My friend really wanted to start playing Overwatch but she didn't want to do it alone so I offered to help her learn the game
We started off doing bot games so she could learn a few heroes, BOT GAMES KEEP IN MIND, NOT QUICK PLAY…BOT GAMES, and the first match we get into has someone with an open mic talking to himself, my friend opened her mic to say hey and all hell broke loose, the guy immediately started calling her a stupid bitch and to "get off his game"
We ended up just leaving because the guy was just trolling us the entire game, even when we muted him
Next bot game we get into we were trolled by a mei the entire game, locking us in spawn, spamming into his mic and chat, it was a nightmare
My friend tells me "Let's try quickplay instead" Because of how badly the bot games were going, kept trying to tell her it was going to be worse, but she wanted to try anyways
Very first game we get into has a guy with an interesting name spamming swastikas in the match chat and blasting loud noises over his mic, we mute voice chat and try to play but the guy is Lifeweaver and just pulling us on CD to troll
Second game we do she made the mistake of saying hi in voice chat and got bombarded with "Kill yourself, bitch" and a bunch of kitchen jokes, she ended up just leaving mid match because they started to threaten her and it freaked her out
This was our convo after…(Warning: NSFW picture, I'm blue, she's pink)
https://i.imgur.com/a2lMQ4v.png
At this point I think even the League of Legends community is friendlier lol
TLDR; Tried getting friend into Overwatch, was bombarded by racism/sexism/toxicity on a whole other level lol
Wow that is really sad. I havenât played overwatch in years and when I did I remember having fairly positive interactions. Sorry to hear that it has become yet another cesspool
This is my sign to not try overwatch
Sorry that happend to you and your friends. That’s so disgusting
average experience of an online videogame
Sadly this stuff is typical online. I never use voice in OW and donât recommend anyone else does. You two should be using discord and have OW voice disabled. Unless you have a comp team you know and trust and who does call outs, then no one is saying anything but awful stuff. Itâs not OW. Itâs male gamer culture in general.
Oh got to love Overwatch /s
I donât play it anymore but when I did during 2016-mid 2019 on PS4 and the amount of toxic messages and death threats from players when I mained D.Va, Tracer and Mercy at the time. Oooft.
But I gave it another go during lockdown and ooooh boy.
I even reported some to Blizzard and PSN, yet they didnât do anything about it.
So it was the last straw for me.
Itâs a shame really, itâs was one of the only few online games where I really got sunk in to on PS4 and made some really nice online friends
Iâm sorry to hear your friend had a horrible time but Iâd definitely avoid or at least turn off all the chat options and up the privacy of your profiles too.
Yeah, thatâs the pure and unfiltered OW experience right there. I remember when I started playing. I met some people in XIV that wanted to play OW with me. Coming from a very friendly and welcoming community to⌠whatever the fuck this is⌠To call it a culture shock would be an understatement.
I was extremely taken aback by the responses I would get when saying âhiâ, âglhfâ or just being positive in general. I only play occasionally now with all chats turned off lol.
Sorry to your friend, itâs unfortunate because the game is really fun. Such a shame.
Iâll always find it funny how quickly they censored âgg ezâ from chat but not slurs or anything like that
Like, yeah letâs keep those, itâll be great! /s
I played Overwatch since release and, honestly, the game went downhill after it went F2P. Yeah, it had the normal shooter dickheads, but overall the community was okay. After they changed to F2P, any person that got banned could just make a new account. The game had a huge chunk of smurfs before the change but they had to pay for each account. Now, you can go through 10 accounts in a day and itâs nothing. Blizzard is doing a terrible job of moderating the game.Â
I LOVE Overwatch. I was really into OWL and supported the game any way I could. My friends and I played every night. I quit playing at the beginning of the year because I was tired of the smurfs, trolls, and way the game made me feel. I was also tired of the blatant cash grab that each battlepass was becoming.Â
Overwatch was the game that made me quit online multiplayer games completely over 5 years ago. It was SO fun when it was goodâsome of my favorite gaming memories are of playing OW with my friends. But it got so toxic that I couldnât stand it anymoreâ I was usually the only girl and my friends (even though I love them) always went mics-off and didnât stick up for me when men trolled me. It makes me so sad because I really loved the game and I was never able to find another that filled the voidâ Iâm honestly wary of even trying any new games because I donât want to deal with the same awful male behavior again.
