My main issue with online play is that, with automatic matchmaking, people feel like chaotic AIs that play until they think they can't win anymore and then drop from the match, or just behave like...
My main issue with online play is that, with automatic matchmaking, people feel like chaotic AIs that play until they think they can't win anymore and then drop from the match, or just behave like assholes griefing foes (or allies) for the lulz. Without matchmaking, you need to either bring your own friends or find communities that are nice enough and can accommodate to the amount of commitment you want to put into the game.
My wife is in a guild in a mobile gatcha game and there are people her age and she enjoys it a lot. The gameplay is mostly asynchronous and they just work together on guild level goals... sounds great except that the kind of daily commitment to play a gatcha/"energy limited" mobile game sounds appalling to me.
It’s funny to see this now. I started playing WoW again recently after the recent Tildes thread mentioning it has added a lot more support for solo play. I had a great time in delves etc until I...
It’s funny to see this now. I started playing WoW again recently after the recent Tildes thread mentioning it has added a lot more support for solo play. I had a great time in delves etc until I decided to join some matchmade battlegrounds (pvp - which I used to be quite good at). Then some person on our team whispered me ‘what are you doing here dude’ and called me a moron in the general chat - this happened because we were supposed to have two healers, but only had one (me). And admittedly I’m not super used to all the changes in the class yet and not up to the skill level I was. But I mean, who acts like that? The first actually multiplayer encounter I had and someone literally called me a moron! Like I totally get it’s frustrating if you join a planned raid group or something rated and someone doesn’t know the tactics, it’s like an etiquette thing - but this is an unrated randomly match made battleground that takes like, 20 minutes, no great time investment if you lose. Also everyone assuming you’re a guy is gross. Just venting I guess.
Yeah, that assumption of male players is gross. You’re playing a game where you have instant visual representation of gender. I remember endless discussion of men (or let’s face it - boys) playing...
Yeah, that assumption of male players is gross. You’re playing a game where you have instant visual representation of gender.
I remember endless discussion of men (or let’s face it - boys) playing as female characters with the explaination that it was so they could look at their butts as they walked. I always thought that was gross but I figured it was probably just them trying to maintain a masculine facade for their role playing. But if people are making that assumption that female characters are being played by males, it makes it sound like they’ve got a lot of people who are not role playing and just telling everyone they are men and are legitimately just playing that way so they can play with their little dress-up playthings.
If you think that WoW players accurately pick their avatar based on their gender I have a bridge to sell you. The rest of your post is sort of true I suppose, but often people just want to have a...
You’re playing a game where you have instant visual representation of gender.
If you think that WoW players accurately pick their avatar based on their gender I have a bridge to sell you.
The rest of your post is sort of true I suppose, but often people just want to have a character looking a certain way. Whether or not the reason is sexual is moot. I played a mix of male and female characters, either from an RP perspective or because I thought it fit the look better.
Anyway, people assume you're a dude on WoW because if I did a census right now I'd bet money on a 95/5 split, if not more. I tend to assume everyone is the name of their character, but I can't help but understand why people would assume something that is overwhelmingly true.
And where are you getting this idea of a 95/5 split? From how many women you hear on the chat? Because many women don't talk on chat because they get harassed in many ways. That being said I've...
And where are you getting this idea of a 95/5 split? From how many women you hear on the chat? Because many women don't talk on chat because they get harassed in many ways.
That being said I've never been on WoW but I played ESO and it has a fair amount of women gamers (who don't even mind showing they are women) including me but I would say ESO overall is not that toxic for a multiplayer game. It had its times but in general the playerbase wasn't so bad (and I met several random nice people too).
I've also had guys tell me they play as females and noted how much differnet other gamers treated them (not in ESO but in GTA.. and I can attest GTA's playerbase is fucking toxic. I stopped talking on it period. Hell, I had one guy before I decided i was happier not talkign to randoms who kept insisting that I must be a guy with a voice changer and was warning people I wasn't a woman. Solely on the fact that he assumed women didn't play the game and no possible way).
No, from being realistic about the demographics of gaming, especially during the time period WoW launched. Vastly fewer women played games when gaming itself was much smaller than it is now. I...
No, from being realistic about the demographics of gaming, especially during the time period WoW launched. Vastly fewer women played games when gaming itself was much smaller than it is now.
I looked at surveys but they're all over the place, although all of them show a majority men, so I can't verify this claim so I'll concede it's likely less nowadays. Nevertheless, I can genuinely not see why it's divisive to say that it's understandable people assume you're male when playing WoW. I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's understandable when you look at any data point from the past thirty years.
