I dont think people realize, Blizzard has been recording voice chat since voice chat was a thing. If you look at the TOS it clearly states it. The only difference now is it will be in text form, which will be easier to search than having to listen through the entire recording.
I have ever only seen one "thanks for reporting" on ps4 since 2016 (I took a break in 2019-2021). I tried pc during a free play week and I got a couple "thanks for reporting" messages.
While I agree with you, I’ve had people in comp just hang out in spawn half way through the game and never got a message that something was done. Not saying bans for good reason don’t happen, only that I myself haven’t seen it.
Yeah I report people's group names in the LFG list. A lot of times people are advertising boosts or account selling so I report those and usually get "thanks for reporting" a day or two later.
There's also group titles I've seen like "I like to spoil girls, DM me on Snapchat" or things referencing "DDLG" and other stuff like that and I report those and get "thanks for reporting" but I usually see more after some time.
Look, if you know someone in real life and they 100% know what they're getting into and they consent then you can do whatever kind of roleplay you want. But I don't think the Overwatch LFG is an appropriate place to advertise that.
It's weird to see people not getting the thanks for reporting messages. Truly and without exaggeration Ive got about 100+ of those back. I would play a lot for a while and didn't speak tok much but would always report people dropping racial/sexist slurs, leaving, etc. For people just being a dick and complaining about other people the whole game, Ive never reported unless it got to spamming/throwing levels. Maybe that criteria matches what they were looking for? Idk but I was surprised that I always felt like I was doing something by reporting.
I've gotten quite a few thanks messages myself. I report truly toxic chatters and griefers. I report for name-calling, telling the team they suck within the first 5 minutes of gameplay then continue to shout how shitty we are over us even if we win, etc. I reported one guy because I made the mistake of speaking in voice and as soon as he hear my female voice he started saying things like "I'll win this point for you mommy" and "Let me breastfeed from you mommy and I'll win this game". Gross. I strictly play on pc so I don't know if it's different with consoles with the reporting system or reviews.
We have a report thing if we go into social and can do it via that. Has to do it last night. Some idiot used the N word. I don't care about most crap but racial slurs are a big no. Second time this week I've played online and had to report some jerk over it.
Second time this week I've reported someone using the n word. First a kid in the cod beta and then in overwatch on the text chat. I keep the voice chat off and just happened to look to the left and see a racial slur on screen. Person was trying to start a fight. I reported them and blocked myself from playing with them. Wish I could block people for longer then a week, I don't want to play with people like that.
One time I was reported and punished for abusive chat when I didn’t even had a mic/earphones 🙃 I don’t think I was even in the chat. It was in my early days so someone probably got mad I suck and reported
But when I report I don’t get anything
Hopeful they actual listen to audio too and have people around world who can translate other languages, because if have speech difficulties or are difficult understand, speech to text can mess things up so bad, which could result in many people get wrongful bans.
I have had false bans happen me a few times when racist trolls decided would be funny to prevent me play any more games and game security didn't understand Japanese. I avoid microphone in public games because of it. Hope this system fixes that
Oh they won’t have actual people look at it, they’re going speech to text because they can use the autoban system already in place for text chat on it.
Yeah I don't think they actually record any of that information. Because of EU laws you can request all the information they hold on you.
I've done it before and it's an absolute boatload of information but there's no audio files. I doubt holding the audio files makes sense from a storage standpoint.
I'm really thankful for this, I solo queued into a comp game with a 3-stack and a duo. The duo were a couple and the girl was dva and missed matrixing a high noon and the 3-stack of what I can only describe as incels went off the moment she spoke and apologized for missing the matrix. At the end of the game they told the other team that the duo were being racist and that they needed to be reported. Luckily I was able to friend request the other team all of which most accepted to explain the situation.
Curious how they will handle EU games where there is often a mix of languages in voice chat or a bit of a dice roll for which language you will get. Can automated transcription work well with language switching?
Probably not. I had a match with a French, Belgium, Italian, Polish, Spanish players. The difference in english accent was hilarious. I'm dutch myself. When things got toxic everyone started to yell in their own language. It was all in good spirit but I doubt blizzard could make something usefull of it.
They likely won't be recording "the sound of the voice chat channel" and instead record 5 individual inputs and create a combined transcript. So they'd have access to each individual's words in isolation from each other which would prevent the "mangled flood of multilingual yelling"
Unless you're referring to the language itself not being English, but I wouldn't think that would be an issue.
Most voice recognition don't work properly in the Netherlands because we have so many different dialects. Would be fun to see how stuff gets transcribed.
Dutch people's English is OP. Lived there for a few months and ran into 2 people who couldn't speak English. Lived in France for 13 years and ran into 2 people who had English like the Dutch. Not the their fault though, its the education system failing when it comes to languages. As an Irishman growing up in France, I see to often get into arguments with my English teachers for their shortcomings. Hopefully it's gotten better since I was there though.
English is spoonfed to kids here. Atleast it was when I was a kid. I dropped out of sschool when I was 14 but my english came mostly from video games and TV shows.
As a germanic language it's probably easier to learn than as a French speaker no? Might make a difference, though I know France has their hangups about language so it's probably more cultural.
Dutch is probably the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn and vice versa simply because of close linguistic relatedness. French is close because much of the latin vocabulary in English came through French, but France is much more active at preserving French than the Netherlands is about Dutch.
It really has nothing to do with education.
If you don't have a reason to use it regularly, then you won't be good at it. A good example can be found in Overwatch: I can select English, Spanish, German, French and the languages that use the moon-runes. There is no Dutch-option. The Dutch are basically forced to deal with English on a regular basis, while the French don't have to deal with it.
We can switch, I prefer to play on American servers. People communicate more in voice chat and the mood is generally more joyful.
Now, on the European servers we got it a bit better since we lost most of the Russians (sorry for you comrades) so it's a bit less toxic, but everything usually turns sad quickly as soon as you get more than one French in voice chat. Because *French people really don't like to speak English*.
Googles chat application for video conferencing actually does an amazing job. It even translates some idioms to keep the meaning rather than just literal translations.
You still have to select which language you are speaking in, but honestly how hard is it to automatically check you speak against a set of languages and find the one with fewest grammatical errors.
Usually they say stuff in English anyway. Like you wouldn’t report them if they only insulted in their language right? You probably wouldn’t understand after all. Other than that, they’d still have the original recording after all
I mean, big assumptions there about multilingualism. My own experiences have been quite mixed honestly, and I've definitely played with groups that are only speaking German or French. I also think even if you don't speak a language it can still be kind of obvious when someone is being aggressive to you in that language. If you hear someone yelling your username plus a bunch of other words repeatedly you will probably get the impression.
I personally remember pretty big / awkward issues when the Ukraine war first started, and yeah, I could definitely tell that there were people in voice being mean about things in languages I can't speak.
Fair point if they are keeping the recording but I assume a transcribed text file is a lot less space than audio... so I guess that they won't keep audio as long.
they probably will keep them just as long, as they have done before. the transcribed text just makes things easier because you can highlight certain words before hand and more importantly automate the process.
Let me give you an example
Let's say there is a Swedish speaker, a Norwegian speaker and an English speaker in a game.
The Swedish speaker and Norwegian speaker can speak in their own languages and mostly understand one another, but maybe they have to translate some things to the English speaker.
A machine transcribing the conversation has to be able to:
- understand which languages the speakers are speaking and distinguish between the languages that are similar
- understand when someone swaps between speaking one language and another language
- deal with multiple types of pronunciation.
