On July 15 2011 16:57 Ganfei2 wrote: lol I just listened to insane_rabbi's rant. It's pretty on the money.
In SC the manner thing came from Korea blah blah and the majority of players were mature and a little older due to the age of the game. New blood or younger kids who started to play SC would see this "manner" phenomenon and even if they were bad mannered little dipshits on East they'd still confine themselves to being vaguely polite and well mannered during at least competitive or casted games.
On the other hand there is no older, more mature, and respected group of competitive players in HON/DOTA it seems to me. SC was a large community but an insular one. HON is not. New kids who play are greeted by extreme bad manners and so that's what they turn to. There's no Korean pros to emulate, no Mondragon's with their super polite never ever BM mannerisms, etc.
Imagine if Idra were a HON player and not a SC/SC2 player. The rage would be astronomical. What contains him is public expectation. Even people who were slobbering slavering dribbling driveling drooling absolute cocksuckers on East come onto TL and curb everything because they know there's gonna be consequences for it. I'm not talking about the posting that got me banned in the past -- for those who know me -- but rather the way people talked on East. HON celebrates BM, and for that it will never be able to be televised nationally like SC in Korea, at least in the West. In Asian countries this kind of attitude for the most part either repressed or oppressed.
It also will never change as long as sponsors don't enforce public appearance rules for players who carry their names, and why would they? The competitive scene is tiny and hardly worth sponsoring anyways. If a Korean progamer were to act the way HON "progamers" (it is a misnomer and a joke to use this term for them) there would be severe consequences from their sponsors/coaches/whatever. As long as the main players for HON are egotistical, mostly high school/barely in college children, then there will never be a "real" scene. Korean SC pros include many high school students but there is an established etiquette so that doesn't matter.
Just my take on the situation.
I am personally trying to make HoN better atm through example and through talking to S2 about possible changes. (To tell them to become more like teamliquid and take many elements from this site, such as not tolerating 99% of the shit they do on their forums). I don't know if they are listening or not, but it would be nice if they did and would improve everyone's image of the hon community.
I think a large part of the problem is that s2 seems to accept and encourage their community to incite flame and anger. -The competitive forums are mostly gossip central and the mods basically encourage you to flame in it (I've seen china, one of the forum's mods respond to flaming so intense it would result in an ip ban for teamliquid with "lol!").
-Rather than just locking or responding to criticism from emotionally upset people they put them into forums called "quarantine" or "non-constructive criticism", which seems rather childish.
That's just the forums... the game itself seems set up to encourage rage.
-It actually SAYS ragequit upon exiting a large portion of the time (and also just in general when dcing while dead),
-automatically points out when a player is getting raped by another
-and their taunts are ridiculous. (Taunting is not inherently bad, it does add an entertainment factor to the game.) but having ridiculous voice actors say things like "kiss my ass" in a highly aggressive tone won't really help with calming the nerves.
-that's before the new one which turns people into literal babies after they die and makes them cry.
I mean... these are things that are not necessary to the game and seem to only have the purpose of making opponents angry. These are all just off the top of my head, I know that there are dozens more that I just don't recall.
At a fundamental level, I don't think that s2 realizes that encouraging a decent community is necessary. They don't seem to believe that it would be beneficial to them to be known as a game with a great community rather than literally the worst one of any game ever. (I can't think of any game with worse communities overall. Sure, some have worse specific instance but they also have more people in general.) The point for s2 really should be that if a friend asks me if they should play hon right now I would (and have done so in the past) tell them that the game is great but that the people that play it are awful, and that they should take it into consideration before buying or even trying the game.
Honestly it all starts with maliken and the other mods who ban people who repeatedly gank them in games, delete replays where they lose, and otherwise abuse their power. No S2 member should ever play under an S2 tag. Ever. They all should have smurfs, and completely separate their in-game persona from their S2 persona.
Once that's done, work on fixing the S2 image. I don't know if it's changed over the past couple of months or whatever, but I know there are some good S2 people (mechanics forum for example), but there is also an alarming amount (see: greater than 0) of S2 staff who just plain don't give a shit and troll an argue with people in the forums. I mean, really? Are they that stupid? Other S2 members are just clueless and not in the "I'm not sure, let me check with someone that knows" way, but in the "S2 doesn't owe you an answer to this" way. All of these types should be removed, no questions asked.
If S2 just flat-out fired anyone who doesn't reflect a professional image, they'd be a lot better off (although admittedly, they'd need to grab quite a bit more people to replace the failures).
With S2 image fixed, you fix the forums, get some good moderators that don't tolerate bullshit.
