After playing Vainglory from Summer 2016 till now, I have been through quite some major stages of Vainglory history. At the beginning I mostly played FPS games on my iPad 3 like Modern Combat 5 and I knew very few things about MOBAs and with League looking quite, well how do you say it actually mmm, toxic but it’s a massive hit so I played Vainglory to be like “Hey, I actually play a MOBA”. Then I fell in love with it. I was passionate about the game and when I knew about the forums, I joined it immediately 'cause I saw the super huge potential in this game and I had many ideas that would freshen the gameplay by for example, even adding a Talent tree into this game. But over the time, my passion gradually went away just because the one and only thing that Vainglory hasn’t solved since the booming in the player count: toxicity. Yes it’s the toxicity of the community. There is absolutely zero discipline in the community which leads to the rise in toxicity that everyone here knows and hates. Yesterday, I PMed hazeleyes about the community and SEMC. We talked a lot about that but I’m talking about toxicity now and here is exactly what he and I said about toxicity
First things first, did you ask @hazeleyes if you could post his words from your PM? You should always get permission before making someone’s privately spoken words public.
As for toxicity, I hope SEMC starts giving it some real attention too! I’m optimistic that they will. The dodging penalty is a nice first step, and helps establish some community norms. There’s already a discussion about this here: 3.4 Dodging Penalty - Finally a decent 25 points Drop~! Maybe it’s better to continue that conversation instead of starting a new, very broad, one?
anyways, its really hard to control the toxicity in vg due to (my opinion) due to the playerbase. I FEEL that semc doesnt want to push too hard of a punishment onto the “toxic” players to make them want to stop playing at all
edit: since the VG playerbase is already small imo
Agreed. I’ve heard that time and again as the explanation why they’re so reluctant to deal with the issue, but I’ve never seen it in writing from one of the devs.
The game is F2P so just like everything SEMC has to deal with it will be a lose-lose situation.
It really isn’t that hard to get someone to get perm banned in general. SEMC is too scared to implement it as an option in the game but instead requires you to go on the site and report the person directly. Karma system is just a placebo to discourage, not to negate, toxic behavior. As you go to support you begin thinking to yourself, is this really worth doing? And boom decide to say nah I won’t do it. It is very similar to something like high schoolers get bullied but “x” amount of them actually say something.
The way SEMC has it formatted to report someone to potentially get them banned is very serious, because what if you just tilted the player super hard and they usually are a super friendly person. That is where the fact that this game is a MOBA comes in. It is a team game and built so much on that, that it is impossible to just solo carry every game. So who’s fault is it when you tilt someone, yours? The person who tilted them by playing horribly or did something that they clearly trusted you to do but you couldn’t. Or theirs? Because they raged pinged you as you instigated them.
I’ve met lots of cool people as I climb but I have seen them getting pissed and I myself rage from time to time not from losses but stupid plays by an ally (one time I was playing Glaive bot and I did my classic lemme ruin the top laner strat. I shoved hard and went to mid because enemies were overextended. Celeste was laning on my side and I punted enemy Tony into our tower DEEP and the Celeste still decides to CS instead of killing the Tony with an AA or even drop a star. The moment I saw this I was like “” I was already able to tell the Celeste wouldn’t be able to carry and once late game came I just dived tower over and over again BECAUSE WOW MUCH FUN.) The community is nice but there are always 100% toxic players, one who got permabanned hehe.
Well taking all of that into consideration I personally don’t listen to people who say this game is toxic unless if they got at least 5 people permabanned themselves. SEMC can’t do everything, just saying.
Yeah, that’s a pretty common thing for people to speculate about, without confirmation.
Concerning toxicity, there are a couple options. One is to punish people more harshly, and hope that potential bans will scare people into being better. I think that’s perhaps helpful, but not the full story. Two, you can try to address what causes toxicity instead of just punishing it. For me, the main main main cause is when players ignore the fact that their teammates are people too. They have different skillsets, different strategies, different reaction-times, different levels of experience, different everything, almost. Most trolling is not trolling, it’s just misunderstandings, and people going on tilt because of them.
I don’t know what the best solution to this is, because it really just requires people to be good, decent humans. Consider the player behind the hero. Know that they’re not perfect, and don’t expect them to be. I’m not sure what the game can do to address this. Contests like the “suggest a tip” challenge were nice (although limited to social media), because they get the player base thinking about the reality that not everyone knows the same thing. Maybe the game should also try to include some stats for your teammates on the loading screen, so you know what sort of player you’re matched with?
As for what we can do in this tiny slice of the VG community… be good forumers. Make awesome guides. Share great builds. Raise the community’s knowledge, one thread at a time. It’ll filter eventually.
This is how I feel about VG. Probably the second least toxic community I’ve experienced, next to FFXIV, which I think of my 4+ years playing I’ve only ever ran into a handful of toxic folks.
Which is the eternal debate, right? I remember arguing against the introduction of Friends List Skill Tiers in VG years ago for the same reason. You can either have people accept that their teammates are unknown entities (like all humans are… lol), or you can try to quantify them enough so people have less to complain about.
Incidentally, there are a few great studies recently on workplace dynamics saying that people who are more comfortable with ambiguity in teammates are more likely to cooperate and accomplish team goals. I think it applies to multi-player games too.
Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual’s ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2). Once the ambiguity associated with another’s actions is sufficiently resolved, this relationship between ambiguity tolerance and prosocial choice is eliminated (experiment 3). Taken together, these results provide converging evidence that attitudes toward ambiguity are a robust predictor of one’s willingness to engage in costly social behavior, which suggests a mechanism for the underlying motivations of prosocial action.
Introduce a mid-match chat: People said this was gonna be a clusterf*** but I’m willing to take that clusterf*** for an extra method to communicate and plan my assault with my teammates.
Extend the duration of the draft phase: Instead of 30s, make it like the pros, give them an extra 90s ‘waste time’ for them to discuss the picks and strategy and the pre-entering/swapping heroes time from 30s to 60s. It will make things longer but the effects are significant.
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” I was already able to tell the Celeste wouldn’t be able to carry and once late game came I just dived tower over and over again BECAUSE WOW MUCH FUN.) The community is nice but there are always 100% toxic players, one who got permabanned hehe.