Don’t play games online, they say. If you have to play games online, turn off chat. If you have to turn on chat, limit it to your friends list. In the past, if you’ve wanted to avoid the toxic jerks of online gaming, those have been your guidelines. It feels like that’s finally changing.
Many people had only expected online gaming to get uglier, and had acquiesced to the notion that anonymous online ugliness was an unavoidable price to playing modern video games. After all, these days, if you want to play a new game, there’s a growing chance you’re going to have to play online. Many of the most popular games, from Destiny to League of Legends, are online-only. Still others are greatly enhanced by being online. But for many players, myself included, the prospect of forced interaction with the sorts of foul-mouthed teen racists that we still associate with late 2000s online play is enough to sour the idea of our brave new online future.
First-Person Shooters Go Quiet
Two of the biggest shooters of the year, Titanfall and Destiny, are both online-only. Both of them offer the sorts of intense, player-vs.-player multiplayer matches that have historically been so plagued by teenaged tyrants. But I’ve found that if you simply log in and begin playing either game, you’ll find that they’re both a good deal quieter than their precursors, Call of Duty and Halo.
In Titanfall, which came out in March, players largely seem to communicate using closed chat, which limits their voice communications with people they have added to their online parties. There’s an open chat-channel in each match — which would theoretically allow you to hear the voices of strangers yelling or calling people names — but surprisingly few people use it. Especially on PC and Xbox One, the general consensus is that most games are remarkably chat-free.
The reasons for the ubiquity of party chat aren’t entirely clear. Some have theorized that the player-base on Xbox One and PC tends to be older, and older players are more likely to party up and talk with friends. That’s certainly been how I play, especially when I’m playing regularly. Furthermore, the moment you join a party on Xbox One, party chat turns on by default. Parties carry over from game to game, which means it’s possible that more and more people are staying in parties for the duration of their online playtime.
Destiny has been even quieter than Titanfall — in the public beta, there didn’t appear to be any open chat channel, and the only people a player could hear were the people in their three-person fireteam. That was true both in the co-op campaign and in competitive matches. It’s unclear what the chat options will be in the full game, but the beta was a remarkably chat-free experience, from deathmatches to games of duck-duck-goose.
More PC Games Ditch Open Chat
Meanwhile, fewer and fewer PC games are defaulting to wide-open global chat. The League of Legends developers at Riot Games have been experimenting with this sort of thing for a long time now, and were among the first to document positive results from simply turning off inter-team chat in League matches as a default. It was possible for players to turn it back on, but by putting that one small step between players and chat, Riot significantly reduced in-game harassment. Just last week, the company started testing another new system for banning poorly behaved players, bringing more swift and long-lasting justice to those who bring toxic behaviour into their games.
Blizzard’s popular card game Hearthstone offers no way to chat with strangers in-match other than the built-in Emote system, meaning that you can hop into matches with strangers with no fears of being called the N-word or getting “joking” death threats. (It’s not a bullet-proof system — players can still message you after a game, if they choose.)
The popular new PC game Divinity: Original Sin used to boot up with a global chat panel open, but shortly after the game’s public release, the developers shut global chat down. Why? Because the moment the public entered the fray, “It seemed like the floodgates of hell were opened,” one of the game’s creators told me.
There may be no game that inspires more trash-talk than Mario Kart. But online play in Mario Kart 8 has no chat options either, meaning that it’s impossible to scream at the person who just pegged you with a shell as you rounded bend to the final stretch. As our own Yannick LeJacq points out, it feels a tad unusual to play Mario Kart without trash-talking, but then again, we’re mostly used to trash-talking our friends and roommates in that game.
I sense that when taken online and opened up to a randomly selected group of players, the game’s chat would spiral out of control in no time. Some sort of friends-only chat would be fine, but I can certainly understand why a notoriously conservative company like Nintendo might err on the side of caution.
Not Everyone’s Happy
The price of limited online chat is too high for some gamers. It indirectly — and sometimes directly — hurts gameplay, they say.
“Party chat destroyed multiplayer,” wrote a commenter on a recent Titanfall story. “Imagine the people who just started online gaming with Xbone and PS4. Who are they going to ‘party chat’ with? The people I party chat with are people I met playing games back when ‘regular chat’ was the way chatting in multiplayer worked.”
Many Destiny beta players feel that the game doesn’t offer enough options for communication, and in light of the restricted chat options, the limited character emotes aren’t cutting it. One common piece of feedback from the Destiny beta has been that in the absence of open voice or proximity chat, the game’s four character emotes, which are currently assigned to the d-pad, need to be greatly expanded. (Though the dance moves are and will always be the best.)