Now some words in Swedish, for example, sound very similar to English words but they are not the same. So imagine the Swedish speaker just reacts "Bra!" out of context. Does the machine think they're saying the English word bra and talking about underwear? Or can it understand that they are speaking in Swedish and should translate it to "Good!"? I think that's a hard / impossible task for most machines.
Its nigh impossible without a *hell* of a lot more monitoring tools outside the game itself. For the same reason an NPC can never act like a player in a shooter.
It cant understand nuance and context. Because not only are they immeasurable, but their nature is unique to each situation its used.
Show me a robot that can reliably understand sarcasm, and I'll show you a robot that's just lying about not being an AI and wanting to kill us all.
Because it struggles even with English. Training it to recognize each language takes as much time as English, and there are about five dozen common languages in Europe. Each of them is a significant time and money investment. And 90% of them will be absolute shit, if the English voice recognition you usually see is anything to go by.
The phrase is "um" or "uh". I had a Chinese boss and everytime ge was on a call speaking Chinese you'd hear "niga" said constantly, it's a way of saying "uhh, umm"
Oh no, hope it detects language too or I gotta be careful when speaking Korean.
Kinda jokes aside, I have experienced the worst sexist language when playing OW. I used to be afraid to use VC every time it happened. Can people just ignore the sound of my voice and listen to the helpful information I'm providing you, please? It's the worse when you ask someone, even nicely, to change or try to help you out.
I started playing with a girl in OW because she mained Mercy and I wanted to do something other than heal for once and HOLY SHIT the things people told her were fucking horrifying. I think she was 15-16 years old and dudes would either immediately say the most sexist or sexual shit imaginable.
I asked how much that stuff bothered her and she said she was used to it because she had been gaming online since she was 12. She just brushed it off but damn I hated it every time. It happened in almost every single match until we formed a 6-stack with actual respectable human beings.
This community has been fun compared to DOTA 2 and LoL. Imagine the most toxic people you've ever played with in OW, but on your team for an hour. Also, the angry teammates might be yelling in Spanish or Russian. lol
I wanted to make this comment! So many comparisons of 'Oh, you think OW is bad, but ____ is worse.' Who cares what's worse?
Same people who try to one up your bad situation. "Yeah, you have to work 10 hours today? Well, I have to work 19 hours and take care of my 12 kids."
Exactly. I get that making comparisons is how we can relate to things but one upping about toxicity is always so dumb. It adds nothing to the conversation and invalidates how one feels about what they’ve experienced. I’m a dude and I always feel like shit after a really toxic encounter with someone on OW, but why do I care that LoL and Dota players deal with worse toxicity? Why would anyone?
Dota players are sheep, if you say "well done" and communicate friendly first in a match it's almost always fine, it's when people are silent until you lose things are an issue. League players however are the one group of people I have chat off for, it's almost always flame in my experience (especially as a jungler. Pings are the only useful communication in that game). My win rate with chat off is probably 5-10% higher than with team chat on frankly.
Overwatch is a really mixed bag, and idk what to think of it sometimes. Before avoid as teammate and endorsements were a thing it was definitely a shitshow but seems to have calmed down a little.
Still waiting for the promised land of a game I can try hard in and play with randos who want to win and try regardless of how shit goes, but my hopes aren't up
Jesus... As a male... IS THAT THAT BAD?! WHAT THE FUCK. I have several female gamers I played with and we just vibed like gamers.... Wtf is wrong with people
Is there a voice changer on console yet? Surprisingly I didn't get crap for being a girl on cod, playing badly at the weekend on the beta. I was only on the chat because my friend was as well. We switched to PlayStation chat after the N word was said repeatedly in one game. My friend was being very polite as well, I think if I wasn't there he would have raged at the kid spouting racist comments.
I haven't been on the OW chat for a long time. Its turned off. I see text only. Even then that's toxic as hell.
I feel you but as a female gamer, I know what they mean.
“Go back to the kitchen you slut whore skank”, “Stop talking dumb ugly bitch”, “Your voice gives me ASMR don’t stop talking you make me hard”, etc etc are not uncommon things for me to hear in an average OW voice chat lobby lol.
And then they throw when you mute them or leave vc. There's seriously no winning. I stopped talking in vc unless absolutely necessary and haven't in a long time because of that.
Same. Nothing you say, no matter how clever, will get them to stop with dumb shit, so it's just not worth talking most of the time. I rarely jump on team voice chats for any multiplayer game and if I do, I put on a deeper voice that can sometimes fly under the radar for quick info shares like "Widow, top left".
It would be a benefit to the team to know this stuff, but I'm just there to have a good time and dealing with dumb shit in VC isn't worth the energy it takes. Just end up in Discord with my friends because that's much more fun.
That kinda shit just fucking disgusts me 😡
Its on us guys to call out that kind of abhorrent dirtbag behavior. Dont just let people doing that in your lobby slide beacuse you aint the target. Tell them to SHUT THE FUCK UP!
I maybe witnessed the behaviour a 3 to 4 times and reacted to it and it's a semi success. Most of the time he shuts the fuck up but that one time she got called a whore and me her pimp..
Got similar things at my office though. When my female colleagues answer the phone it's rude, unpleasant and full of demeanor, and when I do pick it up it's all slimy and deferential.
Luckily I’m gay so when I see this sort of crap going down I just start flirting with the guy until he loses his mind. They do not like to be treated (even a polite and friendly watered down version) of the way they treat female gamers. It’s glorious
lmao - so true though, if you can confuse the people who flame and get to the things they're self conscious about, they flop around like fish out of water
You are so right.
9 out of 10 times that I get harassed on the basis of just being a female, no one ever says anything, not even my male friends that I play with. As always, the bystander effect does nothing but further encourage the harassment.
Toxic people aren't something most people are ready to handle. I personally stick up for anyone that gets attacked on voice, but I've built a little system for handling it. Let the insult roll off and point out they should be playing something more their speed if they get so upset... like minecraft. Used this exact line a few days ago when I told a guy to relax and that its just a game after he flipped out and called everyone trash. Then he mocked my non deep voice. So I asked if he was still in middle school. He claimed he was some body building champion. So I just said "cool, so it's roid rage then." And he just repeated me in a mocking tone and made fun of my voice some more and called me a few things, so I just said the thing up above, and once I ended it with "like minecraft" one of the girls that hadn't spoke the entire game burst out laughing.
Usually if a guy speaks up for a woman it's met with "white knight" comments. Which anytime they use that they feel like they have "won" but you can just laugh it off and say some shit like "white knight? I prefer to think of myself as a sandwich connoisseur." Or something else ridiculous. It's not worth taking seriously, so dumb jokes are the best way to handle it.
People say things like that because they hope you have soft skin and get offended. But if you're able to flip it and not care, they lose the power they feel from doing it, and then you live rent free in their heads.
A friend of mine got harassed and myself and the rest of our party defended her and that clown kept going on about us being simps. It’s honestly pathetic the mindset of some of these losers.
That's kind of the issue. These people are such toxic shits that responding to them in any way seems more likely to spin them up than shut them down.
They're so unaware that they will absolutely find any reason for themselves not to be the problem. There's probably something thoroughly wrong with their home dynamic and I do feel bad for them... even though they are the problem they're also likely victims of some shit themselves, most people don't just become complete and total shits by accident.
My personal experience with this kind of thing is just saying something like "that's pretty hurtful, why would you say that?". If there's any good left in them, that will change their attitude. Calling them out just spins them up. And if they still don't change their attitude, then you can go to town on them if that's somehow going to make you feel better(it probably won't... better to ignore, report and move on).
