For those not wanting to get through an essay (I believed I had something worth saying, and elaborating on), here:
I don’t think it’s about the kinds of people who play these games. I think it’s about the kinds of people these games turn us into.
Within seconds of turning this game on, you are preparing yourself to attempt to steal happiness from a group of 5 strangers. To give them a bad experience so you can have a good one.
You’re then made to wait for other people’s connection speed / loading times. The game already has a chance to stress you out and disappoint you here - by having someone disconnect, making everybody wait.
When you’re in the game, if you’re playing ARAM, you have a chance here to get disappointed and stressed, too, immediately at the character selection screen, because people can troll you, or AFK and pick something wrong, or ignore team demands and play selfishly… you can also just get bad luck on the draw.
Once you’re actually playing, you have to wait a full 30 seconds. If you play a lot of other games and don’t religiously play Mobas, you quickly de-climatise to the trash factor of having to wait for so long for a game to start. After it’s started.
So far, if we’re not having a good day, we’ve already experienced a bunch of things that could potentially cause somebody to lash out or be toxic to others. Even if we are having a good day, it’s throwing things at us in an attempt to spoil it somewhat.
Then the game begins, the door opens and you all pour through - at 1mph. My grandfather wobbles back to his armchair after falling asleep on the toilet for an hour faster than characters in mobas move. When you get on a horse / motorbike / flying carpet, you move a small percentage more than walking speed.
Again, if you play other games and don’t religiously moba it up, you quickly de-climatise to the trash factor of being restricted to grandpa’s walking pace.
With such heavy restrictions on player movement, right off the bat, it’s already contesting with the player’s headspace, conflicting with what he or she wants their character to be doing in the game. We all have to admit here, MOBAs are clunky as hell, they do not control nicely.
When you’re actually playing the game properly and in the middle of a big team fight, trying to win the game, a bizarre, overly malicious design choice is apparent in the majority of the characters in the game. In a patronising and casual way.
In any given experience, you could have a midget wearing a bikini hurling insults at you in a child’s voice while bombarding your whole team with high damage mounds of dry turd, over and over again.
When you die, you’re made to wait, sometimes up to a full minute or more. The game’s making you sit in the naughty corner, for either thinking you can do something heroic, making a mistake, following a fool, trying something new, etc. The sheer reasons for death in a game like this, at least played in a casual setting, and the game will punish you all the same.
And what’s there to do in this time? Most people will not use it productively. Even if constructive criticism is offered it is often batted away. People do not like to feel the victim, or the fool, and some people lash out at criticism, even if it is helpful.
The nature of the game offers a brief window for recollection, for learning and it is mostly used to rant and exchange petty insults. If this escalates, say goodbye to your potential stolen happiness. Is this the player’s fault? You can’t quantify the randomness of personalities. Of people.
You can quantify the exact things the game has done to funnel players into a chosen mental state. Here, in this game’s case, it’s prevailing at stressing and enraging people more than it is culturing them into a position of learning and growth.
Going back to the movement speed side of things, you can find your already comically slow movement speed slowed even more, even drawn to a complete halt, multiple times in a row, turning already painfully restrictive and sluggish controls into a jittery fiasco. It’s an effective way to simulate latency problems, if that’s what they were going for, as far as gameplay is concerned, it’s a 1/10.
You can also find your character launched pushed or dragged into the firing path of static A.I controlled cannons that cleave huge chunks of your health, while also making you easier to kill by players after being hit. Tossed into the middle of teams to watch yourself be torn apart in an instant, like being suplexed by Brock Lesnar into a horde of super soldier zombies, is not a positive experience, especially when you repeat it thousands of times like moba gamers do.
These things are regular staples of the Heroes of the Storm experience, they are not the most extreme examples either, and they can happen to old and new players alike, for many reasons. After saying/reading this, it would appear quite irresponsible to make a game like this, no?
If you have any kind of IRL emergency and need to leave your computer, your team will remember your name as a crook and a thief of their potential stolen happiness, often times directing their rage toward a little box where they can say something spiteful about you, and throw a ticket into a hat for a chance to get you put into a naughty queue. The way you are treated is black and white.
Meaning that when you return to your beloved game, your chosen place of online refuge, you have been placed with people who can’t seem to finish a single game without ragequitting. Making your experience, on top of everything else, EVEN WORSE!
Decide to reply to a text during the game? Chastised as a monstrous plague upon gamers.
I know it’s supposed to all be in good fun, but bullies tend to say that to you after pulling your pants up your back crack until you bleed.
It’s time that the people who are prone to being triggered by any of this stuff, actually accept that about themselves, and face it that you can help yourselves, and the gaming community, by just not playing games that painstakingly try to frustrate you and insult you at every turn. On every screen.
I was starting to suffer from anxiety after years of hearing the announcer say DEFEAT at the end of a lost game. Over time, even a positive win / loss ratio amounts to having red bloody letters and someone saying LOSER at you, thousands of times over. After noticing how it made me feel, I immediately turned it off. Turns out there is a button to remove all of the anxiety and stress causing features of this game and games like it, and that’s to turn off the whole game and uninstall it.
Believe it or not, that stuff has an effect on your brain, and your life. And whether its kids with an attitude, teens with something to prove, adults having a bad day, or whatever, really. The game is going to attempt to provoke them into becoming the worst version of themselves.
An interesting question would be to ask, why is violence, anxiety, stress and pain so casually a part of so many games? And why do we let it all turn us into horrible people, who treat eachother so poorly?
Of course, we’re all anonymous on here, to some extent, but there has to be more to it than that. Maybe we’re all just being really, really blind to our own emotions, and showcasing that we need to take control our lives far more than we currently do?
HAHA, apparently two words I’ve used in this, that aren’t even PG-13 used swear words, I’ve heard them being used in Disney movies, are banned from posts here on the blizzard forums. That’s quite a funny cherry on the cake of this for me. That they created this game that puts people in horrendous moods and then restrict them from using ANY words that could properly express that mood.
In my mind, that’s like a man training his dog to be a killer, but putting an electrified collar and muzzle on him so he doesn’t kill anybody.