Serious question because I don’t play Overwatch but I have played WoW – do they not have chat moderators? Or can they do nothing if you’re getting jerks over voice?
Sorry this happened to your friend!
The was pretty much my experience from overwatch 1, I ended up completely turning off any chat features in game and itâs been a much more pleasant experience but it sucks that it came down to that in the first place, itâs why I love playing FFXIV, I have never once encountered toxicity in that game!
I’ve been playing OW since release, and thankfully, I had a friend group to avoid chat and have NEVER experienced text chat like this before. I’m so sorry, OP.
I play overwatch a lot but I have all chats off. Voice chat, text chat, all of it. People are horrible but Iâm not going to let them ruin a game I enjoy. Voice chat is not necessary unless youâre in high ranks of comp, I donât really know why people use it for quick play.
I find Overwatch very hard to win as it is a team composition game so if others donât switch up to have a good team comp you lose and guys losing get very pissy so overwatch is perfect game to have whiney boys in.
Vs cod you still get that but you can carry a team to victory if youâre good enough
I’m sorry that happened. This is why I play with voice and text chat off.
Where do boys even learn this shit? It can’t *just* be toxic streamers, 4chan, and Andrew Tate can it? It’s so bizarre to take joy in harassing people, it has to be a learned behavior.
The first bot game I ever played in LoL I got called a “f*cking c*nt” after I killed something someone else wanted and I’m like… you know this doesn’t affect your stats or rank at all right? Then lots of “b*tch” followed. I wouldn’t recommend LoL or OW.
The amount of people here acting surprised… Overwatch has always been toxic af as a woman. Had a grown man flirt with me in VC when I was 16, even after I told him my age. He said he’d “take me to prom”. The rest of the VC, who had been chatty before that, went silent when I was asking him to leave me alone. I was told to go back to the kitchen, insulted, etc. semi-commonly. I mean, there was positivity there too don’t get me wrong and I do think it outweighed the moments like that, but there has always been a really toxic sector of Overwatch and it’s the main reason why I stopped playing.
iâve had my fair share of sexism in overwatch, but never back to back games like this. im sorry that happen to you and your friend đ i consider the overwatch community one of the most toxic communities; right after league and cod. it baffles me that in 2024, men STILL think gaming is just for the guys smh
It’s actually kind of horrifying to watch, but this was the kind of stuff I saw right from when I first got online (*y’know, back when you had to sacrifice a digital lamb with a sharpened soundchip on a plastic altar and vow not to speak to others for an hour or two just to get online*) to the point that I gave up playing multiplayer entirely unless with friends, and even then there were issues sometimes.
I say horrifying, because over the last six or seven years I’ve watched it get WORSE. Like… WAY worse.
There is a concerning amount of “it’s never happened to me, so it never happened to you” in this thread. smfh
i think this was definitely because she is new, all the banned people making their new free accounts and being continuously toxic. feel free to report them too! blizzard is pretty good about banning people, granted they can just make new accounts .
it make help her to play with even more people (like in a group) to get he level and mmr up to actually start interacting with normal people.
Yeah the overwatch community is very toxic. Really I’d just turn off chat completely.
Overwatch can be fun but never, ever reveal that you’re a woman. You will always get someone acting weird about it, ranging from “omg it’s a girl on the internet” to rape and death threats.
There are many reasons that Overwatch 2 is rated overwhelmingly negative on steam.
Isn’t this every online game though? Every game I’ve played has been labeled “one of the most toxic”, but they can’t all be the most toxic đ
This sucks and I’m sorry it happened to you. I stopped playing when it went to Overwatch 2 and I was a dedicated player from launch.Â
The toxicity was always there, but it go so much worse when it became F2P and reporting seemed to become less effective too.Â
i’ve never gotten so much rotten luck in ow in like a single session, so i’m sorry y’all had to deal with that! i have run into assholes in bot games before so i’m not too shocked there, though it continues to baffle me why people go out of their way to be dicks in a *training* mode.. it’s absolutely absurd.
if you do ever try playing together again, i recommend turning off at least voice chat. there’s very little to no helpful comms before competitive and even then, there’s little to no value in voice comms until higher ranks where it’s still a mixed bag at times due to trolls and jerks.