I think the push-back you might be observing is because the true ratio matters less than the underlying assumption resulting in an online gaming populace that acts in immature and toxic ways.
Nevertheless, I can genuinely not see why it's divisive to say that it's understandable people assume you're male when playing WoW.
I think the push-back you might be observing is because the true ratio matters less than the underlying assumption resulting in an online gaming populace that acts in immature and toxic ways.
I'm aware, I just think it's sort of silly to directly attribute it to malice when it came to near default levels in the past and how it's often more a thing of trained ignorance instead. That...
I'm aware, I just think it's sort of silly to directly attribute it to malice when it came to near default levels in the past and how it's often more a thing of trained ignorance instead. That doesn't excuse the behaviour that occurs when women speak over mic, but that's not anywhere near the argument I'm presenting. The pushback isn't invalid in and of itself, though it doesn't actually address what I'm saying and turns my words into a value judgment where there was none. Keeping it at that, I understand that regardless of intent someone would default to male because of the overwhelming supermajority men had in the past. That same past many WoW players come from.
If anything, I'm glad there's an effort to include women into something that was, and still is, a predominantly male hobby.
I didn't interpret it as a value judgement, more like an inadvertent, yet needless, derail. The original two vents you were replying to were venting not necessarily at the assumption, but at the...
turns my words into a value judgment where there was none
I didn't interpret it as a value judgement, more like an inadvertent, yet needless, derail. The original two vents you were replying to were venting not necessarily at the assumption, but at the side-effects of that assumption.
Replying with "Actually, that might be a reasonable assumption to make" is kind of missing the point, in my book.
Understandable, not reasonable. Apologies if it felt like a derail or offtopic. I thought I responded to something in their post addressing assuming gender.
Understandable, not reasonable.
Apologies if it felt like a derail or offtopic. I thought I responded to something in their post addressing assuming gender.
Eh... I think that it is vastly underrated how many women actually played games. When I grew up, videogames wasn't seen as a boy thing, it was seen as a kid thing. Every kid (except me cause my...
Eh... I think that it is vastly underrated how many women actually played games. When I grew up, videogames wasn't seen as a boy thing, it was seen as a kid thing. Every kid (except me cause my parents didn't believe in devices for gaming only but even I gamed on what I could) I knew had a console. Even in high school I remember missing New Year's cause I was playing with my best friend (both of us girls) on her nintendo. I swear it wasn't until the 2000's you heard this boys only play videogames BS (and I heard BS on what girls tended not to do as a tomboy cause I was always praised if it was something only guys were interested in which back then was cars, airplanes, and sports. Video games was not something I perceived as being part tomboy, taht was just being a kid <- plus I refuse to grow up, still like cartoons too :P. Or at worst a geek thing).
And go watch vidoes some guys have done where they play as a girl character and the toxicity they get and you'll understand why women tend to either not talk in MP games and pretend to be guys or just hope not to get noticed or play single player games cause it's not fun dealing with assholery.
And I find it kinda interesting that when statistics show that people are wrong about women not playing games all the sudden you get arguments that the study was including "not what I consider gaming" games, or that they must be counting moms buying videogames/consoles for their boy kids (yes, I actually remember some guy using that as an excuse as to why the statistic was wrong). I rememebr the time that you claim women didn't play games. Funny how I rememebr the women I knew played games :P.
Sorry, it's been a pet peeve of mine since 2000 and later when all the sudden there got to be this idea that women didn't play videogames (I never had this problem before then really... I've been playign since Atari so funnily enough before a lot of these younger boys (who probably aren't boys anymore today) who started claiming women didn't play video games).
I don't mean to be rude, but anecdotal evidence is irrelevant to what I'm saying. I know women that play and played games, yet that doesn't change the fact that generally speaking, women were...
I don't mean to be rude, but anecdotal evidence is irrelevant to what I'm saying. I know women that play and played games, yet that doesn't change the fact that generally speaking, women were significantly underrepresented in the early 2000s.
Giving actuals is rather difficult because the topic is more varied than what I stated above. Genres have a large impact on gender disparity, far more than gaming itself where you see roughly half and half, so you'll see that reflected in the interactions (ie assuming male as default).
With FPS, Grand Strategy, Racing, and other sports games being significant outliers in the male/female disparity, the 95/5 I said earlier is not an exaggeration for those genres.
In addition, World of Warcraft was actually an outlier within the fantasy MMO genre where WoW had fewer women than other fantasy MMOs.
Considering the topic at hand I do not find it at odds with most people's experiences that they would assume you are male when taking into account the game you're playing. And just to reiterate this, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm saying that a 38 year old balding male playing WoW since 2006 simply doesn't know any better.
