I did a marathon Kulve Taroth Siege run in order to obtain the Taroth Crest "Claw" Lance, which is widely considered the best lance in Monster Hunter: World. It's also beautiful and striking:
(PSA: if your weapon inventory box is full, you can't accept the weapons you've won after the siege. Make sure you sell your duplicates if your box is full. It would be very upsetting if I got that notification and the weapon I couldn't accept happened to be the "Claw". I thought there was infinite weapon space, since additional pages are added every time you obtain a weapon).
Since I've done quite a few runs, I've seen some really weird stuff that didn't make sense to me. The most puzzling is complete avoidance of Health Boosters that heal you very quickly to avoid carting. As we all know, if your team cart 3 times, you fail the mission, so fainting is the worst thing that can happen.
Avoidance of health boosters occurs even when someone is of very low health, the health booster is literally at their feet, but they move OUT of the booster range towards the monster. You know this will end in a faint.
The very opposite is true. Whenever there's an affinity booster, that can boost your critical hit chance, even across the other side of the screen, players beeline towards the booster like a moth to flame. Indeed, it helps to boost your attack, but if you're already near the monster, you'll do more damage if you continue to attack, as opposed to moving away from the monster and towards the affinity boost.
The avoidance of dropping boulders, which does incredible damage of 1500 with no effort, confused me. A lot of people tend not to lure Kulve to the two boulders in the third lava area. Because of that, I've given up going there unless someone signals that they're about to drop the boulders.
However, the oddest thing that occurred was during a hub session, where two back-to-back players joined, and had anti-Semitic slurs for their Hunter and/or Palico names. They were shunned, and left very quickly as a result. Due to the very offensive nature, I'll not give details here.
I know that video games are banning players who have racist user names, but I feel that this is unwarranted. The most obvious reason is you WANT to know who is hateful enough to use racist slurs, so you can avoid them like the plague. If they were censored, you'll never know and you missed the opportunity to block them.
Indeed, It would be a relief, as an Asian woman, if I see a player with the name Ch!nky_I_ChingChong, so that I can block the joker. If this were censored, he would've chosen an innocuous name and could potentially be on my friend's list.
I think one of the main arguments for banning is that hateful names will run rampant. Again, the solution here is to block from your friend's list? The other main argument is "What about the children?". But this could be a great opening for parents to talk to their children about racism, and teach them not to use hateful language.
What are your thoughts, should players be banned for using offensive names?
The How of Happiness Review
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| Taroth Crest "Claw" Lance |
Since I've done quite a few runs, I've seen some really weird stuff that didn't make sense to me. The most puzzling is complete avoidance of Health Boosters that heal you very quickly to avoid carting. As we all know, if your team cart 3 times, you fail the mission, so fainting is the worst thing that can happen.
Avoidance of health boosters occurs even when someone is of very low health, the health booster is literally at their feet, but they move OUT of the booster range towards the monster. You know this will end in a faint.
The very opposite is true. Whenever there's an affinity booster, that can boost your critical hit chance, even across the other side of the screen, players beeline towards the booster like a moth to flame. Indeed, it helps to boost your attack, but if you're already near the monster, you'll do more damage if you continue to attack, as opposed to moving away from the monster and towards the affinity boost.
The avoidance of dropping boulders, which does incredible damage of 1500 with no effort, confused me. A lot of people tend not to lure Kulve to the two boulders in the third lava area. Because of that, I've given up going there unless someone signals that they're about to drop the boulders.
However, the oddest thing that occurred was during a hub session, where two back-to-back players joined, and had anti-Semitic slurs for their Hunter and/or Palico names. They were shunned, and left very quickly as a result. Due to the very offensive nature, I'll not give details here.
I know that video games are banning players who have racist user names, but I feel that this is unwarranted. The most obvious reason is you WANT to know who is hateful enough to use racist slurs, so you can avoid them like the plague. If they were censored, you'll never know and you missed the opportunity to block them.
Indeed, It would be a relief, as an Asian woman, if I see a player with the name Ch!nky_I_ChingChong, so that I can block the joker. If this were censored, he would've chosen an innocuous name and could potentially be on my friend's list.