These steps alone are not that time consuming, it just requires S2 to finally start giving a shit. All the rage-inciting things in the actual game aren't nearly as big of a problem as the image behind the game imho.
On July 15 2011 16:57 Ganfei2 wrote: lol I just listened to insane_rabbi's rant. It's pretty on the money.
In SC the manner thing came from Korea blah blah and the majority of players were mature and a little older due to the age of the game. New blood or younger kids who started to play SC would see this "manner" phenomenon and even if they were bad mannered little dipshits on East they'd still confine themselves to being vaguely polite and well mannered during at least competitive or casted games.
On the other hand there is no older, more mature, and respected group of competitive players in HON/DOTA it seems to me. SC was a large community but an insular one. HON is not. New kids who play are greeted by extreme bad manners and so that's what they turn to. There's no Korean pros to emulate, no Mondragon's with their super polite never ever BM mannerisms, etc.
Imagine if Idra were a HON player and not a SC/SC2 player. The rage would be astronomical. What contains him is public expectation. Even people who were slobbering slavering dribbling driveling drooling absolute cocksuckers on East come onto TL and curb everything because they know there's gonna be consequences for it. I'm not talking about the posting that got me banned in the past -- for those who know me -- but rather the way people talked on East. HON celebrates BM, and for that it will never be able to be televised nationally like SC in Korea, at least in the West. In Asian countries this kind of attitude for the most part either repressed or oppressed.
It also will never change as long as sponsors don't enforce public appearance rules for players who carry their names, and why would they? The competitive scene is tiny and hardly worth sponsoring anyways. If a Korean progamer were to act the way HON "progamers" (it is a misnomer and a joke to use this term for them) there would be severe consequences from their sponsors/coaches/whatever. As long as the main players for HON are egotistical, mostly high school/barely in college children, then there will never be a "real" scene. Korean SC pros include many high school students but there is an established etiquette so that doesn't matter.
Just my take on the situation.
I am personally trying to make HoN better atm through example and through talking to S2 about possible changes. (To tell them to become more like teamliquid and take many elements from this site, such as not tolerating 99% of the shit they do on their forums). I don't know if they are listening or not, but it would be nice if they did and would improve everyone's image of the hon community.
I think a large part of the problem is that s2 seems to accept and encourage their community to incite flame and anger. -The competitive forums are mostly gossip central and the mods basically encourage you to flame in it (I've seen china, one of the forum's mods respond to flaming so intense it would result in an ip ban for teamliquid with "lol!").
-Rather than just locking or responding to criticism from emotionally upset people they put them into forums called "quarantine" or "non-constructive criticism", which seems rather childish.
That's just the forums... the game itself seems set up to encourage rage.
-It actually SAYS ragequit upon exiting a large portion of the time (and also just in general when dcing while dead),
-automatically points out when a player is getting raped by another
-and their taunts are ridiculous. (Taunting is not inherently bad, it does add an entertainment factor to the game.) but having ridiculous voice actors say things like "kiss my ass" in a highly aggressive tone won't really help with calming the nerves.
-that's before the new one which turns people into literal babies after they die and makes them cry.
I mean... these are things that are not necessary to the game and seem to only have the purpose of making opponents angry. These are all just off the top of my head, I know that there are dozens more that I just don't recall.
At a fundamental level, I don't think that s2 realizes that encouraging a decent community is necessary. They don't seem to believe that it would be beneficial to them to be known as a game with a great community rather than literally the worst one of any game ever. (I can't think of any game with worse communities overall. Sure, some have worse specific instance but they also have more people in general.) The point for s2 really should be that if a friend asks me if they should play hon right now I would (and have done so in the past) tell them that the game is great but that the people that play it are awful, and that they should take it into consideration before buying or even trying the game.
Honestly it all starts with maliken and the other mods who ban people who repeatedly gank them in games, delete replays where they lose, and otherwise abuse their power. No S2 member should ever play under an S2 tag. Ever. They all should have smurfs, and completely separate their in-game persona from their S2 persona.
Once that's done, work on fixing the S2 image. I don't know if it's changed over the past couple of months or whatever, but I know there are some good S2 people (mechanics forum for example), but there is also an alarming amount (see: greater than 0) of S2 staff who just plain don't give a shit and troll an argue with people in the forums. I mean, really? Are they that stupid? Other S2 members are just clueless and not in the "I'm not sure, let me check with someone that knows" way, but in the "S2 doesn't owe you an answer to this" way. All of these types should be removed, no questions asked.