Yeah, there's not much rhyme or reason for which body type I pick. I basically alternate from game to game. So I may be masculine in pokemon and decide to go feminine in a completely different...
people just want to have a character looking a certain way. Whether or not the reason is sexual is moot. I played a mix of male and female characters, either from an RP perspective or because I thought it fit the look better.
Yeah, there's not much rhyme or reason for which body type I pick. I basically alternate from game to game. So I may be masculine in pokemon and decide to go feminine in a completely different game, just because "well I picked a boyish character last time in pokemon...".
On the other hand, in the past while playing WoW I’ve had other players assume that I was a woman because I was playing a healing class and once because I wasn’t saying much in party chat and was...
On the other hand, in the past while playing WoW I’ve had other players assume that I was a woman because I was playing a healing class and once because I wasn’t saying much in party chat and was focusing on my job, which is equally weird.
People seem to “need” to assume the gender of other players which I don’t quite understand. My default is to not make any such association until it’s explicitly stated, which has worked well for me.
Same, I use they/them for anybody I’m playing with unless it becomes clear what their gender is. I get frustrated with people assuming I’m a guy to the point where my gamer tag now has my first...
Same, I use they/them for anybody I’m playing with unless it becomes clear what their gender is. I get frustrated with people assuming I’m a guy to the point where my gamer tag now has my first name in it, lol, so I try not to alienate other players, especially other women, by assuming.
I didn't look at the channel name or your comment here before I dove in to the video. I got about halfway through the video before he said, "... when I got a chance to make an MMO ..." and I was...
I didn't look at the channel name or your comment here before I dove in to the video. I got about halfway through the video before he said, "... when I got a chance to make an MMO ..." and I was like, hang on, who is this guy? Why does he seem vaguely familiar? Checked the channel name and HOLY SHIT, THAT'S TIM CAIN!
A while back I tried out one of the Call of Duty games because I heard there was a mechanic where people could mark players on the opposing team so everyone on your team could see where they were....
A while back I tried out one of the Call of Duty games because I heard there was a mechanic where people could mark players on the opposing team so everyone on your team could see where they were. I thought this was fantastic because it turned teams into something cooperative but still exciting. So I played it. And absolutely nobody else was using that mechanic, no matter how many games I played. I constantly got killed by people I could not see.
I already had TF2 because I bought the Orange Box a while back (I think this was before it had gone F2P), and while I was playing FPSes I thought I would try it out because it had a class system that was supposed to be conductive to cooperative play. I think it worked out a lot better than the tagging mechanic in CoD, but it was much less satisfying to play anything support related like the medic or mechanic.
So when it comes to multiplayer the only competitive games I have enjoyed have been the ones that involve tactics or puzzles. That includes fighting games. I really liked Metal Gear Solid Online with MGS4 in spite of it being fairly underbaked. That is basically the only shooting game multiplayer I have liked.
Multiplayer gaming was my thing decades ago but I've grown out of most of it. Rocket League is the only exception. 99% of my gaming these days is single player and i prefer it that way. Even if...
Multiplayer gaming was my thing decades ago but I've grown out of most of it. Rocket League is the only exception. 99% of my gaming these days is single player and i prefer it that way. Even if it's an online / co-op game like an ARPG (PoE, etc) I am playing it solo the majority of the time.
I could potentially get into more co-op with friends if there was an amazing game for that (most co op is no longer interesting to me either)
Async or essentially zero-interaction can be fine (Backpack Battles, MTGA)
I generally avoid random online players completely at this point though. I do not want to deal with it, period. I don't even like being considered a "gamer" despite loving video games.
My main issue with online play is that, with automatic matchmaking, people feel like chaotic AIs that play until they think they can't win anymore and then drop from the match, or just behave like assholes griefing foes (or allies) for the lulz. Without matchmaking, you need to either bring your own friends or find communities that are nice enough and can accommodate to the amount of commitment you want to put into the game.
My wife is in a guild in a mobile gatcha game and there are people her age and she enjoys it a lot. The gameplay is mostly asynchronous and they just work together on guild level goals... sounds great except that the kind of daily commitment to play a gatcha/"energy limited" mobile game sounds appalling to me.
The older I get the less I enjoy algorithmic group finding/post sequencing/product suggestions etc.
