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Your discord is full of toxicity
violets
Member
Hey friends, this game sounds like everything I’ve ever wanted in an MMORPG and I’m ridiculously excited for it. The forums look cool too, and I’m not including them in what I’m saying here.
Some background: as a normal adult human, I’m not into racism, sexism, transphobia, and general hate/dog whistles that the internet is saturated with. I’m a woman playing online games for 17 years, so I’m pretty familiar with being treated like an alien at best and a harassment opportunity at worst, I still just play games anyway. I’m hype for the game, but I’m not going to engage with the community on discord. Most people who decide not to engage with a community won’t bother making a post about it, so you’ll never know who you’re driving away or why.
All of these examples happened in less than 48 hours:
- someone created a “jihad” themed guild with a man wearing a turban as the emoji. People in voice laughed about it.
- I mentioned that in-game VoIP is fun, but difficult for women to use because of how they’re treated by strangers. Others immediately insisted that that harassment doesn’t actually happen and that “simping” is a bigger problem. Eventually a mod decided that talking about misogyny is against the rules (???) which, bit of advice, won’t make your misogyny problem disappear.
- I suggested that more freedom in character creation would be fun, and was told “there’s only two genders”, along with other transphobic dogwhistles like “if you don’t accept yourself, why should I accept you?” Keep in mind I never said a single word about trans people or my identity before that point, people are just so transphobic by default that they are desperate to bring it up for any reason they can find.
- Memes shared about nutting in women and calling them dirty sluts and worse are not hard to find
- A certain group of people will cry when they hear this, but Pepe the frog is a hate symbol now and many, many people recognize it as such. Most of those people aren’t gonna talk in a space where that’s acceptable. They’re just not. You can agree with it or not, but that’s the reality.
- I watched another person arguing that we shouldn’t encourage toxicity get called a carebear and a “fucking halfwit.”
I saw that there was a dev discussion about toxicity back in August, and I’d really appreciate an update on any dev team thoughts about this. Most normal human adults are not going to have fun in this environment when they just want to talk about the game..when they come in and see this, what are they going to think your community is about? When I hear 10 men in a discord laughing about creating a “terrorist” guild named al qaeda, that tells me something about the people who have come to make up the community.
Right now, you have the type of community in discord that a huge group of people will not be comfortable engaging in. You should probably do something about it, because if you don’t actively work to promote inclusivity, it won’t exist. It’d be nice to see a statement from Margaret or Steven about it - not just a blanket “hey sexism is bad,” but specifics of how you want the out-of-game community to treat each other. Point out that saying “well it’s the internet so we can be toxic, get over it snowflake!!” is not what you want for your community. If you think we don’t need to respect each other because it’s a pvp game, it’d be nice if you made that clear too. At the very least, don’t bother responding with “just report it to a mod, we don’t tolerate that.” The mods were present for most of this, and they DO tolerate that. Often social pressure and the awareness that the group is not ok with toxicity is enough to get most people to leave it out of discord, but if there’s no official stance, then there’s no pressure. You should be aware that games are very often not a welcoming place for anyone who isn’t a white man, and you have an opportunity to do something different with Ashes.
Some background: as a normal adult human, I’m not into racism, sexism, transphobia, and general hate/dog whistles that the internet is saturated with. I’m a woman playing online games for 17 years, so I’m pretty familiar with being treated like an alien at best and a harassment opportunity at worst, I still just play games anyway. I’m hype for the game, but I’m not going to engage with the community on discord. Most people who decide not to engage with a community won’t bother making a post about it, so you’ll never know who you’re driving away or why.
All of these examples happened in less than 48 hours:
- someone created a “jihad” themed guild with a man wearing a turban as the emoji. People in voice laughed about it.
- I mentioned that in-game VoIP is fun, but difficult for women to use because of how they’re treated by strangers. Others immediately insisted that that harassment doesn’t actually happen and that “simping” is a bigger problem. Eventually a mod decided that talking about misogyny is against the rules (???) which, bit of advice, won’t make your misogyny problem disappear.
- I suggested that more freedom in character creation would be fun, and was told “there’s only two genders”, along with other transphobic dogwhistles like “if you don’t accept yourself, why should I accept you?” Keep in mind I never said a single word about trans people or my identity before that point, people are just so transphobic by default that they are desperate to bring it up for any reason they can find.
- Memes shared about nutting in women and calling them dirty sluts and worse are not hard to find
- A certain group of people will cry when they hear this, but Pepe the frog is a hate symbol now and many, many people recognize it as such. Most of those people aren’t gonna talk in a space where that’s acceptable. They’re just not. You can agree with it or not, but that’s the reality.
- I watched another person arguing that we shouldn’t encourage toxicity get called a carebear and a “fucking halfwit.”
I saw that there was a dev discussion about toxicity back in August, and I’d really appreciate an update on any dev team thoughts about this. Most normal human adults are not going to have fun in this environment when they just want to talk about the game..when they come in and see this, what are they going to think your community is about? When I hear 10 men in a discord laughing about creating a “terrorist” guild named al qaeda, that tells me something about the people who have come to make up the community.
Right now, you have the type of community in discord that a huge group of people will not be comfortable engaging in. You should probably do something about it, because if you don’t actively work to promote inclusivity, it won’t exist. It’d be nice to see a statement from Margaret or Steven about it - not just a blanket “hey sexism is bad,” but specifics of how you want the out-of-game community to treat each other. Point out that saying “well it’s the internet so we can be toxic, get over it snowflake!!” is not what you want for your community. If you think we don’t need to respect each other because it’s a pvp game, it’d be nice if you made that clear too. At the very least, don’t bother responding with “just report it to a mod, we don’t tolerate that.” The mods were present for most of this, and they DO tolerate that. Often social pressure and the awareness that the group is not ok with toxicity is enough to get most people to leave it out of discord, but if there’s no official stance, then there’s no pressure. You should be aware that games are very often not a welcoming place for anyone who isn’t a white man, and you have an opportunity to do something different with Ashes.
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This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Communities, whether online or in real life, can be diverse and contain many different ideas and backgrounds. Some of the practices/opinions of others we may disagree with, but so long as they act within the bounds of our code of conduct, they are welcome to express themselves.
I encourage you to record and report any actions from others to the moderators, in addition to using the mute/ignore features ❤️
That said, the community is growing larger. Right now I reckon there are close to 20,000 people on the Ashes discord. When you have that many people congregating together there will be a wide range of opinions, cultures and mentalities. And yes in a group that large there will always be idiots who don't think before they bring their hands out of their pants to type rubbish in the chat.