When playing games, I often get fits of rage when things don’t go my way. Sometimes I rage even when a map is cleared simply because one person does significantly worse than the rest. At best I simply call them out and give tips on how to improve, at worst I simply call them ugly names for not doing X. I know I shouldn’t, but I cant help it.
Removing a scoreboard will not fix this. I am not being toxic because of the scoreboard, I am being toxic because I’m angry how the game itself went.
I played the public beta and it was a miracle I didn’t get banned due to my behaviour. End game transition with no enemies gives you time to settle down (at least a bit) and if I’m lucky I might even calm down enough to give just polite comment on weaker performance and offer tips. HOWEVER without the stats, if game isn’t going well and I get mad, I don’t know who is responsible and who isn’t. Thus in the hear of the moment everyone is instantly taken as worst thing possible, all the time. This makes my behaviour much worse.
During mid-game I don’t have time to start focusing on whether a small blunder I saw was a honest small mistake or “a bad player in general”, I find myself raging at EVERYONE for even the smallest infractions. I even transitioned to yelling over voicechat since there isn’t time to write mid-combat, making my harrassment much worse. Darktide was the first time I went so far that I heard someone start sobbing on the other end. I am not proud.
With score screen, my issues were much better contained and I often managed to cool down enough to hold my tongue, or even be constructive at best times. Without it I have no way of knowing, so even small imperfections swell into incredible proportions: “since it could be a shitter, better call him out”. Many of my friends with similar anger issues experienced the same phenomenom. Most toxic players aren’t toxic because of the score screen, its sadly just the way they are. Removing score screen transforms the harrasment from small period where the game ends into a constant flood of abuse.
For the sake of protecting others from harrasment, bring back the score screen. I’d love to hear your reply on this. I don’t want to play the game if I make others cry, but I know many people like me will.
Yours truly,
A person with abusive bouts of gamer rage even at age of 32.
(First time using these forums, sorry for being a bit clumsy) @Fatshark_Hedge
Heh, a good meme, even if a bit under the skin for someone who has anger problems. I appreciate the quick response though, so no offense taken: my highest wish was for this issue to be read by your company. I feel very few companies get feedback or improvement recommendations from the very people doing very toxic flaming. This is why I created this account.
I’d like to also point out that I am nor angry 24/7: only on worst days or if I keep playing far too long. Most of the time I’m just like everyone else. I just wanted to point out that (at least some of us) toxic garbage behave even worse without score screen. I don’t try to defend my attacks on human decency in any way, but not having SOMETHING to focus one’s anger on causes it to spill everywhere. In hindsight score screen was great tool in reducing toxicity and saving it for the end, despite seeing the opposite: imo you see only a small fraction of what could be. Also if flaming is saved mostly for score screen, you can always requeue to get another group, but it sucks to quit a level halfway through because someone else cannot behave.
@LoveTruffle
It is only an issue with gaming. I dont have other anger issues (that I know of) in real life. If you have good recommendations for medication I could discuss with my doctor I’d love to hear them though, just in case. For me the rage seems to be mostly with PvP games (which I avoid for this reason) and, well, any team-based games. It feels as if I’m being “unfairly” being punished for someone else’s “incompetence”. On rational level it doesn’t make sense, it just gets me foamimg despite knowing well how ridiculous it is.
I wasnt trying to make light of an anger management issue but rather frame it in the context of this being a game and that there are lots of other, more important things that deserve anger.
Whilst games are a great escape, it makes me sad that anger can be born of them. Even intense games like the tide ones. We dont want our games to be a source of anger or upset for anyone.
I’m not going to get into the weeds of a scoreboard (or lack of) being a good (or bad) thing. But we are looking at what a revised scoreboard might look like, and when you might expect it (not day 1). it’ll likely promote coop measurements and less of the green circle stuff.
If you’re keen to see specifics of your team you’ll likely need to keep an eye on them, for now at least.