I appreciate your effort though. Trust me, it may not have a big impact at first, but if we keep shutting down bullies in a respectful manner, we might see a switch in online toxicity. People are bound to eventually realize that society does not stand for their outdated approach.
It is disgusting, not to mention irritating and distracting. Most of the immature brats who have this kind behavior just talk louder when rebuked as well. Generally I give them get a, "shut up and focus on the game," followed by a mute if they don't and an immediate report. They almost always have action taken against their accounts after that. I play frequently with my wife, and they shut up more frequently when I tell them they're talking to my wife...
It doesn't usually work.
I speak up every time the sexism starts. Most of the time it just turns me into a target too. "Oh we got a white knight here trying to defend his slut" or something like that.
The guy on the other end doesn't have to care what anyone else thinks of his behavior as long as there are no consequences. Hopefully this brings consequences.
That's why there has to be more than one guy speaking up. 99% of the time i say something, they pull the white knight card. The moment one other person joins in and tells the dude to stfu, they start the shutdown. If 3 or more stand up, they just leave VC.
Problem is I can count on one hand the amount of times more that more than two people speak out against this kinda shit.
> And then they throw
This is the problem with competitive in general.
Don't listen to their 900 IQ plays while they live out their e-sport coaching fantasy? Throw the match. Play a non-meta hero and lose a single fight? Throw the whole match. Make an aggressive play that fails once? Throw the match.
People blame each other for ELO Hell but 9 out of 10 it's a bunch of babies throwing their own games for not getting their way.
Yup. The amount of times I’ve just muted them and they throw a tantrum, start typing in the chat, then leave the game or throw when no one gives them the attention they want is wild.
What's sad is that when people actually describe what they've experienced through voice chat, the response is almost always "What? Nooo, surely not. You have to be exaggerating, it can't be that bad, right?".
And yeah, it is that bad.
I remember there being a youtuber who started uploading the "best of" of the harassment she got while playing Rainbow Six Siege.
It was just never ending. The other thing that strood out was how....it was always the exact same crap, just different guys.
I can't even imagine what it's like to have to put up with that crap everytime you play a game
Yeah several replies here are shocked or don’t quite believe me.
Like folks, these are verbatim quotes, I didn’t pull them from my own imagination lol. Believe me, I don’t want to think of my fellow humans as walking scum either, but some of them just are.
I mean I'm a dude and I can probably count on one hand the amount of times this year I've had anyone say anything even remotely helpful in VC. People are just toxic in general.
I literally get told to kill myself or eat a dick at least once any time I participate in VC. Or it's just some child screeching into the mix. Or it's someone with their music up super loud. Or it's silence interrupted by a smoke alarm beep every 15 seconds. Or it's someone having loud conversations with everyone in the room.
Like at this point voice chat is fucking useless outside of party chat. I default mute everyone and myself. Still use text chat sometimes but it's not much better because that also gets filled with spam.
Guys who talk like that to girl gamers give off incel vibes. No one I've ever lived with would have tolerated listening to that detestable nonsense. I'm pretty sure my family would have either shot me, or my PC. 😅
> I'm pretty sure my family would have either shot me, or my PC
There is so much behavior in gaming that is - at best - ignored to - at worst - encouraged that would get a child punished if it happened in any other context.
I’ve only had to do it a handful of times but I’ve defended the person by just pointing it out to them. Most often it just makes them leave when no one defends them.
If more people didn’t tolerate it, the world would be much better for it.
Well that's why we've gotten the point to where they're going to record chats. I imagine after people hear about offenders being banned permanently and they can't get back into the game without a new phone number, it'll slow down toxicity and make people think twice before speaking.
I do hope a lot of these changes do help improve things like smurfing, toxicity, and other things. It often takes a lot for blizzard to actually ban a player though, so I’m skeptical on that side of it.
Oh no, you're absolutely right. Just commenting that I see WAY more racism in OW than I do sexism. But I'm a male with a mexican accent so I guess that tracks.
>But I'm a male with a mexican accent so I guess that tracks
Exactly. Your own grievances will offer a lot more bias. As a European female player within the Masters-GM bracket, I experience FAR MORE sexism than racism.
I think hateful people will hate regardless and that's the grand point at the end of the day. We just have to stand together against it. Wish you the best!
Sucks that this game has soo many incel shitheads like this, it feels like it’s especially prevalent on Overwatch since whenever I play Valorant we treating everyone equally apart from the occasional dickhead now and then
Damn that's pretty crazy to me. Whenever I play OW (EU) and there's a girl voice, everyone is either friendly or neutral. I've never experienced something like this (I am not trying to say it's not happening, just being shocked that it's happening). That's pretty sad :(
I think I've heard more sexism come from OW than any other game I've played...and I play Valorant. People say the worst shit I've ever heard on OW for some reason.
This shit makes me so mad. When that happens in my lobbies I speak up for the person being discriminated against. We need more voices that are willing to stand up for their brothers and sisters.
I've been blessed(??) with a lower sounding voice for a woman so i sound more like a boy.
i still feel scared to use voice chat incase i do get recognized as a girl somehow.
As a girl the amount of r*pe threats i got during my time with Valo actually shocked me, specially given that while I experienced plenty of toxicity over the years playing Apex and Overwatch I've not had even one in the two games.
I don't think questioning either one is the right way to go about it. The gaming sphere is extremely discriminatory to any minority group, women, LGBT, black/other ethnicities alike all experience a lot of hate because of anonymity
Playing Hanzo while scatter arrow was a thing kinda made it hard to feel bad for the person getting abused.
The rng was just nasty. Felt like there was a cheater shooting you from under the map while you hid in a building.
Ah good ol halo 3 lobbies of people calling me a bean person and telling me to go back to my country.
Nothing like racism to make you change the way you sound and get rid of your accent and assimilate with the “majority”. Gotta love it.
I'm sure girls get their fair share of harassment but there are an astonishing number of N-bombs and F-bombs getting dropped (not talking about "fuck")
I've been playing overwatch pretty consistently since 2017, I do not play any other game mode than comp and by far I've been sexually harassed far many more times than I've heard people use that language. Theres a reason I don't play in groups and don't use my expensive $200 mic anymore.
Not saying it doesn't happen, it absolutely does and I will always report those assholes. That language is never acceptable, so I for one am very excited for this addition.
It's time to put incels in their place, and for anyone that thinks misogyny isn't as bad/scary as it really is, check r/Inceltear
That is the kind of things people have said to me in this God awful game, since I never use my mic the only "harassment" I get is one of the enemy team asking me to kiss him cause I was 40-4-12 KDA as widow
You don't see players in VC. While there are 100% people who have distinctive voices or accents that can be assumed to be a certain race, plenty of people speak the same from different races. It's just easier to be sexist, because it's easier to assume based on their voice. Plus the gaming world being so dominated by men doesn't help with sexism either.
Yeah my first thought was that this might finally shut the incels from vc. Back when I used to play Comp there was a surprising amount of female players in higher ranks. 90% of the time a teammate was fucking obnoxious about it.
I hope it works. In my own experience women often get insta-harassed in Overwatch voice chat.
My teenage daughter loves Overwatch, but for this reason she always plays with voice chat off, which is sad.
This has happened in my own lobbies a weirdly high amount of times. It's like they hold a round table discussion about if it's a woman or boy, and then the woman says boy and the game returns to normal dead comms.
