Negativity about the game

Vainglory Archive Out-of-Game Experience
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Hi all, this is more of a rant but not about the game. Rather, about the playerbase here on the forums itself. I wouldn’t be so sure if this belongs to the salt mine, but I will just post it here.

I have been playing this game for 2+ years and I have never seen much negativity as this forums compared to the “hivemind” called r/vainglorygame.

Recently, I have been visiting this forums for a change of pace or rather get fresh outlook about the game. It is disappointing that even this site is infested with negativity. I know I cannot blame anyone for their experience about the game or how much their “selfish idea” can improve the game, but can you please be more positive for the sake of newer players?

  • Division between 3v3 players vs 5v5 playerbase.
    This argument is really toxic and just spreads negativity. For one it is more of a self preference but hurts the game mindset of newer players. It is corrupting in a way like:
    “If veteran players says it, then it must be true”
    Yes, that is partly correct but it is very discouraging even for myself.

  • I am just playing this game because [insert whatever reason]…
    Yes we get it, the old Vainglory was better in your opinion. But in reality it is just living in the past. Confined in your memory. Never opening the door for changes.

  • Balancing is way off/WTF is this changes? or similar ones…
    Again, another negative approach for a game you stopped or barely playing nowadays. Then things just piles up one another until it builds up a hate train to crash on a wall called “Game Balancing”.

I am just gonna make this clear. I am not being a Vainglory white knight or “the game is perfect” guy. But please, atleast try to keep the negativity minimal or unbiased in a way new players can be less discouraged to keep playing the “dying game” or whatever thing you call it at this point.

TL;DR: The forums is too negative and cling too much on the old vainglory. Overshadowing the development and love of some players for it.

P.S: If you could also input your feedback without starting a flame war, that would be awesome.

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All I want is devs to stop pushing their own opinions over the community and make a proper statement regarding the issues the community is having.

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I wished that too. hecc, all of us needs that.
Even the comments in patch notes from devs themselves are non-existent now.
I might be disillusioned but I really clinged to this game and still wishes it can return it’s glory with a happy playerbase

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What’s the point in being positive if you’re truly unhappy with your situation? I don’t care about attracting new players - that’s not my job. If I was paid, I’d shill for SEMC and say that Vainglory cures aging, but again, I’m not. SEMC is supposed to do that by making customers happy as best as it can, and instead, it’s diversifying the hate it receives.

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Yeah I would agree if it wasn’t so simple for the game to succeed literally back in VG’s simpler state the game was most successful. All these monetizations, unsuccessful 5v5 map, and blatantly ignoring the community is all their doing and they’re paying the price for it. I would love new players to join the game and for it to be revitalize but I don’t know of any game that was successful revived.

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You can actually hate all you want. My point is, not influencing newer players by means of hijacking topics and maximizing only on the bad parts making it negative in outcome.

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I get it and I also saw HipsterSkaarf’s thread calling out negative echo chambers, but just silencimg criticism, opinions and sincere concern isn’t how you make things right. FWIW, fake optimism echo chambers are just as bad. IMO that’s one of the reasons why vainglory is in its bad current state.

I mean, I agree that sometimes criticism can be done wrong and sometimes it comes off as rudeness. But, hey, if the game is bad and isn’t fun to play, why would I recommend it or encourage anyone to play it?

If it gets new players, good I don’t really care nor I wanna do sth about it.
But when I’m giving my opinion, I’m gonna be honest and say what I think: If your intention is to have fun, I think there are a lot of better games for that as I think Vainglory isn’t fun to play. And hecc, that’s SEMC’s fault, not mine.

Someone were to ask me if it’s worth it to put money into vg, I’d say not at all. And that’s not negativity or sabotage, that’s my sincere opinion and advice.

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Reddit is full of delusional white knights, any form of criticism towards the game or semc is silenced. Here in the forums when we see something worthy of criticism we critise it but we also give praise when good changes are made. Sadly in the current state of the game there is a big list of issues to point out and barely anything to be hyped about.

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I can get what this post is saying.
I truly understand.

But no game makes announcements that make my PP shrink from disgust more than Vainglory. ):

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Though those White Knights are less every day.

On topic: its hard to be optimistic when there is no reason for It.

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Naturally, I can’t speak for anyone else, but 5v5 is directly responsible for a host of jungle camp changes, hero releases, hero nerfs and buffs, and item alterations that I personally do not agree with. Many of these changes have negatively impacted 3v3, a mode that I favor over 5v5.

