MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. It is a really terrible acronym. I think they should have gone with MMORTS, but whatever. The granddaddy of MOBA games is a Warcraft 3 mod called DotA – Defense of the Ancients. There are now two commercial MOBAs out there. League of Legends (LoL) is the more successful and popular one, and Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is (according to some) the more hardcore one.
My wife and I have played LoL off and on for the last year and enjoyed it. But as much as we enjoy it, there are aspects of the game and especially the community that often drive us away for months at a time. While there are of course some really nice people who play, the majority of players are absolute dicks. They will talk shit while winning, losing, before, during, after, it doesn’t matter. They will use all manner of racial slurs, profanities, and just grossly immature gutter talk for no good reason. If anyone on their team makes a mistake, they will flame the person horribly. Oftentimes, the person being flamed didn’t even make a mistake. Sometimes its as simple as they didn’t do exactly what the flamer wanted them to do, and this necessitates a disruptive verbal assault.
If things go badly, they are likely to just quit the game entirely ruining it for everyone else. When they do this early, it means everyone is screwed for up to 25 minutes since that’s the minimum time before you are allowed to surrender.
We have also noticed that very, very few women play LoL. We have met a grand total of ** 2 ** people in the game who even claim to be female in RL. That’s shocking. I can’t help but think this fact is connected to how loathsome the community is.
Despite everything I’ve just said, the game itself is fun. That’s why this community issue is such a shame. From what I have been told, both DotA and HoN are even worse than LoL in this respect.
What is it about this type of game that lends itself to such despicable behavior from its members? Is it the genre itself or something about the current games in the genre that attracts and cultivates such horrendous behavior from its members?
Personally, I think the highly competitive environment of MOBAs lends to a more male dominated gaming population; I think it also lends itself to more general aggression and “foulness” (in the same way many competitive multiplayer games on consoles do).
The games are not designed to help newer players learn in team environments, and are designed in such a way that a team member who is still learning the game is a major hinderance. It’s very anti-newbie, very competitive, and engenders a more angry playerbase than other games.
I have understood, however, that LoL’s community is much worse than HoN’s, but both still face the same problem, which I think is generally typical of most MOBAs.
I think you hit on a key point here, Jaime: “are designed in such a way that a team member who is still learning the game is a major hinderance.”
The whole concept of people “feeding” is definitely a problem. It takes an additional level of maturity for someone to remain patient and tolerant when the guy screwing up is messing it up badly for everyone on his/her own team. This also raises the barrier to entry because a lot of people, female gamers especially, are very sensitive to not wanting to be a burden to the other people they are gaming with.
Really? That’s interesting. All I have ever heard is that HoN is more hardcore than LoL, includes concepts like “creep denial” which is a huge hardcore element that keeps new players completely gimped, and that the players as a result emulate that hard core attitude even more stringently.
This is fairly common in competitive gaming, ESPECIALLY team based competitive gaming. In one on one or free for all games you’ll see some trash talking, but it’s exponentially worse in team based games. It is extremely frustrating to be held back by some noob, and there is very rarely any way for a noob to learn the game without holding his team back. Because I’m not a jerk I usually bottle it up rather than spewing it allover, but I understand the anger it causes. This is one of the reasons I advocate for 1v1 and FFA pvp.
I like to just shut off all chat panes and go into DND and pretend I’m playing a single player game.
Women tend to be underrepresented in PvP, don’t they?
Anyway I guess adding a PvE mode for people to learn the game in a more nocarebear environment is out of the question right?
PvE mode or PvE elements are nice.
I think also it is nice when you design aspects of the PvP that do not involve simply killing the other team. Alterac Valley in WoW is a good example of this. In its early days, gathering the rams and leading them back to the alliance base actually was very helpful when you gathered enough for a dwarven cavalary. Things like that give people useful things to do that are something other than having the uber twitch reactions/skill to kill people.
have you ever heard what is going on at xbox online network? i don’t own an xbox, and not planning to buy it after i read a series of articles on some site, where people posted what they overheard while playing online on xbox. it’s absolutely identical to what you’re telling about LoL, plus there are tons of small kids (around ahe 7-10) who do the same stuff (cussing & all), and they are incredibly lame even for their age. i bet LoL is full of that kind of characters, because while playing we assume it’s adults, but they as well can be stupid, brainless kids
That’s a good point. A lot of the cretinism is young kids for whom half the fun is using curse words. I bet it would be a better community if there was a way to enforce an 18+ year older division. This is also one of the downsides of F2P games. The lack of a barrier to entry means anyone can fire up an account, and even people who get banned can just get right back in.
Children do take things a bit farther at times, yes. They are stuck in an environment(school) where treating eachother cruelly is the norm, and authority figures often turn a blind eye. Thus they don’t think twice about treating people cruelly online, and feel like they are being treated unfairly when they receive even the slightest punishment for it.
Even without them though, competitive online gaming is full of people talking crap. Anonymity combined with competition brings out people’s dark side. When you are competing with people at the arcade or on the sports field, crap talking happens there too. It’s alot more restrained though, as if you go too far, there will be repercussions. There’s no repercussions in an anonymous environment, thus no restraint.
I agree with everyone you said Outsider. The second paragraph is particularly sad, imho.