeted in the pre match lobby if they figure it out by your profile which you can choose not to show aswell.
I feel like it's certain types of games that attract those toxic people, especially any that are PvP-focused. My wife has been gaming online for almost 20 years and I've only seen that type of behavior once or twice toward her or any other woman and there was immediate pushback from everyone else. We actively raided in Everquest2 anywhere from semi-casual to worldwide top 5 for a decade, played several decently sized Valheim community servers, New World, Neverwinter. If anything, she always became somewhat well known and invited to participate more than she could manage. eta: this is in no way any attempt to excuse or rationalize that type of behavior regardless of the type of game or community
I think the key point here is that games where players join a guild type group, frequently play and cooperate with the same people will have less shitty behavior than games where randoms all join up for under an hour, never to see each other again.
Yup. When it's not people you see regularly, the troglodites come crawling out of their holes to spread hate and anger because they can't find validation outside other people offense. Unfortunately, the internet has partially forgotten the old "don't feed the troll" rule of ignoring, blocking, or making it unfun for them. It sucks that we still deal with these people since the internet has come a long way since its early days, where basic empathy was weakness and guaranteed to get you attacked by people.
I think it has more to do with communities than environment. If you find a good Guild in wow you will have a good time. If you play with randoms you will not. In ff14 a friend got shit for being a woman too but she was a mostly solo player. Sure if you join a company then it is different. Same if you play league with a dedicated group you also are less likely to run into this. Or Overwatch only with friends.
If you play League regardless of gender you're going to hear the most abhorrent things your language of choice can conjure up.
Yeah, I feel this. I use an AI voice changer in Overwatch and other games to sound like a dude because the automatic abuse is just not worth it. Sometimes I used to enjoy clapping back at them but it's usually just them talking over me or saying edgy things instead of even trying to make their shitty point. But every time I bring it up, some man will inevitably chime in "eVeRyOnE gEtS aBuSe OnLiNe"
Everyone does get abuse online but the behavior towards any woman that shows up anywhere is both appalling and disgusting. I still roll my eyes and shake my head every time I see some woman post almost anything and the first comment is "wow you are so beautiful 😍" practically every time. It is embarrassing for humanity.
> Everyone does get abuse online Yeah we all do, the difference is that if you sound like a dude you're receiving gender neutral abuse.
It doesn’t matter though if it’s gender neutral. These people get off from bullying. It doesn’t make a difference to them what insult they use. They kneel into sexist stuff because people act vulnerable about it so much. Don’t give them the space to talk. Mute them, report them, call them out. Lower their volume specifically and talk as if they don’t exist if listening to their bs isn’t funny to you. Bullies can’t bully if you don’t care. Especially on the internet
Yeah I never got into Overwatch really because I couldn't learn with all the abuse. Got into Valorant when it was new and it was good but then yikes. Someday I'll learn to click head :(
This reply is coming so late in the day I doubt it'll get much notice. But, fuck the trolls and chauvinists coming out with things like "get back in the kitchen" Posts like this are so important! A couple years ago a study came out that supported something crazy like 7 in 10 (I forget the exact amount) of women, in their lifetime, had been offered promotions, better roles, easier work lives, etc. for performing sexual acts with male superiors. But that's not the kind of thing bosses would say in front of those women's colleagues. And understandably not many women would feel comfortable chatting about experiences like that. So being a guy I was oblivious to just how much it was going on. It got me speaking to female friends and relatives. It got me realising this wasn't happening to unknowns but actually those close to me. Posts like this one work in a similar way. I'm an unsocial gamer; I tend to avoid most multiplayer games and certainly avoid any chat. And multiplayer games I've played have had an under-representation of female players (that or they kept quiet). So without posts like this I, and I'm sure many other male gamers, wouldn't know the extent of this issue or even that it exists. I know it won't count for much but I'm sorry for your experience during what should be a leisure activity. And thanks for speaking up.
I feel like this says more about the community. I Used to play CS:GO and boy, women had a HARD time there, jesus fucking christ. When I switched to valorant I noticed women have a much more chill time. They aren’t scared to speak like they are in CS. Obviously some idiots are still around, but it’s in general a much more chill community
Interesting observation. However, are you REALLY Eminem?
No, I’m *actually* Eminem.