@Fatshark_Hedge
That is great to hear! With that settled, Darktide is a must-buy for me! I appreciate all the effort you go through.
I’ve loved the -tide series and been a fan since VT1 (which got me into Warhammer Fantasy from 40k). Your games manage to realize the scale of the world better than any other game in the franchise I’ve played. Both vermintides have been almost perfect: the effort you’ve put into them really shows. Thank you again for your time.
There are specific situations where you hurt people and you know it. And you still go into those situations willingly continuing to harass and hurt people. How about you just don’t play games with other people and do something else instead?
And yes going into those situations is probably the only way to improve your behavior. But I honestly think it is not worth it that people get hurt over and over just so you might one day not be abusive anymore. I think at that point you are just a massive a**hole if you keep playing multiplayer games.
Is friendly fire with ranged weapons going to be in the final game? If so, a friendly fire stat definitely needs to be on the scoreboard. Otherwise my “friends” will continue to unload their guns into the back of my head.
@Heretic-Voice
I appreciate the input. If you refer to my posts, you’ll no doubt find I agree with you: my bouts of rage aren’t right. You’ll also see it isnt’t common: we all get angry sometimes, I just get angrier than many. It’s an ongoing process to learn to deal with these issues, and I’ve improved a lot over the year: both occurence and intensity of these attacks has lessened greatly. Nonetheless, I’d lie if I claimed they don’t happen. Thus this post. Furthermore, I’m not the entire gamer pool; there are many others with similar (and often worse) issues. Reducing the abuse caused by these individuals is important in my opinion.
I made this post to give input on how to reduce these episodes, because we all agree they aren’t right. However I don’t think people usually realize, that these problems are like road rage: no one enters a car thinking they’ll be angry. Yet it happens sometimes. If you knew you’d meet the guy you’re angry at in the end of your journey, you’d save most of your anger until that point. When not, everyone is “a f***ing horrible driver **** **** you ****!”.
As a throwback: would you demand that people who suffer from road rage refrain from driving (always taking bus/carpool for example)? They are willingly putting themselves in situation where they hurl abuse, when there are easy alternative options (just don’t drive yourself).
I like this post and find it interesting.
You sound like someone who knows a lot more about this than I do. I know one interesting trick is to focus on curiosity about why someone did what they did .
Humans do frustrating things, but why they do what they do is always interesting and sometimes a focus on that heads off a path to anger.
It can be cool, because even if a lot of people do act like ***** if you manage to channel curiosity you find out a lot about people you’d otherwise miss.
You might know that one, but maybe someone else doesn’t.
If this is satire then it is brilliantly done. If not then it is an amount of honest which is unusual.
Nonetheless, it is an interesting topic from a psychological standpoint and I really would like to see a study concerning score boards. Obviously, most of what I say is my biased opinion.
What you have to consider is the overall influence of a scoreboard. From Vermintide we know that the scoreboard can influence players in a negative way. The board “rewards” egoistic, aggressive and damage orientated playstyles. Which is why people then tend to lean into these more than existing counterparts. Good examples would be the obstuse Noobstick (Javelin) or Coruscation Staff spam just in order to get most damage and kill. On the other hand, if you have a player which does an excellent job keeping the team alive, enabling them to do more damage while neglecting his own dps slightly, he will be considered bad. We have seen this in the ranked weaves in season 1 (ignoring the exploiters) where survival became suddenly so important that people forfeited their aggressive mindset and also set roles for defense. This was additionally supported by having no scoreboard in the Weaves which made the mode a team experience where the only measure of success was winning. Not sure if it is still like that. I think at least Weaves QP has also the scoreboard.
With that in mind, you have now to balance the different issues against each other. Are there people with anger issues which will become worse if they don’t get their scoreboard? Apparently yes. Is it enough to add a scoreboad risking to influence a far higher amount of players in a bad way? I wouldn’t be so sure about that one. So for the sake of the overall playerbase health it might be necessary to “sacrifice” some on the other end.