I think one of the main arguments for banning is that hateful names will run rampant. Again, the solution here is to block from your friend's list? The other main argument is "What about the children?". But this could be a great opening for parents to talk to their children about racism, and teach them not to use hateful language.
What are your thoughts, should players be banned for using offensive names?
The How of Happiness Review
Somewhat relevant, but I use a strategy like this myself. When I'm playing League of Legends, a game with a notoriously toxic community, I'll bait my teammates out by silently pretending to be a troll, and "Hovering Teemo as my Champion selection, regardless of role." (In English, I'm pseudo threatening to troll my teammates. The way it works, is you declare at the beginning of the game, who you fancy playing that game, before people start actually selecting champions. Then both teams get the opportunity to ban champions really strong against their comp, or champions they have trouble beating, or champions that are really strong that patch, etc.)
ReplyDeleteWhat happens most of the time, if people notice, they will ask me not to pick Teemo, and I switch to my actual pick at the end when prompted to lock in my choice. However, particularly nasty players, will waste their ban on Teemo, signaling to me that they are assholeish enough to go that far just to stop me from playing him. That's a damn good sign that I don't want to play with them, and promptly dodge the game (quit the client before the game starts so I don't play with them)
It's the same principle here, it gives you the opportunity to test your allies before you spend an hour communicating and playing with the guy. However I think one thing that we need to discuss, is how we got to this position in the first place. Oftentimes I feel overly racist names, "NuckFiggas", "LucianStoleMyBike", etc, all originally come as jokes. Maybe not the funniest of jokes, but oftentimes there were players in Dark Souls PvP with the name "Hitler" because it wasn't censored, (yet K***ht was...) and I can be certain most of those people don't actually want a second holocaust, they were just trying to have a name they thought funny. Leading off of that, we should ask whether that kind of community in our games, whether we want that sort of environment, or whether we should censor and shape it into something were we discuss different things. And if not, do we consider it a serious problem and if so, how do we fix it?
I think it's one thing to have racist username, but I'm definitely against hateful speech in forums, b/c they end up attacking others in really nasty and harmful ways.
DeleteI think there are exceptions like with everything, but the best way to combat hatefulness comes from the leadership. Guerrilla Games forums are very positive to the point where you can OD on all the love, b/c the leaders are very pro-consumerist (no micro-transactions) and always posting their fan's artwork, having contests, really appreciating their fans. They also appear to have a great support staff that probably removed all the hate speech, since I've never seen one, and I can see rabid, fanatic Nintendo fanboys (note, they're not true fans) trying to trash the community.
Then you see the FN community which is so toxic that you need to wear a gas mask. Epic Games is anti-consumerist with the awful micro-transactions of lootboxes in the form of llamas, and they have barely any support staff. If they were more ethical like Guerrilla Games, I don't think it'll be this toxic.
Those who are in power should be held accountable and are responsible for managing their forums.
This is certainly true to some extent, however there plenty of examples of aggressive, hostile communities with great develoipers too. League of Legends for a while was considered by many to be the most toxic game to exist, and spending 10 minutes in Twitch Chat during an LCS stream will still show glimmers of that.
DeleteYet Riot Games created a free to play game, praised for having no pay to win elements, and have went so damn far beyond the call of duty to be transparent with fans, encourage streaming, creating additional content outside the game with the advent of the Esports scene, fan-art showcases, implementing features to their games that their fans ask for, answering the cries of even the smallest portions of the community. One example would be how they recently had to encrypt all the gamefiles, because it was a bit too easy to use hacks and 3rd party cheats in game. This was great, but had the unwanted side affect of blocking access to the folder where every champions splash artwork is kept for the client, artwork which a fair few people pulled their desktop backgrounds from. In response, Riot created their own 3rd party desktop wallpaper too, complete with splash arts, animated splash arts, world art, concept art, select best fan art, fancy animated short stills, and more. They didn't have to go that far, but they did it anyway, to please the tiny subsect of fans who want splash art for their desktop wallpaper.
They're great, consumer friendly developers, who deserve the world, yet their playerbase is terrifying at it's worst. You need a thick skin to play the game, because you will get chewed up and spit out.