man, I remember the “first” instance of new games journalism being about in-game gestures and their subcultural value. you know, it’s the one with the racial slur in the title, about the star wars game.
also hi cammy welcome to sb, good thread
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if I knew the answer to that question, I probably wouldn’t do it in the first place. but if any toxic player has made you quit a moba they’ve done you a favor in the long run.
my behavior in mobas is varied and arbitrary. I’m not always toxic. sometimes I’m even pleasant. winning and losing plays some role in this, of course, but it does not appear to be a primary one. mobas lend themselves to toxicity because more is out of your control than in other competitive games, the average game length is longer, and the consequence of mistakes are compounded over time. my toxicity generally takes the form of “why did you do X thing, which was really stupid,” and goes from there.
Hey Cammy
I’m a little disappointed this thread isn’t about how you can say you love sidecars in EDF
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I still use the “It is all thanks to [special item]” syntax without thinking. I love English translations of stock Japanese phrases.
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THE EDF DEPLOOOOOYYYYSSSSSS.
THE EDF DEPLOOOOOYYYYSSSSSS.
THE EDF…
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I’m on the receiving end of a lot of these kinds of comments and they piss me off. A lot of the times I can justify the actions I make in-game, but if it’s clear to me that the person on the other side already thinks I’m stupid, then there’s no point in even explaining why I did what I did. It’ll just become an argument between two people at that point and it keeps distracting from the game.
MOBAs are shit at teaching people how they are meant to be played. The tutorials in these games are awful, barely teaching anything other than the basic controls and the notion that you need to destroy towers before you can destroy the core. It’s Monster Hunter level of inscrutability, except when you fuck up, you’re inconveniencing 4 other strangers for a half hour. YouTube stuff is all about being greedy in-game and carrying in solo queue because it’s a foregone conclusion that everyone else on your team is going to be shit and you will be the only decent player on the team.
None of that is useful when you know for a fact that you’re a beginner and won’t be the best player on the team. Maybe if your teammates didn’t yell at you for making rookie mistakes in an unranked game and actually tried to tell you what you’re doing wrong in a constructive way, the genre wouldn’t be so frustrating to newcomers.
in conclusion just play ARAM
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it’s hard to do this for two reasons: 1) most low level accounts in a moba are either smurfs, or people being boosted by friends. you’re trained to assume one of these things are true. and 2) not once in my life have I ever constructively criticized a player in a moba without being told to fuck off. I’m not going to shit on someone who is clearly new, but I’m also not going to be playing with someone who is clearly new unless the matchmaker really fucked up or they are being boosted.
I don’t know how anyone gets into a moba these days, because yeah, they fucking suck at teaching people. the genre is not particularly intuitive, and the “hi I just started” rankings in every moba are full of smurfs anyway. usually people smurfing are doing so for disingenuous reasons, which means they’re probably trolling to boot.
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Hostility in MOBA player culture caused by intricately thoughtless game design… as metaphor for the warping of human nature under manifold pernicious incentives coupled with deadly consequences in late stage capitalism 
…
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Only heard about this second hand so please correct if anybody knows more
Clash Royale is the sequel to F2P mobile behemoth Clash of Clans. Basically a Vs. Tower Defence games where both you and your opponents castles and defences are all visible on screen at all times. These are the emotes and set messages you can send each other
Easy enough to see how to abuse that. It got bad for people, REAL bad
Biggest problem was that there was absolutely no way to mute these messages. People demanded it. The developers though went as far as to outright refuse to add such a feature:
The same principle - evoking strong emotions - is at the heart of why we’re not planning to implement a mute option. Emotes are loved by some and hated by others - even within the Clash Royale team! We believe these strong emotions are integral to the core of the game.
Also the fact that most of the time the only reason you get stomped in the game is because your opponent spent more real money on it and so should you if you REALLY want revenge.
Three months later though:
Strong emotions are built into the core of Clash Royale, and are important for knowing the difference between good cards and great cards, but we’ve come to realize that this doesn’t need to be tied to all aspects of the game - emotes being a case in point.
They finally caved in and added a mute feature.
Here’s a random youtube man I found that seems alright and basically sums up my post but also shows some actual gameplay of how emotes were used
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Trackmania Turbo on consoles has an interesting implementation of this. The ONLY way to communicate on consoles was with preset messages, and you didn’t even get to decide what it said, or really when, just whether to say it or not.
When people join a server, everyone gets a prompt to press L3 to welcome them. If you press it, it would send a “Hello!” message, and if you didn’t press it, it wouldn’t send anything. 10 seconds before the game ends, you get another L3 prompt to say “gg”.
While this system is obviously super limited, it was interesting in that I think it still conveyed some of the positive aspects of communication (albeit super limited), and had none of the negative aspects. It felt nice when people chose to say “Hello” or “gg” to you, even though they’re canned messages and only available when appropriate.
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“Booyah!s” got buffed. This way! left in the dirt?
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am I one of the few on here who enjoy this sort of thing? when in moderation of course.
Rocket League was great for this. since everyone uses controller, there’s a bunch of presets you can tie to your D-pad. can be used as taunts or just self-deprecation.
[wildly missed shot]
Calculated.
Calculated.
Nice shot!
Calculated.
OMG!
Shazbot!
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VGS
VGTG
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Holding my breath whether we will get even more verses in EDF5 to proudly proclaim
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Hopefully class-specific verses too!
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