Does Chat Actually Improve Teamwork?
Chat is generally seen as an important part of playing games online, not because it allows you to meet new people and taunt your opponents, but because it helps you communicate with your team and, in theory, play better. Turns out that isn’t always the case, at least not with every game. Recently on the League of Legends forums, a user asked whether a chat-restricted player could negatively affect his or her team’s performance.
Riot’s lead social systems designer Jeffrey Lin explained that players who don’t use chat and rely on the “smart pings” system — a series of pre-baked commands like “Danger” and “On My Way” — do just fine, sometimes even better than those who use chat. “For a large number of players, chat restrictions actually increases their win rates,” Lin wrote, “because being verbally abusive to teammates tends to make the team’s performance spiral negatively.”
Game Creators Will Decide How This Goes
All of this comes down to two things, really: Options, and defaults. It’s always better for game developers to give us more options. More options for how the game looks, plays and sounds, and also more options for how we communicate with each other. Destiny would clearly benefit from a more flexible voice-chat system. It’d also benefit from giving players a big wheel of varied gestures, so that players who don’t want to chat can have other options for communication.
The more options that are made available to players, the more important it is that the game’s creators put a lot of thought into which options they turn on by default. As Riot learned with League of Legends, simply turning off inter-team chat by default — instead of removing it entirely — significantly lowered the amount of negative chat and harassment that happened in every game. Blizzard still makes it possible to send taunting, angry messages to people you won or lost to in Hearthstone, but by removing the ability to do so while in a match, they have no doubt significantly cut down on taunts and harassment.
It’s nice to see games including more options to let us communicate with one another, while adjusting their default settings to let more new players feel more comfortable. Harassment will continue to be a problem in online games, particularly for women, and negative chat will continue to keep quieter, shyer players at bay. But progress is progress, and if you fire up a new online game in 2014, the chances have greatly increased that your first experience will be with the game itself, not with the angry, muffled voice of a stranger.
Comments
14 responses to “Good News: Online Games Are Getting Less Obnoxious”
I’m actually playing fps games less because of this. Unless my friends are up for a game, what’s the point? I hate deathmatch, and the team that doesn’t speak will 90% of the time be demolished by the team of speakers in objective style matches, so there’s no joy in playing anymore.
The death of team speak has pushed me back to single player gaming.
This! Exactly this!
Yeah I play exclusively single player unless it’s Battlefield, in which case I usually do my own thing and TURN OFF ALL THE CHAT.
Still waiting for the dudebros or toxic players to go away.
Don’t worry one day there will be a Candy Crush/Call of Duty cross-over for Android and they will all forget about actual games.
used to like a bit of mm1 banter in Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. v,5,6!
It actually worries me about Destiny, if the chat options stay as strict as they were in beta I don’t see the mmo aspects surviving
IMO it’s to do with accountability. There is none. Particulary w/ mmos , in the early days of wow you had invested 20 – 30 days played just to get to 60. If you were a fucking twat you’d have to reroll to get groups on your server, thats a massive investment. Now days you just LFR or LFG and if you get a bad rep – name change, server change. No big deal.
FPS have always had shit loads of vitriol, its part of it imo. It’s like trying to remove the jock from football games, as much as you try it’s never gonna happen.
Haven’t turn chat on for years. When playing on PC with friends we just use Skype conference.
And as far as console games I’ve played heaps of Battlefield 4 but just turn chat off. Have tried open chat a few times but funnily enough it wasn’t abusive people that forced me to turn it off. It was people that have load music or are heavy breathing. It is really annoying 🙂
I have too often heard someone yelling abuse at others because they have lost. some people take gaming too far and cant handle losing, so they try to tell others how to play the game or claim that someone is cheating.
Man, this article was a let down after that title. I thought that maybe online games were less obnoxious because people were growing the hell up, except all it is is that they’re less obnoxious because people are given less opportunity to be dickheads.
Oh well.
So basically whats happening is all us normal people are losing out again because of all the ratty racist little F**** thats would piss there pants if they where confronted in the real world
I’ve been on some great servers that manage chat really well. It all comes down to good admins and ones who aren’t afraid to lay down the law (server rules) regardless of who you are or how long you’ve played for. Sadly it does take some work, especially when some admins abuse the power they have. But most are pretty good, and help bring both a balance and enjoyment to the server.
I’ve been doing multiplayer with skype chat for years. I get to do my party chat with friends only, there’s no dealing with the almost uniformly terrible in game options, and someone can jump in or out of the game without getting the chat killed.