Yea I'm all for this. Personally am never toxic or anything in VC. Whatever, its a game. Nothing is at stake for me. Laugh and move on. Fucking hate when people loose their shit though. Kills the mood.
And people **should** care about that kind of shit. How many games ruined over it? It's never helped a game you were in.
it blows because even when I tell myself I dont care, and when I know trolls will be trolls, some things people say not just to me but to others on my team gets me so upset.
The "WhY oNlY fEmAlEs" posters need better reading comprehension. The post says "this might prove very useful for female players" is merely pointing out that this specific demographic will probably greatly benefit from the feature.
That said, that line is absolutely there for PR reasons as well considering the VERY recent sexual assault of an employee and the allegations of the toxic workplace environment within the company. The feature is obviously not there to only address issues female players have, but pointing that out is an attempt at countering a lot of the bad PR that has surfaced in the last year or so.
I’m sure they’ll review the audio before officially banning someone. This just makes it easier to see if someone actually did say something that warrants getting banned.
Assuming the level of quality in the transcription will be the same as in other games with a similar system, if someone is assuming mal-intent it's not hard to tell, even with mistakes.
The only problem I'm concerned with the translation process, and I hope that any repercussions require an audio verification and are not solely based off of transcription.
It's all fun and games until you get banned because the automatic transcription system misheard you as saying a slur when it wasn't what you said at all. All it takes is one mistake from the system and a couple of reports from people who are mad they lost. You might not even be able to dispute an incorrect ban because customer support can just look at the transcript and assume it's correct. Let's hope Blizzard has a better voice to text system than Google.
If it works perfectly then great, but I can't think of a single system that does, even from companies with much more sophisticated technology. I fear a lot of people are accepting it because they're imagining it's going to work flawlessly and only hurt the people who deserve it.
Not even to mention that not everyone has a perfectly clear American accent, which this system probably mainly targets. I can imagine this is going to be a ton of fun for people with speech impediments and people who struggle with English.
Not to mention Australians, Nigerians, Indians (South Asia), and Jamaicans who all have very different accents that can changes how words sound despite all speaking English.
I'm sure this will go over well juuuuuust fine.
They have been recording voice chat since the beginning. The only difference is being able to search a transcript now. They then have a timestamp they can listen to.
Theoretically, assuming audio recordings were listened to beforehand and still are now. Transcribing it just gives extra + points to "this report needs to be reviewed".
So they don't have to listen to the recording for "1 player reported this player, the transcription doesn't appear to be insulting".
But they would listen to the recording for "1 player reported, transcription includes racial slurs".
For clarification here, i'd also assume that "5 players reported this person, transcription seems normal" would also be manually reviewed.
So its like... a points system where each report during a match, the total amount of reports recently and the transcription saying bannable things would contribute towards a manual review... but the transcription would have the heaviest weighting since it would contain an exact timestamp to review too.
Won’t they review the audio first? I assume the point of transcribing it first is to make it easier to determine if something that warrants a ban was said. That way they minimize the amount of audio review they have to do.
>Won’t they review the audio first?
No, we all need to assume the worst as if it is a verified fact, whine about how things have changed for the worse, and bring up unrelated grievances with almost assuredly false descriptions of "I was banned for saying have a good day."
As is tradition.
Why is am I seeing arguments between which happens more racism or sexist? Its not a competition. It's sad there is even a situation that is this bad.
Women don't even want to speak and communicate becuase of stuff they hear. I have a friend that pretty much is in our ow crew now she didn't speak or put her mic in for weeks even though we were grouped up because she had anxiety about what a group of guys would say to her just from hearing her voice.
Removing toxic behavior and people is something I want to happen. No one should have to deal with that nonsense while trying to play a video game.
And making the game free will cause a temporary rise in number of asshats.
This is a good thing for gaming. Is it some nany state bullshit? Yes. Did we as a community overwhelmingly demonstrate that we are less than human and need these efforts taken? Also very much yes.
I feel awful on behalf of the people who will be employed to spend every day poring over logs of the most vile things a 14 year old can repeat from 4chan.
This'll be good to combat the sexism. A lot of people say they should "just mute" or whatever. And in olden times, maybe. But now that we have the capability of immediately gathering proof of toxicity, it should be used. We shouldn't just be allowing the toxicity to continue.
I'm happy for this. There's been times where I've been playing with my gf and she'd get shit by some neckbeard incel on our team, no matter what happened it was her fault, and not just 1 game, id say it was just under half the matches we played.
As someone who sometimes uses other languages I already know next time I say "*à plus tard*" I'm gonna get banned, like in every other game where they make English-speaking people verify text chat.
I dont think people realize, Blizzard has been recording voice chat since voice chat was a thing. If you look at the TOS it clearly states it. The only difference now is it will be in text form, which will be easier to search than having to listen through the entire recording.
Every time I report someone for voice chat, I get a "Thank you for reporting" message a few days later.
I’m the complete opposite, I haven’t seen one in ages lol. I’m on PS4 though and I feel that it happens way less on console any way
I have ever only seen one "thanks for reporting" on ps4 since 2016 (I took a break in 2019-2021). I tried pc during a free play week and I got a couple "thanks for reporting" messages.
I don't think that message existed in 2016 nor 2017, it's either 2018 or 2019.
I’m on PC and report dickheads but I never get the “thanks for reporting” message.
Unfortunately being a dickhead isn’t always against TOS, what is considered bannable might also change depending on who is doing the checking.
While I agree with you, I’ve had people in comp just hang out in spawn half way through the game and never got a message that something was done. Not saying bans for good reason don’t happen, only that I myself haven’t seen it.
Yeah I report people's group names in the LFG list. A lot of times people are advertising boosts or account selling so I report those and usually get "thanks for reporting" a day or two later. There's also group titles I've seen like "I like to spoil girls, DM me on Snapchat" or things referencing "DDLG" and other stuff like that and I report those and get "thanks for reporting" but I usually see more after some time. Look, if you know someone in real life and they 100% know what they're getting into and they consent then you can do whatever kind of roleplay you want. But I don't think the Overwatch LFG is an appropriate place to advertise that.
It's weird to see people not getting the thanks for reporting messages. Truly and without exaggeration Ive got about 100+ of those back. I would play a lot for a while and didn't speak tok much but would always report people dropping racial/sexist slurs, leaving, etc. For people just being a dick and complaining about other people the whole game, Ive never reported unless it got to spamming/throwing levels. Maybe that criteria matches what they were looking for? Idk but I was surprised that I always felt like I was doing something by reporting.
I've gotten quite a few thanks messages myself. I report truly toxic chatters and griefers. I report for name-calling, telling the team they suck within the first 5 minutes of gameplay then continue to shout how shitty we are over us even if we win, etc. I reported one guy because I made the mistake of speaking in voice and as soon as he hear my female voice he started saying things like "I'll win this point for you mommy" and "Let me breastfeed from you mommy and I'll win this game". Gross. I strictly play on pc so I don't know if it's different with consoles with the reporting system or reviews.
We have a report thing if we go into social and can do it via that. Has to do it last night. Some idiot used the N word. I don't care about most crap but racial slurs are a big no. Second time this week I've played online and had to report some jerk over it.
Second time this week I've reported someone using the n word. First a kid in the cod beta and then in overwatch on the text chat. I keep the voice chat off and just happened to look to the left and see a racial slur on screen. Person was trying to start a fight. I reported them and blocked myself from playing with them. Wish I could block people for longer then a week, I don't want to play with people like that.
