Too many personalities in the scene routinely showcase incredible abrasiveness and arrogance which pushes away newcomers and fosters general toxicity and negativity in the community.
I’m thinking about creators such as IWD, LS, Thorin and Monte, people like Forest and Veigarv2 on twitter- they all often do this thing where if they disagree with someone they don’t know, they treat them with absolutely 0 respect, making it clear that not only do they disagree, but that the person is an idiot for thinking/feeling it.
Watching these streamers treat people like dirt over low-stakes disagreements while their chat eggs them on and echoes them is just shit to see and clearly fosters even more toxicity in a community struggling with that already.
And obviously not all creators are like this, Caedrel for example has a much more positive, self-deprecatory vibe and I’m not surprised he has blown up to the level he has.
And I’m not speaking on their analysis here, they are clearly intelligent about the game/industry. They also don’t treat people like this all the time, but it does happen far too often, and I think the community suffers for it.
I don’t expect anything to change, and if any of these creators saw this thread I’m sure they’d much sooner treat me like an idiot before anything else, but I just wanted to get these thoughts out.
It’s not so much personalities in the scene. As much as the personalities can be abrasive and aggressive, the real problem is how diehard the fans are. I notice you didn’t mention DL here or any of the actual modern pro-players that are simply abrasive and pretend they know everything about everything.
The older community is incredibly well-established and built upon believing that their favorite creator is always right.
LS and his garbage picks are “actually giga brain”, IWD is “so right” every time he shits on NA and praises China for whatever random ass team he likes that year. Monte and Thorin are like 40 years old spouting about the failures of Riot as if they weren’t a part of the inception of the problems 10 years ago. DL is the only “down-to-earth” pro and “trash talk is fun” while being stuck in master/gm like the rest of the old pros.
There are a TON of creative and fun, graceful and kind creators out there but the old heads are always going to have these insanely massive audiences that won’t just die overnight.