And when I see 5v5 advocates on the subreddit (and on this forum) proposing that SEMC remove 3v3 or Blitz to somehow “improve” the queue times for 5v5, my low-level loathing for this mode is dramatically enhanced.

There’s going to be division between 3v3 and 5v5 players as long as 5v5 persists in being corrosive to the 3v3 experience. When 3v3 gets its own separate balancing and flows in a direction that I happen to agree with, the 5v5 community and its preferred mode will both cease to be on my proverbial radar.

No. I’m not going to tailor my vocalized opinions on Vainglory to make sure new players aren’t turned off from the game. I’m going to tell it like it is.

This just doesn’t go for Vainglory, but for all things that I happen to use, enjoy, or partake in within my own waking life.

If, for example, someone were to ask me what I thought about PC gaming, I’d tell them the truth as I personally see it: depending on your budget, you may or may not get something more powerful than a console (a 1050ti paired with an i3 is not a console killer hardware-wise in 2018), physical game copies are more or less dead on PC, the platform is far superior to console when it comes to supporting older titles from 2 + generations ago, the gaming library for PC is breathtakingly enormous, a distinct subset of the PC gaming community is indeed full of elitists who have a serious hateboner for both console and mobile gaming (with mobile gaming getting even more flak), and the flexibility of the PC platform is virtually unmatched compared to every single other gaming platform out there.

I’m going to tell a new player what the game does right, what it does wrong, and what it does horribly. I’m not spamming positive posts when there’s no real reason for it just for the sake of a new player. They can make their own informed decision and choose to heed my warnings (and praise when applicable) or not.

If they like the game, they’ll stick around. If they don’t, they’ll bounce to something that suits them better.

No amount of me talking up SEMC or their product will alter that dynamic.

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Its funny how they think that deleting 3v3 would make those players go to 5v5 to have better queues. Those how dont play 5v5 wont play It just because you delete 3v3, they Will just leave. 5v5 players are completely ignoring 3v3: they shouldnt balance It, they should remove It… But if they do that, they Game Will die, there are too many players in that mode.

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You say that we should keep the negativity to a minimum to keep the newer players from being discouraged. But we’re just a community ran website that isnt first met by the newer players… The app is.

The app has long queue time, unbalanced casual matches, (which are the new players first game mode to learn and play) I could list more but I really dont want to participate in this thread because I dont want to. But there are other things besides the forums that discourages the newer players than us just talking what we think needs to be said.

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Isn’t VG Reddit Hella positive and TBH it’s kinda hard to stay that way when wierd stuff is happening in front of you.
All of SEMC tries either ends up buggy or frustrating for players.
I don’t rant or complaint (although I should)
I’m still playing 3 hrs a day and hoping that one day SEMC would figure out how to do proper events.

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Have you seen reddit? Its no longer a “praise SEMC no matter what” world. Though its not as negative as the forum (the Royal guard is doing some work) its becoming more and more negative over time. And its reddit, imagine how bad is the state if the game for that to happen.

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That’s a good point. This is a pretty small bit of the VG community, and new players don’t find it right away. That said… just yesterday we had an old player come back to the game and this forum (so, kind of new) to say they were really liking it right now, and the very first response they got was “why? Don’t bother playing anymore.” That’s demoralizing, and I think that’s the sentiment Rawzri is talking about. Even if the negativity of this place only effects one person, is it really worth it, just to tell other players who already know and agree with you about how you’re down on it all?

More importantly though - your mood effects how you approach the game (for those of you who are still playing), and it goes a long way to how enjoyable you find the experience. If you’re in a good mood about the game, you’ll take less notice of the bad, be less likely to troll/throw yourself, and have a much better time. I mean, it’s as facetious as “the power of positive thinking,” but… it’s really true. The counter-argument to this is “but I’m just responding to the game. I’m not in a good mood because it’s not in a good state.” Yeah, there’s truth in that. But there’s always a give and take between things you like and don’t like, and how you approach that balance will effect the long-term impression you take away.

A long, long time ago, I kept a bunch of stats for an entire season’s worth of matches - wins, losses, match times, heroes I played as, with, and against, and also the amount of toxicity I saw. A lot of people in the forum at the time had been complaining about trolls in every match: ping-spammers, AFKs, griefers, instalockers, all of it. The impression was that well over half of all games were toxic somehow. So I noted it all, and kept track. I was also super strict. If someone pinged me once with a :vg_: to say “wtf are you doing?” I marked it as toxic. By the end of the season, I had played 167 games, but instead of the ~60+% the forum was expecting, only 15% had any kind of toxicity, and it was only that high because I was measuring with a hyper-sensitive scale. On top of that, 15% was surprisingly higher than I even remembered. In my head, it was closer to 4 or 5%, limited to a handful of memories of some players who were legitimate Grumpy Gus’s.