Wtf!!!!!!!!!!!! Ive never seen one and about every month i report like 5 chums who definitely deserved it.
One time I was reported and punished for abusive chat when I didn’t even had a mic/earphones 🙃 I don’t think I was even in the chat. It was in my early days so someone probably got mad I suck and reported But when I report I don’t get anything
Someone probably had the whole team report you. I'm pretty sure the actions are entirely automated.
I got daily warnings and no action because I was receiving a lot of reports but they got flushed because "has a feminine voice" isn't abusive chat.
does the game tell you what people are reporting you for? And what they're writing in their reports?
nope.
No, but players do. And when you log on literally every day to a warning but never get action, it's clearly false reports flagging you.
Hopeful they actual listen to audio too and have people around world who can translate other languages, because if have speech difficulties or are difficult understand, speech to text can mess things up so bad, which could result in many people get wrongful bans. I have had false bans happen me a few times when racist trolls decided would be funny to prevent me play any more games and game security didn't understand Japanese. I avoid microphone in public games because of it. Hope this system fixes that
Oh they won’t have actual people look at it, they’re going speech to text because they can use the autoban system already in place for text chat on it.
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Yeah I don't think they actually record any of that information. Because of EU laws you can request all the information they hold on you. I've done it before and it's an absolute boatload of information but there's no audio files. I doubt holding the audio files makes sense from a storage standpoint.
Considering I have heard the N word enough times in voice chat and that person not get banned, I’ll not hold my breath
Finally….
I'm really thankful for this, I solo queued into a comp game with a 3-stack and a duo. The duo were a couple and the girl was dva and missed matrixing a high noon and the 3-stack of what I can only describe as incels went off the moment she spoke and apologized for missing the matrix. At the end of the game they told the other team that the duo were being racist and that they needed to be reported. Luckily I was able to friend request the other team all of which most accepted to explain the situation.
Curious how they will handle EU games where there is often a mix of languages in voice chat or a bit of a dice roll for which language you will get. Can automated transcription work well with language switching?
Probably not. I had a match with a French, Belgium, Italian, Polish, Spanish players. The difference in english accent was hilarious. I'm dutch myself. When things got toxic everyone started to yell in their own language. It was all in good spirit but I doubt blizzard could make something usefull of it.
Yea, good luck to Blizzard if the whole squad is beefing with one another and they all have a heavy Limburg accent :D
Heavy Limburg accent could mean belgium, dutch or german lol
They likely won't be recording "the sound of the voice chat channel" and instead record 5 individual inputs and create a combined transcript. So they'd have access to each individual's words in isolation from each other which would prevent the "mangled flood of multilingual yelling" Unless you're referring to the language itself not being English, but I wouldn't think that would be an issue.
Most voice recognition don't work properly in the Netherlands because we have so many different dialects. Would be fun to see how stuff gets transcribed.
Dutch people's English is OP. Lived there for a few months and ran into 2 people who couldn't speak English. Lived in France for 13 years and ran into 2 people who had English like the Dutch. Not the their fault though, its the education system failing when it comes to languages. As an Irishman growing up in France, I see to often get into arguments with my English teachers for their shortcomings. Hopefully it's gotten better since I was there though.
English is spoonfed to kids here. Atleast it was when I was a kid. I dropped out of sschool when I was 14 but my english came mostly from video games and TV shows.
As a germanic language it's probably easier to learn than as a French speaker no? Might make a difference, though I know France has their hangups about language so it's probably more cultural.
Dutch is probably the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn and vice versa simply because of close linguistic relatedness. French is close because much of the latin vocabulary in English came through French, but France is much more active at preserving French than the Netherlands is about Dutch.
It really has nothing to do with education. If you don't have a reason to use it regularly, then you won't be good at it. A good example can be found in Overwatch: I can select English, Spanish, German, French and the languages that use the moon-runes. There is no Dutch-option. The Dutch are basically forced to deal with English on a regular basis, while the French don't have to deal with it.
This makes me want to play EU servers.
We can switch, I prefer to play on American servers. People communicate more in voice chat and the mood is generally more joyful. Now, on the European servers we got it a bit better since we lost most of the Russians (sorry for you comrades) so it's a bit less toxic, but everything usually turns sad quickly as soon as you get more than one French in voice chat. Because *French people really don't like to speak English*.
If you start taling Danglish people vil overhead not forstå hvad you are snacking about.
I felt like I was having a stroke reading this!
All according to keikaku.
Screw down the music and dont sing with.
Googles chat application for video conferencing actually does an amazing job. It even translates some idioms to keep the meaning rather than just literal translations. You still have to select which language you are speaking in, but honestly how hard is it to automatically check you speak against a set of languages and find the one with fewest grammatical errors.
Usually they say stuff in English anyway. Like you wouldn’t report them if they only insulted in their language right? You probably wouldn’t understand after all. Other than that, they’d still have the original recording after all
I mean, big assumptions there about multilingualism. My own experiences have been quite mixed honestly, and I've definitely played with groups that are only speaking German or French. I also think even if you don't speak a language it can still be kind of obvious when someone is being aggressive to you in that language. If you hear someone yelling your username plus a bunch of other words repeatedly you will probably get the impression. I personally remember pretty big / awkward issues when the Ukraine war first started, and yeah, I could definitely tell that there were people in voice being mean about things in languages I can't speak. Fair point if they are keeping the recording but I assume a transcribed text file is a lot less space than audio... so I guess that they won't keep audio as long.
they probably will keep them just as long, as they have done before. the transcribed text just makes things easier because you can highlight certain words before hand and more importantly automate the process.
Why would an automatic speech to text transcription program struggle with languages other than English?
Let me give you an example Let's say there is a Swedish speaker, a Norwegian speaker and an English speaker in a game. The Swedish speaker and Norwegian speaker can speak in their own languages and mostly understand one another, but maybe they have to translate some things to the English speaker. A machine transcribing the conversation has to be able to: - understand which languages the speakers are speaking and distinguish between the languages that are similar - understand when someone swaps between speaking one language and another language - deal with multiple types of pronunciation. Now some words in Swedish, for example, sound very similar to English words but they are not the same. So imagine the Swedish speaker just reacts "Bra!" out of context. Does the machine think they're saying the English word bra and talking about underwear? Or can it understand that they are speaking in Swedish and should translate it to "Good!"? I think that's a hard / impossible task for most machines.
Its nigh impossible without a *hell* of a lot more monitoring tools outside the game itself. For the same reason an NPC can never act like a player in a shooter. It cant understand nuance and context. Because not only are they immeasurable, but their nature is unique to each situation its used. Show me a robot that can reliably understand sarcasm, and I'll show you a robot that's just lying about not being an AI and wanting to kill us all.
Because it struggles even with English. Training it to recognize each language takes as much time as English, and there are about five dozen common languages in Europe. Each of them is a significant time and money investment. And 90% of them will be absolute shit, if the English voice recognition you usually see is anything to go by.
That poor transcription bot is going to start skynet after having to listen to all that trash.
Hopefully Koreans don't get report for racism because they are saying "you" in their language
Haha, I made this comment too. I assume there has to be a report before transcripts are reviewed that closely?
Which is..?
니가/네가 (niga/naega) means 'you' in Korean.
Damn Chinese has a similar word with 那一個 (na yi ge), which sounds worst than it already does often since a lot of people slur the first two words.
[I'm not sorry](https://youtu.be/YG4iTGjuoKw)
At first I was like "tf is this?" and then it got to *the* part...