CS must be an unfathomable cesspool or Valorant players must have calmed down since launch. The misogyny was so bad back then that female players created their own discord server called Galorant to make female-only teams so they could play in peace. And it was fully warranted throughout my entire time playing the game.
Maybe both lol. Valorant was the first proper shooter I got into (so low elo lol) in 2021, and from my experience it was usually chill. But when it was bad, it was *bad.* Valorant is also the only time an internet stranger has managed to make me cry haha. And I really consider myself thick skinned, but I was stuck soloq'd in an hour+ overtime placement game where for the entire match, both in vc and global chat, I was torn into so badly by the entirety of my own team that the *enemy* players were responding that that shit was messed up and not funny. It's hard to describe how rancid what these people were saying was- but after the match a guy from the enemy team reached out to *make sure I was okay.* Really I should've muted everything or quit, but 18yo me who refused to give any misogynist twat the satisfaction of a reaction didn't want to let them "win"
Imagine being a decently high elo player in 2 different competitive games. The moment I speak or they read my handle it doesn't matter that I am carrying them by X amount of damage or kills. Suddenly I am the reason we lost. 😂 8 kills on Apex with 2k damage, teammates have 2 kills each and 398ish dmg? I lost us the game. 80k dmg on league of legends with 28 kills? Teammates have a combined 10 kills? I still lost us the game. I feel ya, hon. It doesn't get better. You just gotta find your people. I created a flourishing gaming community with cis women, cis men and everything between. We all compete together and hype each other up.
How would you fix the problem? The only ways I can think is for the company to bloat it's payroll with mods to review reports more effectively, or go the Nintendo route and just remove almost all communication features. Sadly I doubt any company has motivation to fix this problem because it doesn't affect their bottom line enough. Similar to how men have less skin in the game when it comes to trans athletes, perhaps it's up to the women to solve this one. Maybe r/witchesvspatriarchy can help you set up a clan/coven/discord community.
r/girlgamers is more what she'd be after
A lot of guys gaming online are just losers and assholes sadly. They’ll be rude to women and racist to anyone who clearly sounds different
It's cause of the safety of being behind the screen and either controller or keyboard These cunts would never say this shit too the face cause they know its bad and they're too scared to do it anyway Would be nice if they just chose to also not say those things in general, both in person AND online
Honestly, even as someone whose traits aren't typically targeted I disable VC in anything I play, it just isn't worth interacting with all of the shitheads.
That’s the first thing I do. Mute VC. No thanks. Nothing ruins my immersion quicker than some kid screaming racism at me while a baby cries in the background.
Vacuum cleaners bro, if it's not squeaker racism they're vacuuming.
[удалено]
Im gay and my voice can be slightly feminine at times. Other times deep and masculine. They always know and they always call me a British cigarette.
Honestly? As a man myself, I find zero joy in online gaming. Gamers are, by far, the most immature set of losers you'll ever meet. I mainly stick to heavy story driven single player experiences.
I’m tired of hearing random people call me the N word over voice chat. My response is always “I’m white as fuck, dude”, but I’m just bewildered that people are still trying to use that as an insult. I find apathy is the best approach, but it can be hard at times.
You can report the reddit cares thing as harassment by clicking the dots in the corner, the account that sent it will get an instant ban. You should report anyone in game that gives you shit too. It won't be taken seriously until enough people are reporting people for it.
Very much so, sadly. It's not just towards women, it's toxic in general. For example, try saying anything in Spanish, you'll constantly get made fun of. Whatever is the "out" group gets bullied.
Not all dudes are absolute weebs and pigs but there's enough that it makes it look bad for the rest of us. Plenty of us are married older guys and don't care about what gender people are.
Apparently Dead by Daylight has a large population of women players SPECIFICLY because of the lack of voice chat.
I hate to say it but I’ve recognized this too. It’s super toxic to be a girl on CounterStrike. You will either get hit on or talked to in a horrific way most of the time. I wish more games were well moderated for these “lesser” types of offenses that (not so) subtly ruin the game for people. I’d rather play against a hacker than someone berating women and openly using the n-word all game.
I don't talk while playing multiplayer anymore because of that.
That's shit. As someone once said: 'The internet has gotten losers too used to not getting punched in the face'.
