As the title says.
A week ago, I had a 3 stack absolutely tear me to shreds in VC and TC. What did I do to deserve this? I politely asked us to communicate in VC as I knew the other team was a 5 stack who would roll us. What did I get in return?
“F*****”
“I want to bash your skull in”
“Fa*s should be set on fire”
“I cant wait to come to your house and gutter stomp you”
Lovely. I reported them, the other team reported them, and I got the notification that my reports were successful about 5 days later. Great!
Until almost the exact same thing happened to me today (In quickplay, of all things). I went to avoid those teammates before being met with a “You must remove teammates from your avoid list before you can do that again bitch”. So now I’m faced with a choice. Avoid the homophobes and get stuck with these team members again. Or avoid the new people and end up with the same team as last week. How is that fair for me? How is that fair for anyone?
Now you might ask, what are the chances youll be in a team with them again? Well… high. I’m in Australia, and once you play this game for a few weeks you very quickly realize that our servers are minuscule. You start to recognize the same names, especially if you’re playing at the same time of day, or the same days each week. So its an inevitability that I will end up with these people on my team again eventually. I wanna be the type of person who is able to have VC and TC turned off, however, I really think it takes away from the fun I have in the game, and is a huge deciding factor in whether I win or lose my matches (Not to mention all the friends Ive made through OW too). I’m not asking for an infinite list of avoided team mates. I’m not asking fore a 50 max list of avoid teammates. But THREE??? Come on. We can do better than that.
One of the worst things people can do is engage with these idiots. An Overwatch match is 15 mins long and is extremely intense with almost no downtime. In those 15 mins you can’t even get a Reinhardt player to stop charging in on CD and being extremely aggressive if that’s the only way they know how to play. Constantly telling them to play defensively doesn’t do anything cause they aren’t gonna learn a different playstyle in the middle of a 15 min game.
So if we can’t get a player to change their playstyle, then it genuinely beats why people think they can argue the bigotry out of someone in the middle of a match. You aren’t gonna exorcise the racism or sexism or homophobia or some other form of bigotry out of some idiot in the middle of an Overwatch match by arguing with them. If your priority is to have fun playing the actual game then you instantly mute and focus on the game and then report them after (I throw in a bunch of different reports just to be safe).
I know this cause I used to argue with randoms all the time 6 years ago when I first started playing this game and was still kinda young. I’d argue about play style or about people saying toxic shit. I quickly realised that it is entirely pointless and the best thing I can do for myself is mute, block, report and move on.
I’ve been in many multiple hour long LFG Raid sessions in Destiny with randoms, even there it is extremely rare to get someone to change their stupid ways, their stupid playstyle, even after hours teaching them and telling them what not to do.