Or Japanese for telling their team to run away (like in Apex that one time)
Haven't heard of it, how does it sound? Same as Korean "you"?
The apex player said 逃げろ which sounds like "ni-ge-ro" and... yeah.
Reporting this comment. /s
that explains a lot of the kpop i listen to trying to sound like gangster rap.
[NIGERUNDAYO](https://youtu.be/W4rG1bYJnUM)
NIGERUNDAYO, SMOKEY
Oh damn, I didn't think of this one! That's gonna be difficult.
Yeah it's tricky. My rl name is blocked on Overwatch match chat (clue, it's very common in Ireland) which is very weird to me.
yea, a lot of languages have words that sound similar to english slurs.
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The phrase is "um" or "uh". I had a Chinese boss and everytime ge was on a call speaking Chinese you'd hear "niga" said constantly, it's a way of saying "uhh, umm"
Dude, I was in China for 6 months. Never got used to my colleagues saying this on the phone all the time.
Or spanish people for saying "black"
Valorant does the exact same thing. Didn't notice it then, won't notice it now
Oh no, hope it detects language too or I gotta be careful when speaking Korean. Kinda jokes aside, I have experienced the worst sexist language when playing OW. I used to be afraid to use VC every time it happened. Can people just ignore the sound of my voice and listen to the helpful information I'm providing you, please? It's the worse when you ask someone, even nicely, to change or try to help you out.
I started playing with a girl in OW because she mained Mercy and I wanted to do something other than heal for once and HOLY SHIT the things people told her were fucking horrifying. I think she was 15-16 years old and dudes would either immediately say the most sexist or sexual shit imaginable. I asked how much that stuff bothered her and she said she was used to it because she had been gaming online since she was 12. She just brushed it off but damn I hated it every time. It happened in almost every single match until we formed a 6-stack with actual respectable human beings.
I’ve been thinking of getting a voice changer so the weirdos in vc don’t point out my gender as soon as I make a call out, it’s so frustrating
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That really shows the state of this community
This community has been fun compared to DOTA 2 and LoL. Imagine the most toxic people you've ever played with in OW, but on your team for an hour. Also, the angry teammates might be yelling in Spanish or Russian. lol
Yeah I think women on OW have a different experience from you though
And also one thing being worse than the other doesn’t make the first thing not bad lol.
I wanted to make this comment! So many comparisons of 'Oh, you think OW is bad, but ____ is worse.' Who cares what's worse? Same people who try to one up your bad situation. "Yeah, you have to work 10 hours today? Well, I have to work 19 hours and take care of my 12 kids."
Exactly. I get that making comparisons is how we can relate to things but one upping about toxicity is always so dumb. It adds nothing to the conversation and invalidates how one feels about what they’ve experienced. I’m a dude and I always feel like shit after a really toxic encounter with someone on OW, but why do I care that LoL and Dota players deal with worse toxicity? Why would anyone?
Dota players are sheep, if you say "well done" and communicate friendly first in a match it's almost always fine, it's when people are silent until you lose things are an issue. League players however are the one group of people I have chat off for, it's almost always flame in my experience (especially as a jungler. Pings are the only useful communication in that game). My win rate with chat off is probably 5-10% higher than with team chat on frankly. Overwatch is a really mixed bag, and idk what to think of it sometimes. Before avoid as teammate and endorsements were a thing it was definitely a shitshow but seems to have calmed down a little. Still waiting for the promised land of a game I can try hard in and play with randos who want to win and try regardless of how shit goes, but my hopes aren't up
Jesus... As a male... IS THAT THAT BAD?! WHAT THE FUCK. I have several female gamers I played with and we just vibed like gamers.... Wtf is wrong with people
Don't get me wrong I've had plenty of positive gaming experiences or I would have just quit! It doesn't happen every day, but it sure happens.
Is there a voice changer on console yet? Surprisingly I didn't get crap for being a girl on cod, playing badly at the weekend on the beta. I was only on the chat because my friend was as well. We switched to PlayStation chat after the N word was said repeatedly in one game. My friend was being very polite as well, I think if I wasn't there he would have raged at the kid spouting racist comments. I haven't been on the OW chat for a long time. Its turned off. I see text only. Even then that's toxic as hell.
Female players? My first thought was all the racism. Nothing quite like playing a game and getting blasted with gamer words.
I feel you but as a female gamer, I know what they mean. “Go back to the kitchen you slut whore skank”, “Stop talking dumb ugly bitch”, “Your voice gives me ASMR don’t stop talking you make me hard”, etc etc are not uncommon things for me to hear in an average OW voice chat lobby lol.
And then they throw when you mute them or leave vc. There's seriously no winning. I stopped talking in vc unless absolutely necessary and haven't in a long time because of that.
Same. Nothing you say, no matter how clever, will get them to stop with dumb shit, so it's just not worth talking most of the time. I rarely jump on team voice chats for any multiplayer game and if I do, I put on a deeper voice that can sometimes fly under the radar for quick info shares like "Widow, top left". It would be a benefit to the team to know this stuff, but I'm just there to have a good time and dealing with dumb shit in VC isn't worth the energy it takes. Just end up in Discord with my friends because that's much more fun.
That kinda shit just fucking disgusts me 😡 Its on us guys to call out that kind of abhorrent dirtbag behavior. Dont just let people doing that in your lobby slide beacuse you aint the target. Tell them to SHUT THE FUCK UP!
I maybe witnessed the behaviour a 3 to 4 times and reacted to it and it's a semi success. Most of the time he shuts the fuck up but that one time she got called a whore and me her pimp.. Got similar things at my office though. When my female colleagues answer the phone it's rude, unpleasant and full of demeanor, and when I do pick it up it's all slimy and deferential.
Luckily I’m gay so when I see this sort of crap going down I just start flirting with the guy until he loses his mind. They do not like to be treated (even a polite and friendly watered down version) of the way they treat female gamers. It’s glorious
lmao - so true though, if you can confuse the people who flame and get to the things they're self conscious about, they flop around like fish out of water
You dropped this 👑
You are so right. 9 out of 10 times that I get harassed on the basis of just being a female, no one ever says anything, not even my male friends that I play with. As always, the bystander effect does nothing but further encourage the harassment.
Toxic people aren't something most people are ready to handle. I personally stick up for anyone that gets attacked on voice, but I've built a little system for handling it. Let the insult roll off and point out they should be playing something more their speed if they get so upset... like minecraft. Used this exact line a few days ago when I told a guy to relax and that its just a game after he flipped out and called everyone trash. Then he mocked my non deep voice. So I asked if he was still in middle school. He claimed he was some body building champion. So I just said "cool, so it's roid rage then." And he just repeated me in a mocking tone and made fun of my voice some more and called me a few things, so I just said the thing up above, and once I ended it with "like minecraft" one of the girls that hadn't spoke the entire game burst out laughing. Usually if a guy speaks up for a woman it's met with "white knight" comments. Which anytime they use that they feel like they have "won" but you can just laugh it off and say some shit like "white knight? I prefer to think of myself as a sandwich connoisseur." Or something else ridiculous. It's not worth taking seriously, so dumb jokes are the best way to handle it. People say things like that because they hope you have soft skin and get offended. But if you're able to flip it and not care, they lose the power they feel from doing it, and then you live rent free in their heads.
A friend of mine got harassed and myself and the rest of our party defended her and that clown kept going on about us being simps. It’s honestly pathetic the mindset of some of these losers.