It may already be enough if the scoreboard is removed from post-mission to being accessible only somewhere in the central hub and only if the player actively searchs out for it. Something like storing the results of the last five matches so that you can check how it went.
I think it would be more of a problem to remove them from Vermintide 2 since that’s had the scores from the start. Darktide is a new game, so it seems like a good time to try something different.
I understand what you are saying and appreciate that you are open and reflective about your problem. I don’t see it as black and white as it may have sounded in my previous post.
A key difference I see between the driver in your example and gaming is, that playing multiplayer games is a completely optional hobby whereas people might be dependent on driving. But if someone were just driving for fun (I think driving for fun is antisocial anyway) or had the option to take other transportation then yes - I think they should show responsibility and not drive. Or work on it in kind of a supervised environment like going to a driving school or hiring someone professional to drive with them to work on their anger issues.
I realize that most people don’t hold themselves to such a high standard but my opinion is that they should. In the end, I think it boils down to how much people hold themselves accountable for their actions and how much they value their own interests (driving/gaming) compared to the interests of other people (in this case not getting hurt).
@Adelion
I can assure you this isn’t satire. I’ve struggled with these issues a lot more in the past, but nowadays I feel these things happen so rarely that it doesn’t define me anymore. Well except for getting way beyond mad at Darktide it’d seem. Therapy has helped a lot, good to see it shows. For most however, anger issues are a source of endless shame, and thus most keep quiet about them. This was why I felt I had a valuable experience worth sharing. That and getting so mad I caused someone to cry was a turning point for me. Due to my issues I’ve had tons of people being (justly) mad at me, and as a result I’ve grown a hard mental shell. During fits of rage I project this mental armor to encompass everyone, and go too far assuming they are as desensitized to it as I am.
You bring up good points on how difficult it is to reign in all sorts of toxic behaviour. I subconsciously focused mostly on the worst cases - those who go way too far. You are correct that most toxic behaviour isnt as severe, just selfish way of playing a team game, which too can definitely ruin a game.
It is a delicate balancing act and I was superlatively overjoyed that (getting my hopes up!) the new Score Screen will mostly show stats that don’t promote selfish playing. I could see this hitting the middle ground where you get best of both worlds - promote teamplay while removing sources of abuse. I for one can see this nudging me towards better behavior; maybe the other player was just a teamplayer, or focused on suppressing dangerous targets, or so on. I feel this could drive people like me towards looking at people with curiosity instead of anger like Greenpeas said.
@Heretic-Voice
I don’t think we’ll find common ground then, but I respect your opinion. I, like most people with anger issues, had my worst bouts at young age (less impulse control, more energy). If I had gone by your recommendation, I wouldn’t had gone outside at all, because these fits were very common (weekly) and not just while gaming (like nowadays). Entire outdoor world would’ve been outside my grasp because I wasn’t physically able to “hold myself up to standards”. I wouldn’t had made friends who made me feel more than just my issues, nor would I have dared to admit this is an actual issue due to shame, nor ever get into therapy. My life would’ve been very, very bad and people who’d have to deal with me would have suffered immensely, from public services to loved ones.
Nowadays I can say with pride that I am a productive member of society and my issues are likely soon entirely in the past. However this isn’t the case for many of us, and having experienced these things first-hand I wanted to voice my opinion on the behalf of those who still have a long way to go. Thank you for showing interest, we’ll hopefully meet in Darktide as a team after I’ve sorted out rest of my issues!
Going outside is a necessity. You need to go out to get an education, work, socialize, be part of society, and not go insane. But playing multiplayer games is by no means a necessity. It is not even a grey area like driving. It is just valuing your fun over other people’s emotional health. I think it is important to not mix those two things up.
Different people might draw the line at different places. But I think it is imperative that a line should be drawn. For most people, this line is the law. But only stopping at the line the law draws does not prevent you from being antisocial, mean, or even an a**hole as I put it before.