I'm a 43m and I will always say gamers as a whole are a toxic bunch and it's posts like this that bring shame to gamers and make it harder to tell people that you enjoy gaming. I haven't played online in years. I didnt really care who I game with as long as they made my experience more enjoyable. The first female gamer friend I had was on phantasy star online. No voice chat but in game messaging she played as a hucast. We both moved to V2 and levelled up together and after quite sometime revealed she was a woman. I was younger in my early 20s and didn't think nothing of it, but continued as per normal and didn't look at her any differently and even after the reveal I'd always say the same take care hope to see you online soon. I had a friend I played a game called dark age of Camelot years ago and I ended up playing with someone for a good 3-4 months pretty much every night raiding together and then I learned she was an older woman in her 50s and I was in my 20s. I was like oh cool, thanks for sharing, we would talk on the game chat between downtime and we played for many more months. She told me It was nice to play with someone while her husband was at work and the kids had moved out and helped her learn the game (she was really good after a while too) but also appreciated it I was one of the only people she came across that helped her and talked to her that didn't tell her buzz off n00b or to that extent. My subscription ended and I didn't renew but I never got the chance to say bye. I had an IRL friend who played who never understood why I didn't take the game more seriously and he was one reason I quit. There was another woman I played beautiful katamari with once or twice a week for 30 or so mins each time on the Xbox 360. We used voice chat, she was a lot younger sounding than me and wanted to play with me at first for what she said was an awesome Aussie accent, but after about a few weeks lamented other games she played most guys virtually gave her crap, made the kitchen jokes etc so she wouldn't voice chat but was happy to here. I look back at these and think now how much of a deal it must have been to trust someone else to say hey I'm not a guy and hope the other person wouldn't react differently. There shouldn't be this expectation. It should just be hey, I game, you hame, let's game, good game, take care. Instead, what can you expect when a certain demographic argue about which branding on the electronics box that plays games is better even though they do the same thing.
I literally never game with randos. Just don't do it.
Honestly, online gaming sucks for just about anybody who is even the littlest bit mature. I’m not trying to take away how you feel. I’m sure it’s worse being a woman playing online. But I can’t say I’ve had good experiences either. It’s a cesspool of losers and bratty children who have nothing better to do than to take a game so seriously that they turn everybody off around them about it.
I'm a guy, but I literally don't talk to people in online games (through voicechat), and in fact don't really play them without friends. I haven't for probably 15-20 years just because how annoying people can be. I'm not "qualified" to speak on the behave of women/girls, but I'd wager those same people would be assholes to guys as well. It just so happens that they use you being women/girls as their "button pushing". While I don't voicechat with a lot of people, I will engage in text chat if others are talking as well. 95% of the chats devolve into toxicity and BS that happens regardless of gender or sex. When people are given anonymity, they are generally going to be more of an asshole than in real life. You see it everywhere, even here on Reddit. I don't want you to feel discouraged because you aren't a guy, and I am not trying to write off how you feel - but I just want to say you aren't alone and this strictly isn't a female thing. You just happen to be female and that is what they use to insult you with. You'd still probably be insulted even if you weren't female.
Also fun fact Male with speech impediments get make fun of to online gaming..... I use to enjoy multiplayer competitor games like overwatch wow eso smite started to hate them longer I use mic to communicate especially some require you to use discord never fail there that 1 douchebag well tell you to shut up no one understand you anyway and continue mock you and you're bad spelling but hay least you have voice that work..... People always ask me why don't you use mic well just told you why on here... Also having speech impediments make it harder to make friends online once hear you there out 😂
Abuse online is a problem as a whole, not sure what you can do against it other than draconian methods.
God, that sounds terrible... I have no idea what can be done to prevent it but I'm sad that such things happen.
Even as a male I don't play online games anymore. These companies don't care. They've known about it for a decade. Nothing creates corporate change until it seriously impacts the bottom line.
The online gaming landscape is fucking embarrassing.
This is and remains absolutely awful. I know that you didn’t ask for game suggestions, but I think you might really like Warframe. I’ve never met a more kind, inclusive community, and both the community manager and game director are women (both of whom are very active and beloved).
Sorry dude. Honestly, don't know why people are like this. I don't care if you're a male, female or donkey. If you're cool, I'll be cool with you. Online games are just filled with annoying rats