If S2 just flat-out fired anyone who doesn't reflect a professional image, they'd be a lot better off (although admittedly, they'd need to grab quite a bit more people to replace the failures).
With S2 image fixed, you fix the forums, get some good moderators that don't tolerate bullshit.
These steps alone are not that time consuming, it just requires S2 to finally start giving a shit. All the rage-inciting things in the actual game aren't nearly as big of a problem as the image behind the game imho.
To be honest, the majority of the potential and current playerbase probally has no idea about the company and the shitty atitude from some of their employees, so I do think what really is the biggest problem is the community shitty atitude.
That said, they would never be able to fix that before even trying to fix their internal problems. By the way some of them act, it doesn't even look like they think it's such a big deal, else they wouldn't be like that themselfs. Plus, this kind of atitude generates much worse, but more subtle, problems than a shitty community.
These steps alone are not that time consuming, it just requires S2 to finally start giving a shit. All the rage-inciting things in the actual game aren't nearly as big of a problem as the image behind the game imho.
These steps alone are not that time consuming, it just requires S2 to finally start giving a shit. All the rage-inciting things in the actual game aren't nearly as big of a problem as the image behind the game imho.
No.
How do you expect S2 to encourage a decent community when their attitude can be summed up as:
It starts at the top. It always does. Random players being nice does fuck-all when their efforts are drowned in a sea of shit.
Pft, I don't care. Most of the time, I'm nice with TL and those are the only people I play. Whether the outside world of S2 is just a cesspool of dumbasses, more assists for me.
However it also relies on resources. S2 doesn't have the resources to hire a lot of programmers, or to hire a lot of moderators, or to hire a lot of REAL marketing/PR people. Or maybe they do and they just don't want to spend the money.
Volunteer moderating works at TL because the people who are chosen like the site and are old well-known posters. Moderator volunteers at HON are like ICCUP moderators (that means that they are complete shit 90% of the time). TM volunteers aren't paid, they do it cause they care about the site. HON volunteers both don't care about the site + aren't paid. I'm pretty certain that they only do it for the "power." I think even if S2 paid them some small salary it wouldn't fix anything, because that's not their incentive. Only a full-salaried full-time moderating team could do anything to that cesspool called the HON forums.
Despite my dislike for S2 I just spent $20 to buy 2 accounts and refer 1k gold coins to myself, with which I can now buy a sub account from the shop. I figure $7 a pop for accounts isn't too bad when there's no way to start from lower MMR/PSR without spending money. I really wish they would do ICCUP/most ladders in any game-style resets every X months.
If players gave a fuck about manners, they could police themselves. This 'it starts from the top' bullshit is just a way of passing the buck to S2 because no one including the threadgoing anti-anger crowd really give a fuck.
It doesn't start from the top because some people don't even know who the people at the top are or simply play the game without inquiring more than just how to play a certain hero.
This includes me, I didn't know who Merrick was until today. Maliken was about 2 weeks ago. The game has a fundamental flaw that causes people to get mad and exert their anger at other anonymous users: cooperation.
If your team sucks and things aren't going your way, like most children, you will throw a tantrum, get mad or insult these people. While imagery of the company is important, it isn't a strong factor for many players if they don't play the game beyond what it is: a product from some company.
guys calm down its the nature of the game that makes ppl rage. SC is 1v1 you can't compare. There is no other type of game that is so team dependent. And on top of that one or 2 players need to basically serve the others and play a humble role. It's basically a recipe for rage.
Just play CM and hf or play with a team of 5 if you can.
On July 16 2011 04:40 Torte de Lini wrote: Maybe they just know that their game is going downhill when DoTA 2 comes out. On another note, what's their other game about? Is it any good?
If you're talking about the Savage series then the answer is "yes, they're good". They suffer from the same problem that HoN experiences right now, that is a lot of rage. Unfortunately it can't be helped in a game that requires teamplay and cooperation on a competetive level, if you'll just throw a bunch of people who all want to just do their thing and don't give a shit about their team you're bound to end up with rage all around. It's not as bad in Savage as in HoN but it's still there occassionally. Smaller community means less rage though as most of the people there (it's really pretty small community) are die hard fans of the game who've been playing it for ages (like BW).
Personally I enjoyed my experience with Savage 2 greatly. I think that the idea behind this game is just awesome and the execution is great too. The major problem is that it didn't get enough attention when it should and thus couldn't develop large and active community of competetive players. Mixing RPG, FPS and RTS into a single game is brilliant. And it requires a fuckton of skill to play this game good, even considering "solo mode" where you just join pubs and don't work all that well with the team.