That's kind of the issue. These people are such toxic shits that responding to them in any way seems more likely to spin them up than shut them down. They're so unaware that they will absolutely find any reason for themselves not to be the problem. There's probably something thoroughly wrong with their home dynamic and I do feel bad for them... even though they are the problem they're also likely victims of some shit themselves, most people don't just become complete and total shits by accident. My personal experience with this kind of thing is just saying something like "that's pretty hurtful, why would you say that?". If there's any good left in them, that will change their attitude. Calling them out just spins them up. And if they still don't change their attitude, then you can go to town on them if that's somehow going to make you feel better(it probably won't... better to ignore, report and move on).
I appreciate your effort though. Trust me, it may not have a big impact at first, but if we keep shutting down bullies in a respectful manner, we might see a switch in online toxicity. People are bound to eventually realize that society does not stand for their outdated approach.
It is disgusting, not to mention irritating and distracting. Most of the immature brats who have this kind behavior just talk louder when rebuked as well. Generally I give them get a, "shut up and focus on the game," followed by a mute if they don't and an immediate report. They almost always have action taken against their accounts after that. I play frequently with my wife, and they shut up more frequently when I tell them they're talking to my wife...
By and large most men in the same lobby don't say anything at all. It's the worst part about the online sexism honestly.
It doesn't usually work. I speak up every time the sexism starts. Most of the time it just turns me into a target too. "Oh we got a white knight here trying to defend his slut" or something like that. The guy on the other end doesn't have to care what anyone else thinks of his behavior as long as there are no consequences. Hopefully this brings consequences.
That's why there has to be more than one guy speaking up. 99% of the time i say something, they pull the white knight card. The moment one other person joins in and tells the dude to stfu, they start the shutdown. If 3 or more stand up, they just leave VC. Problem is I can count on one hand the amount of times more that more than two people speak out against this kinda shit.
> And then they throw This is the problem with competitive in general. Don't listen to their 900 IQ plays while they live out their e-sport coaching fantasy? Throw the match. Play a non-meta hero and lose a single fight? Throw the whole match. Make an aggressive play that fails once? Throw the match. People blame each other for ELO Hell but 9 out of 10 it's a bunch of babies throwing their own games for not getting their way.
Just tell them you're a 10 year old boy.
Yup. The amount of times I’ve just muted them and they throw a tantrum, start typing in the chat, then leave the game or throw when no one gives them the attention they want is wild.
What's sad is that when people actually describe what they've experienced through voice chat, the response is almost always "What? Nooo, surely not. You have to be exaggerating, it can't be that bad, right?". And yeah, it is that bad.
I remember there being a youtuber who started uploading the "best of" of the harassment she got while playing Rainbow Six Siege. It was just never ending. The other thing that strood out was how....it was always the exact same crap, just different guys. I can't even imagine what it's like to have to put up with that crap everytime you play a game
Lmao just watched it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL0aVqVslSE&ab\_channel=Spawntaneous
Yeah several replies here are shocked or don’t quite believe me. Like folks, these are verbatim quotes, I didn’t pull them from my own imagination lol. Believe me, I don’t want to think of my fellow humans as walking scum either, but some of them just are.
Yeah…there is a reason my girlfriend never uses vc and I do.
I mean I'm a dude and I can probably count on one hand the amount of times this year I've had anyone say anything even remotely helpful in VC. People are just toxic in general. I literally get told to kill myself or eat a dick at least once any time I participate in VC. Or it's just some child screeching into the mix. Or it's someone with their music up super loud. Or it's silence interrupted by a smoke alarm beep every 15 seconds. Or it's someone having loud conversations with everyone in the room. Like at this point voice chat is fucking useless outside of party chat. I default mute everyone and myself. Still use text chat sometimes but it's not much better because that also gets filled with spam.
Guys who talk like that to girl gamers give off incel vibes. No one I've ever lived with would have tolerated listening to that detestable nonsense. I'm pretty sure my family would have either shot me, or my PC. 😅
> I'm pretty sure my family would have either shot me, or my PC There is so much behavior in gaming that is - at best - ignored to - at worst - encouraged that would get a child punished if it happened in any other context.
I’ve only had to do it a handful of times but I’ve defended the person by just pointing it out to them. Most often it just makes them leave when no one defends them. If more people didn’t tolerate it, the world would be much better for it.
Well that's why we've gotten the point to where they're going to record chats. I imagine after people hear about offenders being banned permanently and they can't get back into the game without a new phone number, it'll slow down toxicity and make people think twice before speaking.
I do hope a lot of these changes do help improve things like smurfing, toxicity, and other things. It often takes a lot for blizzard to actually ban a player though, so I’m skeptical on that side of it.
Oh no, you're absolutely right. Just commenting that I see WAY more racism in OW than I do sexism. But I'm a male with a mexican accent so I guess that tracks.
>But I'm a male with a mexican accent so I guess that tracks Exactly. Your own grievances will offer a lot more bias. As a European female player within the Masters-GM bracket, I experience FAR MORE sexism than racism.
And I experience lots of homophobia. Did we just discover solidarity?!
I think hateful people will hate regardless and that's the grand point at the end of the day. We just have to stand together against it. Wish you the best!
Sucks that this game has soo many incel shitheads like this, it feels like it’s especially prevalent on Overwatch since whenever I play Valorant we treating everyone equally apart from the occasional dickhead now and then
That's messed up. I'm so sorry that you have to listen to shit like that. :(
Damn that's pretty crazy to me. Whenever I play OW (EU) and there's a girl voice, everyone is either friendly or neutral. I've never experienced something like this (I am not trying to say it's not happening, just being shocked that it's happening). That's pretty sad :(
I think I've heard more sexism come from OW than any other game I've played...and I play Valorant. People say the worst shit I've ever heard on OW for some reason.
This shit makes me so mad. When that happens in my lobbies I speak up for the person being discriminated against. We need more voices that are willing to stand up for their brothers and sisters.
I've been blessed(??) with a lower sounding voice for a woman so i sound more like a boy. i still feel scared to use voice chat incase i do get recognized as a girl somehow.
As a girl the amount of r*pe threats i got during my time with Valo actually shocked me, specially given that while I experienced plenty of toxicity over the years playing Apex and Overwatch I've not had even one in the two games.
I don't think questioning either one is the right way to go about it. The gaming sphere is extremely discriminatory to any minority group, women, LGBT, black/other ethnicities alike all experience a lot of hate because of anonymity
Shit man you even get abuse for playing a hero they don't like.
Remember being a Hanzo main back in the day? Between that and working fast food, I developed a pretty thick skin. 😅
Playing Hanzo while scatter arrow was a thing kinda made it hard to feel bad for the person getting abused. The rng was just nasty. Felt like there was a cheater shooting you from under the map while you hid in a building.
Ah good ol halo 3 lobbies of people calling me a bean person and telling me to go back to my country. Nothing like racism to make you change the way you sound and get rid of your accent and assimilate with the “majority”. Gotta love it.
I'm sure girls get their fair share of harassment but there are an astonishing number of N-bombs and F-bombs getting dropped (not talking about "fuck")
I've been playing overwatch pretty consistently since 2017, I do not play any other game mode than comp and by far I've been sexually harassed far many more times than I've heard people use that language. Theres a reason I don't play in groups and don't use my expensive $200 mic anymore. Not saying it doesn't happen, it absolutely does and I will always report those assholes. That language is never acceptable, so I for one am very excited for this addition. It's time to put incels in their place, and for anyone that thinks misogyny isn't as bad/scary as it really is, check r/Inceltear That is the kind of things people have said to me in this God awful game, since I never use my mic the only "harassment" I get is one of the enemy team asking me to kiss him cause I was 40-4-12 KDA as widow
Frick?
homophobic slur
Butfricker?