It’s funny to see this now. I started playing WoW again recently after the recent Tildes thread mentioning it has added a lot more support for solo play. I had a great time in delves etc until I decided to join some matchmade battlegrounds (pvp - which I used to be quite good at). Then some person on our team whispered me ‘what are you doing here dude’ and called me a moron in the general chat - this happened because we were supposed to have two healers, but only had one (me). And admittedly I’m not super used to all the changes in the class yet and not up to the skill level I was. But I mean, who acts like that? The first actually multiplayer encounter I had and someone literally called me a moron! Like I totally get it’s frustrating if you join a planned raid group or something rated and someone doesn’t know the tactics, it’s like an etiquette thing - but this is an unrated randomly match made battleground that takes like, 20 minutes, no great time investment if you lose. Also everyone assuming you’re a guy is gross. Just venting I guess.
Yeah, that assumption of male players is gross. You’re playing a game where you have instant visual representation of gender.
I remember endless discussion of men (or let’s face it - boys) playing as female characters with the explaination that it was so they could look at their butts as they walked. I always thought that was gross but I figured it was probably just them trying to maintain a masculine facade for their role playing. But if people are making that assumption that female characters are being played by males, it makes it sound like they’ve got a lot of people who are not role playing and just telling everyone they are men and are legitimately just playing that way so they can play with their little dress-up playthings.
If you think that WoW players accurately pick their avatar based on their gender I have a bridge to sell you.
The rest of your post is sort of true I suppose, but often people just want to have a character looking a certain way. Whether or not the reason is sexual is moot. I played a mix of male and female characters, either from an RP perspective or because I thought it fit the look better.
Anyway, people assume you're a dude on WoW because if I did a census right now I'd bet money on a 95/5 split, if not more. I tend to assume everyone is the name of their character, but I can't help but understand why people would assume something that is overwhelmingly true.
And where are you getting this idea of a 95/5 split? From how many women you hear on the chat? Because many women don't talk on chat because they get harassed in many ways.
That being said I've never been on WoW but I played ESO and it has a fair amount of women gamers (who don't even mind showing they are women) including me but I would say ESO overall is not that toxic for a multiplayer game. It had its times but in general the playerbase wasn't so bad (and I met several random nice people too).
I've also had guys tell me they play as females and noted how much differnet other gamers treated them (not in ESO but in GTA.. and I can attest GTA's playerbase is fucking toxic. I stopped talking on it period. Hell, I had one guy before I decided i was happier not talkign to randoms who kept insisting that I must be a guy with a voice changer and was warning people I wasn't a woman. Solely on the fact that he assumed women didn't play the game and no possible way).
No, from being realistic about the demographics of gaming, especially during the time period WoW launched. Vastly fewer women played games when gaming itself was much smaller than it is now.
I looked at surveys but they're all over the place, although all of them show a majority men, so I can't verify this claim so I'll concede it's likely less nowadays. Nevertheless, I can genuinely not see why it's divisive to say that it's understandable people assume you're male when playing WoW. I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's understandable when you look at any data point from the past thirty years.
I think the push-back you might be observing is because the true ratio matters less than the underlying assumption resulting in an online gaming populace that acts in immature and toxic ways.
I'm aware, I just think it's sort of silly to directly attribute it to malice when it came to near default levels in the past and how it's often more a thing of trained ignorance instead. That doesn't excuse the behaviour that occurs when women speak over mic, but that's not anywhere near the argument I'm presenting. The pushback isn't invalid in and of itself, though it doesn't actually address what I'm saying and turns my words into a value judgment where there was none. Keeping it at that, I understand that regardless of intent someone would default to male because of the overwhelming supermajority men had in the past. That same past many WoW players come from.
If anything, I'm glad there's an effort to include women into something that was, and still is, a predominantly male hobby.
I didn't interpret it as a value judgement, more like an inadvertent, yet needless, derail. The original two vents you were replying to were venting not necessarily at the assumption, but at the side-effects of that assumption.
Replying with "Actually, that might be a reasonable assumption to make" is kind of missing the point, in my book.
Understandable, not reasonable.
Apologies if it felt like a derail or offtopic. I thought I responded to something in their post addressing assuming gender.
Eh... I think that it is vastly underrated how many women actually played games. When I grew up, videogames wasn't seen as a boy thing, it was seen as a kid thing. Every kid (except me cause my parents didn't believe in devices for gaming only but even I gamed on what I could) I knew had a console. Even in high school I remember missing New Year's cause I was playing with my best friend (both of us girls) on her nintendo. I swear it wasn't until the 2000's you heard this boys only play videogames BS (and I heard BS on what girls tended not to do as a tomboy cause I was always praised if it was something only guys were interested in which back then was cars, airplanes, and sports. Video games was not something I perceived as being part tomboy, taht was just being a kid <- plus I refuse to grow up, still like cartoons too :P. Or at worst a geek thing).