It's free so you can always give it a shot. I played it for a week and then decided to purchase premium account and played quite a bit more after that.
S2 is garbage as is the HoN community in general. But nothing's going to change really because BM is an accepted part of the game, and it isn't going anywhere because it's a team game where individuals think they can do no wrong and any loss is their team mates' faults or the opponent picking "op heroes".
Yeah, BM is prevalent in SC2 and Quake and all, but the players know inside "Hey, I just lost a 1v1, and I don't really have anybody else to blame but myself. I'm going to bad manner the other person, but it's just to mask my inability to win the match." As opposed to games like HoN, DotA, and LoL, where people truly think "I just lost a 5v5, f my team, stupid noobs, I need to go to a doctor and get a new brace for my back."
Team games in general just bring this about: people expect themselves to be good, so when they lose, they look for an out, and the easiest out is to just blame their team mates and go to the next game.
As for the LoL vs HoN vs DotA thing: really, all 3 games are getting rather different now in that yeah, they can be slightly compared because they have 3 lanes, a jungle, and you select one hero out of X heroes and play on a team 5v5 in an attempt to bring down a "throne", but all 3 games, whether through item changes, hero introductions, map changes, etc., are different in their own right that drawing comparisons between them is getting rather silly now. To be honest, all 3 games are rather basic mechanically in that pretty much anybody can learn them, the main difference about the games are the team play, awareness, and timing elements which separates bad from decent to the top level players of each of their respective games.
If players gave a fuck about manners, they could police themselves. This 'it starts from the top' bullshit is just a way of passing the buck to S2 because no one including the threadgoing anti-anger crowd really give a fuck.
lol yes it does
i don't want to sound offensive but i feel like this is basic and obvious human interaction
people don't just magically police themselves
they need rolemodels. it doesn't matter if nobody knows who the fuck they are. that's what propagation is.
random ass kids on bnet know what "manner" is but they sure as fuck don't know that saying anything but gg in the OSL results in a disqualification
On July 16 2011 05:13 Torte de Lini wrote: It doesn't start from the top because some people don't even know who the people at the top are or simply play the game without inquiring more than just how to play a certain hero.
This includes me, I didn't know who Merrick was until today. Maliken was about 2 weeks ago. The game has a fundamental flaw that causes people to get mad and exert their anger at other anonymous users: cooperation.
If your team sucks and things aren't going your way, like most children, you will throw a tantrum, get mad or insult these people. While imagery of the company is important, it isn't a strong factor for many players if they don't play the game beyond what it is: a product from some company.
Its not about cooperation. LoL does the same thing and people are far more mannered in general. People talk more in channels. People friend request more. People are less likely to attempt to hijack teams.Why is that? Is it because LoL's playerbase is different? If that's the case then the activities of players should change dramatically on different ELO levels, which it doesn't to the same extent that it does in HoN.
Why is HoN unique? HoN has aggressively promoted a playstyle that rewards picking off the weakest member of a team because:
1) They stay stupidly weak and generally are useless without some item plateau. 2) You get exponentially stronger via cash gains.
Add that to a UI which actively shits on players and pumps the egos of others up and you have a fantastic recipe for pissing people off. When I came back and checked this game out again after a long hiatus I spent the first game wondering what the fuck a flamboyant dude was doing yelling "CHERRY POPPER" at someone else. It was completely outside of the game's atmosphere as it was at launch, and had transformed it into something closer to a sanctioned grief-fest.
But that's cool because hon's supposed to be HARDCORE compared to other MOBA offerings. Which is great until your playerbase stops existing and people stop caring about your niche bullshit. DotA used to be a game that EVERYONE played. Playing guild wars and not enough people on? Play a round of doter. WoW raid ended early? Wrangle 10 and play a round of doter. Got nothing better to do? Play a round of doter. Now that group's gone. Try to introduce someone new to LoL, then try to show them HoN. I had a good 6 people tell me to fuck myself less than a month ago for introducing them to HoN. Barriers to entry are huge, acceleration towards defeat is massive.
The fact that there's a team involved that has to work together actually dissuades that type of activity because success correlates to cooperation. There's a reason the LoL thread eclipsed this one despite the stupid 600 pages of spammy bullshit we had; More people are playing it.