But what’s the point, you ask? Plainly, echo chambers produce expectations that a) don’t always match reality, but b) can produce reality. I didn’t see toxicity because I didn’t create it and I didn’t let it throw me. I’ve always been a responsive player, and keen to work with teammates to get the job done, however they’re defining the job. I don’t have much ego when I play. Even in those times when I know that I’m the best player in the match, I try to stay calm while nudging my team to a winning strategy. As a result, I don’t see much toxicity, and I don’t internalize it when it happens. Overall, it’s a much better experience, and, I like to think - I hope - that it’s contagious for other players sharing the game with me. Other forumers were seeing more toxicity than I was, I won’t discount their experiences, but it was because of how they were approaching their matches in the first place. People pinging a :sad: at the start of a match when the draft went poorly, or abandoning teammates who they think are unskilled… there are a lot of ways for matches to go downhill if you let them. If you’re looking for faults, you WILL find them, be it in the behavior of other players, or matchmaking, or the UI, or the monetization strategies, or whatever else. You’ll find good too, if you look for it.

Likewise, how you approach your critiques of the game effects how you approach the game itself while you’re playing it. Some of the more persistent toxic responses in the forums, reddit, discord, twitter, etc, come from people that I know are toxic in-game. You get yourself in a negative mindset, and you’re more likely to be negative while you play, which makes negative experiences for other players, which in turn makes negative experiences for still more people.

I’m not saying anyone here has to be super happy-go-lucky about the game. If you don’t feel that way, you don’t feel that way, and that’s fine. It’s not your job to fake it. But, I don’t know… what’s the point in being negative every chance you get? It’s fun every now and then, but it hurts you if you stick with it for too long.

Anyway, I don’t indulge in commentary about commentary often, so, sorry about that. Also, this is rambling a bit. Sorry for that too, and thanks for reading. :cheers_minioncandy_t3:

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I made it a rule for myself not to bring down anyone that enjoys the game. If you like the game, good for you. I wont be the one to shit on your parade. I just personally dont like the state of it.
I also dont like it when someone tells me they dont like something I like so why would I do it to someone else.

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I think that’s a great rule. And, to be fair, it seems like most people here have the same approach.

It’s more the constant, indirect stuff though. Side comments about the game being bad, all over the place. It hardly ever shows up as a direct challenge to someone who says they like something about the game, but it redefines the community expectation just the same. It sets a group standard around here that the game is bad, which, I think, leads to people actually treating the game like a disposable thing that they shouldn’t really care about. Expecting toxicity leads to toxicity.

On the flip side, if people expect quality and focus on quality and celebrate quality, it’s going to actually produce quality.

I don’t know. It’s easier to tear something down than it is to build something up, but I think it’s especially hard to build in an environment full of demolition. I guess. That’s a clumsy metaphor that doesn’t quite make my point, but… oh well. :rbgwen:

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What quality are you talking about other than the graphics? The super laggy servers? The new heroes no one gets to play because they are always banned? The P2W talents? The “behind an RNG wall” skins? The extremely buggy gameplay? The unbalance? The dead match making? The long queues? The nerver kept promises? Hats? The fun heroes being destroyed? The guild system that hasn’t seen a rework since its release? The BP full of talents most don’t give a shit about? What do you want us to say?
Right now there is very little to be happy about. They don’t give the community what they want, they delayed the updates to solve the bugs yet no bugs are solved and new bugs appear. No changes to the guild system, no improvement in the MM, new heroes we can’t even play, horrible servers (RIP SEA). They only thing I can praise them for is the work the art department is doing.
I can’t be optimistic when I see problem after problem and nothing is done. We used to be optimistic, we used to give ideas, but after a long time without that actually working, why continue? We tried being positive, and nothing changed. You are asking us to be positive, for what? So nothing changes again? The community us burnt out, has been complaining about a lot of problems and they don’t solve any, yet we still have to be optimistic? We have no reason to do it.

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I see what you mean, If I remember correctly, the devs dont fix existing problems yet create more stuff to cover up the bugs n such.

A example would be the targeting bug that afflicts melee heros. Thats been in the game for probably around a year and it still hasn’t seen a fix.

I dont have a problem with expanding the game to other ports but shouldn’t polishing the game come first before expanding a buggy game that could be improved further?

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