Edit:
Just to be clear, I don’t say having anger issues makes anyone an a**hole. But not taking responsibility does. You could try to take responsibility in many ways. One example: Find a group of people who know about your problem and play with them. They could be RL friends, people from Darktide discord to whom you explain the problem. I am sure there are other people out there who deal with similar problems in games and might be willing to play together. That takes a lot of effort and maybe even bravery. But just playing with strangers and hurting people until it maybe gets better at some point in the future is not taking responsibility.
Edit 2:
Thank you for showing interest, we’ll hopefully meet in Darktide as a team after I’ve sorted out rest of my issues!
I’ll be playing from 17th on (Central European Timezone) and if you are looking for people who are willing to get insulted in the worst ways for the greater good of the empire you can PM me anytime to exchange steam IDs.
@Heretic-Voice
(Edit: forgot to mention, I bought VT already but will only play it after scoreboard is implemented to avoid making someone cry again)
Thank you for being so polite. These things aren’t as easy to talk about as it might seem. Getting a taste of my own medicine it seems, hehe.
You missed a bit of my point: this was an error on my part and I apologize. I was only talking about after-work socializing since it is optional in my opinion. I made all of my friends in spare time, since school was tough for me socially since I had way less impulse control. I think this was on the “me just having fun despite knowing I’ll eventually flip out and verbally hurt people”. I’m lucky enough to have never been physically violent, which I’m greatly grateful for. You can take this discussion further and I’ll gladly reply, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort. Either way I value your opinions and respect them.
We’re all different bunch, and having experienced severe difficulties during my formative years I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look things the way you do. “Standards”, “normal behavior” and whatever I heard from my teachers did not help, it made things much worse, so I think I’m subconsciously projecting that trauma on what you said. Not saying you’re incorrect mind you.
Thank you for your advice and tips. Much appreciated. Finding teammates is what I’ve done, since I’ve been drifting towards people with similar issues. We’re currently a group of 3: me, a fella with ADHD and a third “normal” guy who takes our outbursts as silly. The issue is we’re not always playing at the same time, we always have 4th member and the fact that Darktide surprised me in how angry I got. But beta was only short period so we made the selfish choice. Like I said, I steer clear of most PvP games because of my issues. Darktide was first -tide game to cause these extreme outbursts and came as a total surprise. Having gone over it a lot, I zeroed it on Score Screen significantly affecting my cognitive expectations of “what is reason enough to get mad?”, since I noticed myself thinking that I cannot just ignore “errors” in gameplay since I never get feedback on whether a guy was “pulling their weight” or not. Everything in quotation marks because I don’t think this way normally, I just want to have fun to offset having to swallow my burning anger in regular life constantly to manage myself. Only when I get mad do I revert back to my 14-year-old selfish prick dungflinger.
Wait did I miss something? A manchild makes threats and throws a tantrum and we reward his toxic behaviour now? Why are you even entertaining him?
Removing the scoreboard was one of the many pleasant surprises I found in the beta, please don’t add a misleading and arbitrary system back into a great co-op game.
Kills and damage mean absolutely nothing, each mission plays differently, different situations, different weapons perform better at different things, different number of enemies, different classes, scoreboard is absolutely useless in tides games.
Even other stats, like damage taken can be misleading, zealot will always have high damage taken, friendly fire also can mess that stat up. Hell, even most revives is useless, if two people are trying to revive the same fallen player, the one who gets the number ticked is better because he clicked first? ridiculous.
A good weapon description, detailing exactly what each weapon trait does, and the ability to test them in the simulacrum against preset simulated enemies, would be much more useful than a scoreboard that only shows who did the last hit.
Hot take, some of the tides toxicity stems from playing with bots.
They create a forgiving sense of comfort being able to teleport around and hit every shot and revive you always and take care of you. This sense of security is lost when playing in a full group.