And go watch vidoes some guys have done where they play as a girl character and the toxicity they get and you'll understand why women tend to either not talk in MP games and pretend to be guys or just hope not to get noticed or play single player games cause it's not fun dealing with assholery.
And I find it kinda interesting that when statistics show that people are wrong about women not playing games all the sudden you get arguments that the study was including "not what I consider gaming" games, or that they must be counting moms buying videogames/consoles for their boy kids (yes, I actually remember some guy using that as an excuse as to why the statistic was wrong). I rememebr the time that you claim women didn't play games. Funny how I rememebr the women I knew played games :P.
Sorry, it's been a pet peeve of mine since 2000 and later when all the sudden there got to be this idea that women didn't play videogames (I never had this problem before then really... I've been playign since Atari so funnily enough before a lot of these younger boys (who probably aren't boys anymore today) who started claiming women didn't play video games).
I don't mean to be rude, but anecdotal evidence is irrelevant to what I'm saying. I know women that play and played games, yet that doesn't change the fact that generally speaking, women were significantly underrepresented in the early 2000s.
Giving actuals is rather difficult because the topic is more varied than what I stated above. Genres have a large impact on gender disparity, far more than gaming itself where you see roughly half and half, so you'll see that reflected in the interactions (ie assuming male as default).
With FPS, Grand Strategy, Racing, and other sports games being significant outliers in the male/female disparity, the 95/5 I said earlier is not an exaggeration for those genres.
In addition, World of Warcraft was actually an outlier within the fantasy MMO genre where WoW had fewer women than other fantasy MMOs.
Considering the topic at hand I do not find it at odds with most people's experiences that they would assume you are male when taking into account the game you're playing. And just to reiterate this, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm saying that a 38 year old balding male playing WoW since 2006 simply doesn't know any better.
Yeah, there's not much rhyme or reason for which body type I pick. I basically alternate from game to game. So I may be masculine in pokemon and decide to go feminine in a completely different game, just because "well I picked a boyish character last time in pokemon...".
On the other hand, in the past while playing WoW I’ve had other players assume that I was a woman because I was playing a healing class and once because I wasn’t saying much in party chat and was focusing on my job, which is equally weird.
People seem to “need” to assume the gender of other players which I don’t quite understand. My default is to not make any such association until it’s explicitly stated, which has worked well for me.
Same, I use they/them for anybody I’m playing with unless it becomes clear what their gender is. I get frustrated with people assuming I’m a guy to the point where my gamer tag now has my first name in it, lol, so I try not to alienate other players, especially other women, by assuming.
Timothy Cain is one of the creators of the original Fallout.
I didn't look at the channel name or your comment here before I dove in to the video. I got about halfway through the video before he said, "... when I got a chance to make an MMO ..." and I was like, hang on, who is this guy? Why does he seem vaguely familiar? Checked the channel name and HOLY SHIT, THAT'S TIM CAIN!
I still do multiplayer, but I dropped out of anything competitive. I still play quite a bit of multiplayer coop, such as deep rock galatic.
A while back I tried out one of the Call of Duty games because I heard there was a mechanic where people could mark players on the opposing team so everyone on your team could see where they were. I thought this was fantastic because it turned teams into something cooperative but still exciting. So I played it. And absolutely nobody else was using that mechanic, no matter how many games I played. I constantly got killed by people I could not see.
I already had TF2 because I bought the Orange Box a while back (I think this was before it had gone F2P), and while I was playing FPSes I thought I would try it out because it had a class system that was supposed to be conductive to cooperative play. I think it worked out a lot better than the tagging mechanic in CoD, but it was much less satisfying to play anything support related like the medic or mechanic.
So when it comes to multiplayer the only competitive games I have enjoyed have been the ones that involve tactics or puzzles. That includes fighting games. I really liked Metal Gear Solid Online with MGS4 in spite of it being fairly underbaked. That is basically the only shooting game multiplayer I have liked.
Multiplayer gaming was my thing decades ago but I've grown out of most of it. Rocket League is the only exception. 99% of my gaming these days is single player and i prefer it that way. Even if it's an online / co-op game like an ARPG (PoE, etc) I am playing it solo the majority of the time.
I could potentially get into more co-op with friends if there was an amazing game for that (most co op is no longer interesting to me either)
Async or essentially zero-interaction can be fine (Backpack Battles, MTGA)
I generally avoid random online players completely at this point though. I do not want to deal with it, period. I don't even like being considered a "gamer" despite loving video games.