If players gave a fuck about manners, they could police themselves. This 'it starts from the top' bullshit is just a way of passing the buck to S2 because no one including the threadgoing anti-anger crowd really give a fuck.
lol yes it does
do you know anything about human interaction
people don't just magically police themselves
they need rolemodels. it doesn't matter if nobody knows who the fuck they are. that's what propagation is.
random ass kids on bnet know what "manner" is but they sure as fuck don't know that saying anything but gg in the OSL results in a disqualification
You realize your last sentence completely demolishes your premise, right? I know plenty about how social norms work and your last phrase is pretty correct. Top down and bottom up forces need to co-exist for a maximal change in normative structures, but in this instance you aren't going to get a top down effort without a bottom up movement.
S2 doesn't need to give a shit until you do. And you don't.
If players gave a fuck about manners, they could police themselves. This 'it starts from the top' bullshit is just a way of passing the buck to S2 because no one including the threadgoing anti-anger crowd really give a fuck.
lol yes it does
do you know anything about human interaction
people don't just magically police themselves
they need rolemodels. it doesn't matter if nobody knows who the fuck they are. that's what propagation is.
random ass kids on bnet know what "manner" is but they sure as fuck don't know that saying anything but gg in the OSL results in a disqualification
You realize your last sentence completely demolishes your premise, right? I know plenty about how social norms work and your last phrase is pretty correct. Top down and bottom up forces need to co-exist for a maximal change in normative structures, but in this instance you aren't going to get a top down effort without a bottom up movement.
S2 doesn't need to give a shit until you do. And you don't.
As evidenced by your second line.
uhhhhh there is an extreme disconnect her between what I'm saying and what you're taking from it. My last line does not in any way contradict what I said. I don't see any point in continuing the argument, because there is obviously not going to be any sort of change in viewpoint from either of us. I simply wanted to point out that my last line does not in any way even remotely contradict what I said and that I am baffled as to how you've managed to construe it that way.
Throw anthropological or sociological or whatever the shit jargon that is at me, it doesn't pair up with empirical real-world evidence as I've experienced it in the years I've been playing. The 'east kids' may not necessarily conform to the concepts of manner but they know what it is; top-down forces caused the dissemination of the idea and regardless of its efficacy it has at least promulgated through the community due to the influence of the higher levels. This is not the case in HON; there is not even a concept-to-be-ignored that can fall through the cracks to the "lower" players.
People in SC get offended if you say GG to your opponent when you're winning or if you don't say GG when you lose, even random ass kids on Bnet who don't watch any professional games. This idea is community-enforced, which is perhaps your "bottom-up" force, but where did it originate from? Grass-roots-originating and enforced systems of etiquette don't exist, or really systems of anything else; religion, law, government, etc are all imposed by "higher ups" and for their to be "bottom up" forces the idea has to be disseminated to the point that it becomes the norm at which point societal pressures can take over and people who have 0 interaction with the original forces are affected.
The difference between DOTA/HON and every other game and the behavior of it's community is that it is run by an unprofessional company that glorifies BM and has a younger community player base than others do. Creating an image that can be copied by its consumer base and promoting players who exemplify a "good" image makes a difference.
This argument is a huge fucking waste of time. It doesn't really matter, because S2 won't do anything, the userbase won't do anything, nothing will change, Dota 2 will come out, HON will die, and Dota 2 will have just as bad a community. What remains to be seen is how harshly Valve polices the player base, and given that the dollar is the bottom line the likelihood is that it will be not at all.
Guys, look at you. You are a bunch of nerds trying to argue for nothing.
The forums have been a clusterfuck of shitboat of assholes complaining, insulting and trolling and I can understand that moderators and S2 members were annoyed. Now it has changed, every unpaid S2 members have been stripped down and they have improved the quality of the GD (which was the biggest problem) You are all complaining about the state of the forums from 6 months ago.
I have always regretted the state of the forums but this was the consequence of the presence of S2 members in the forums. Attention whores and forum trollers were hoping to have attention. Bans have ensued many times (many Off-Topics posters were banned numerous times) and now s2 games have stepped up their games. GD is clean (pretty much)
The sole problem now is CC where all pros are trolling, insulting, trashtalking. It has nothing to do with S2.
Yes, there were some case of S2 trashtalking in games particularly from Maliken. BUT one never knew the whole story : Did the "supposed victim" trolled him ? Were they trashtalk themselves ? So far all the cases I have seen on the HoN forums have been revealed as fake and thus are invalid. But why not trust some kids on rants, there are more trustful than paid workers right ? Oh wait, no ! Customers is king ! <- Sarcastic
Nowadays they barely play the game outside of the test clieant and the beta testers so unless you are in one of those two groups, who don't know how they behave now. Stop spreading stupid rumors, play the game or don't if you don't like it and more importantly don't make fools of yourselfves.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hNcgS.jpg)
