Imperioratorex Caprae said:
Quite right. I feel more inclined to find ways of avoiding BS because I feel like I've less time to enjoy life as it is so it behooves me to fill said time with the least amount of stressors as possible.
Yup. My leisure time is limited. I want to enjoy my games. I'm getting too old for this shit.
Personally I rarely use party chat and mute the voice chat if there's an ingame way of doing so. I've no interest in talking to random folks online anymore, whether its the old-man hermit coming out or what I'm unsure (probably is though, I do feel the compulsion to sit on my porch and yell at kids in the neighborhood to keep off my lawn).
I mostly play with friends, and sometimes their friends. Partying up is perfect for that. And, I would stress, the alternative is that I probably would stay off mic and mute people anyway, so as it relates to the topic it's not a game changer.
Even when I'm not playing with friends, I deal with people mostly through party chat. I generally accept party invites because they're usually also people who don't want to have to figure out which of the 30 people talking at once is the one screaming "******" every ten seconds. And if they're not? It's easier to leave than to start muting everyone.
A different note: I've noticed that people can be dickwads in text chat as well, so having voice chat/party chat didn't really change the game so much as make it easier for dicks to be dicks. But they were always there. Pre-chat window games could be flooded by folks on PC who wrote scripts... and I recall a lot of shitheads flooding Quake games back in the day with horrible language atrocities (vulgar or otherwise). So, adding in the voice chat and party chat actually gave me an out by way of allowing me to mute those bastards, something the pre-chat window (and sometimes even post-) didn't allow.
I always found chat in such games easier to ignore when it was text than audio. Children screaming in text boxes isn't quite as annoying as children screaming right in my ear.
SaneAmongInsane said:
And it's not a "Safe Space" thing either just because I don't want to hear some jerk legit being blatantly racist. It's annoying, especially when I'm paying for shit...
It will probably never cease to amaze me that people can think an environment where groups who are frequently endangered can not be is somehow worse than being mildly inconvenienced.
No, it's not about safe spaces. It's about something far more trivial. I'm not sure why that makes it better.
What I miss was back in the days of PS2 online, the headset didn't come with the adapter or console. You had to pay extra for the privilege of voice chat, so you ended up with people who were relatively less shit bags because of that 30$ gatekeeper.
Well, except it didn't do it then, just like the same claims aren't true now for XBL Gold and PS+. It's almost like people are willing to pay to be assholes. Which is exactly why Microsoft won't step in. They're the big paying customers.
Nathaniel Grey said:
A majority of my interactions with people are very pleasant.
And it's never occurred to you that the number of people who talk about this might have the more typical experience than your single example?
Look at it this way: it sounds like you're the guy who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 50 years and didn't get cancer telling other people they didn't get it from cigarettes.
Call of Duty, then yeah you might run into a few foul mouth kids. But there are a lot more games than that and there are a lot more genres than shooters.
I'm not sure stereotyping is going to work, either.
My interactions in racing, fighting, and adventure co-op have rarely been anything but, pleasant.
Weird, I've got bad results from all of those. Especially fighting games. And, again, I think you will find that the more common result.
A lot of this love for party-chat seems to be anti-social people simply being anti-social.
Only if you dismiss the experiences of others because you don't share them. And that seems to be the problem here: the notion that you haven't had a bad time so when people mention harassment or trolls or screaming kids, it must somehow be less valid.
If you put chat in Mario games, people will use it for the same purposes. Hell, the lack of communication in the early DS Mario Kart games didn't stop people from making penis emblems and swastika emblems. In a Nintendo Game. Not Call of Duty, not even a shooter. This is exactly why Nintendo limits their communication options, whether people think it's a good thing or a bad thing.
And speaking for myself only, I find party chat to be a social experience, rather than an anti-social one. Why? Because I will actually use it.
Also, while not specifically to you, the part of this post where I address Imp is probably worth the read.
JimB said:
I appreciate the offer, but there's not much to talk about. My family dies younger than most, and I'm reaching that age. Plus it's winter, and I get morbid in winter.
If it makes you feel any better, the mutant stargoat will be here any day now, so it'll probably be a moot point.
Grouchy Imp said:
On the contrary, Party Chat is awesome. It allows my friends and I to game all evening without hearing one racial or sexist slur. I personally cannot remember the last time I had to converse with someone was going to, as I believe they put it, "come round to my house, kick my door in and rape my family". The number of over-excited 12-year-olds screaming into my ears has been reduced to nil. Online gaming is much more pleasant now that I don't have to put up with the majority of online gamers*.
Since this is about consoles, playing on Xbox Live is going to be a big chunk of the online experience.
I'd also like to stress that the environment you mention, the one we're both avoiding, is the one the community seems to want. This topic has been broached numerous times before and the answer has always been a very free market sort of solution. Free speech (even though that has nothing to do with it), free market, if you don't like it, don't mic up/just mute people/don't play online.
Which is fine, but this is the end result. People pushed for an environment of trolls, jerks, and bigotry. And they got it. And we (which seems to be a large number of people) don't want any part of it.
A similar note is that I always see these topics with people wondering why nobody's willing to help them get their GTA heists done so they can get to Pacific Standard. And I'm sure part of that is money, but there's also the part where so many people are such jerks it's hard to justify wasting your time. I like to be helpful, so helping people get their heists is not a problem for me. It's fun and makes money in a game I like playing. But if I had a nickel for every time someone ran me over or blew up my vehicle at the start of a heist, I would be...well, I wouldn't be rich, because it would take 20 times to make a dollar, but I'd have paid for GTA several times over in any event. I've thought about putting together a video of dick moves.
And based on the responses I see, this is exceedingly common. Which is why people want to play with friends, who probably already have their heists, and not waste an hour looking for a decent game. Hell, even if I can only play the 2-player Fleeca game, it's more productive and fun to actually do it than to wait for people who will join and NOT wreck the game.
And it's not just GTA, before anyone asks "what do you expect?" It's just an example that comes to mind and is fairly relevant: people don't get why others are slow to play with them, despite numerous reasons.