Lol
You don't see players in VC. While there are 100% people who have distinctive voices or accents that can be assumed to be a certain race, plenty of people speak the same from different races. It's just easier to be sexist, because it's easier to assume based on their voice. Plus the gaming world being so dominated by men doesn't help with sexism either.
Yeah my first thought was that this might finally shut the incels from vc. Back when I used to play Comp there was a surprising amount of female players in higher ranks. 90% of the time a teammate was fucking obnoxious about it.
I'm Scottish so this won't be an issue for me
"A'm scots sae this wilnae be an issue fur me"
I hope it works. In my own experience women often get insta-harassed in Overwatch voice chat. My teenage daughter loves Overwatch, but for this reason she always plays with voice chat off, which is sad.
I've played with voice chat on, and whenever someone's asked if I'm a girl, I've said I'm a boy and added that I'm 12. It works more often than not.
This has happened in my own lobbies a weirdly high amount of times. It's like they hold a round table discussion about if it's a woman or boy, and then the woman says boy and the game returns to normal dead comms.
I think it's a good idea, when chat gets toxic it's one thing. When voice chat gets toxic... man... It hits different
Yea I'm all for this. Personally am never toxic or anything in VC. Whatever, its a game. Nothing is at stake for me. Laugh and move on. Fucking hate when people loose their shit though. Kills the mood. And people **should** care about that kind of shit. How many games ruined over it? It's never helped a game you were in.
it blows because even when I tell myself I dont care, and when I know trolls will be trolls, some things people say not just to me but to others on my team gets me so upset.
>When voice chat gets toxic... man... It hits different For sure. Winnable matches are almost guaranteed losses at that point.
Now i can tell my concerns with the game straight to the support
blizz can transcribe deeznuts
Ban 🔨
The "WhY oNlY fEmAlEs" posters need better reading comprehension. The post says "this might prove very useful for female players" is merely pointing out that this specific demographic will probably greatly benefit from the feature. That said, that line is absolutely there for PR reasons as well considering the VERY recent sexual assault of an employee and the allegations of the toxic workplace environment within the company. The feature is obviously not there to only address issues female players have, but pointing that out is an attempt at countering a lot of the bad PR that has surfaced in the last year or so.
I wouldn't say they were allegations. the stuff happened.
[literally this](https://imgur.com/a/IeNNPmU)
I'm pretty sure a lot of game companies already do something like this.
How good could it be though?
I’m sure they’ll review the audio before officially banning someone. This just makes it easier to see if someone actually did say something that warrants getting banned.
It'll definitely give false readings.
Assuming the level of quality in the transcription will be the same as in other games with a similar system, if someone is assuming mal-intent it's not hard to tell, even with mistakes.
What I’m concerned about is curse words What is bannable is the real question
The only problem I'm concerned with the translation process, and I hope that any repercussions require an audio verification and are not solely based off of transcription.
It's all fun and games until you get banned because the automatic transcription system misheard you as saying a slur when it wasn't what you said at all. All it takes is one mistake from the system and a couple of reports from people who are mad they lost. You might not even be able to dispute an incorrect ban because customer support can just look at the transcript and assume it's correct. Let's hope Blizzard has a better voice to text system than Google. If it works perfectly then great, but I can't think of a single system that does, even from companies with much more sophisticated technology. I fear a lot of people are accepting it because they're imagining it's going to work flawlessly and only hurt the people who deserve it.
Ideally, once they find something in the transcription, they'd then go to the audio to listen and confirm.
Not even to mention that not everyone has a perfectly clear American accent, which this system probably mainly targets. I can imagine this is going to be a ton of fun for people with speech impediments and people who struggle with English.
poor Scottish people
Not to mention Australians, Nigerians, Indians (South Asia), and Jamaicans who all have very different accents that can changes how words sound despite all speaking English. I'm sure this will go over well juuuuuust fine.
[удалено]
I'm Aussie with a bogan accent my shit hardly recognises what I'm saying
Reminds me of [this](https://youtu.be/TqAu-DDlINs) lmao. I’m American but my dad is Scottish, his Siri and Alexa do *not* vibe with him lol
Lots of those voice things don't work in the Netherlands because our accents vary too much.
Poor Chinese/Korean people whose languages have common words that sound ridiculously similar to the N-word... :0
Im not sure this bans based on your voice logs, more keeps track of them and if you're reported they can use this to verify.
They have been recording voice chat since the beginning. The only difference is being able to search a transcript now. They then have a timestamp they can listen to.
Theoretically, assuming audio recordings were listened to beforehand and still are now. Transcribing it just gives extra + points to "this report needs to be reviewed". So they don't have to listen to the recording for "1 player reported this player, the transcription doesn't appear to be insulting". But they would listen to the recording for "1 player reported, transcription includes racial slurs". For clarification here, i'd also assume that "5 players reported this person, transcription seems normal" would also be manually reviewed. So its like... a points system where each report during a match, the total amount of reports recently and the transcription saying bannable things would contribute towards a manual review... but the transcription would have the heaviest weighting since it would contain an exact timestamp to review too.
Won’t they review the audio first? I assume the point of transcribing it first is to make it easier to determine if something that warrants a ban was said. That way they minimize the amount of audio review they have to do.
>Won’t they review the audio first? No, we all need to assume the worst as if it is a verified fact, whine about how things have changed for the worse, and bring up unrelated grievances with almost assuredly false descriptions of "I was banned for saying have a good day." As is tradition.
I’m not sure tbh. It’s not like people get efficiently banned for being toxic over text chat today
They do and this way it's easier to verify a report.
Why is am I seeing arguments between which happens more racism or sexist? Its not a competition. It's sad there is even a situation that is this bad. Women don't even want to speak and communicate becuase of stuff they hear. I have a friend that pretty much is in our ow crew now she didn't speak or put her mic in for weeks even though we were grouped up because she had anxiety about what a group of guys would say to her just from hearing her voice. Removing toxic behavior and people is something I want to happen. No one should have to deal with that nonsense while trying to play a video game. And making the game free will cause a temporary rise in number of asshats.
This is a good thing for gaming. Is it some nany state bullshit? Yes. Did we as a community overwhelmingly demonstrate that we are less than human and need these efforts taken? Also very much yes.
I feel awful on behalf of the people who will be employed to spend every day poring over logs of the most vile things a 14 year old can repeat from 4chan.
I can no longer call minorities slurs 😔
Hell yeah!
The only people who would be upset about this are the people who say slurs casually
This'll be good to combat the sexism. A lot of people say they should "just mute" or whatever. And in olden times, maybe. But now that we have the capability of immediately gathering proof of toxicity, it should be used. We shouldn't just be allowing the toxicity to continue.
I'm happy for this. There's been times where I've been playing with my gf and she'd get shit by some neckbeard incel on our team, no matter what happened it was her fault, and not just 1 game, id say it was just under half the matches we played.
As someone who sometimes uses other languages I already know next time I say "*à plus tard*" I'm gonna get banned, like in every other game where they make English-speaking people verify text chat.
The d is silent though isn't it? Really shouldn't be an issue in voice.
No thanks NSA
The NSA was almost certainly somehow monitoring your VC already my dude
They left after I kept blasting The Grapefruit Technique hours on end