I WANT TO EAT THIS THREAD AND SPIT IT OUT AS BULLETS.

Well, as soon as Ben made AoS he put it on 4chan so...

There's one terrible community mystery solved.

If I'm not accused of hacking by some nub at least once per match I start to think something's wrong...

I don't cheat, buddy, I just learned my trade on the Railgun in Quake 2, and boy is it paying off.

It's all fun and games until that rager takes down their team's intel tower.
I don't mind the chat but from my experience people like that have no respect for other's work or the team and grief at a moment's notice.

yea

In a 3D voxel sandbox? Not very likely, but hilarious if raging does occur.

Hey he wrote us a book :)

Good topic. Raging, like cheating and griefing, is something that both the game design and the community has to address. We should talk about it seriously. :)

The game can help by enforcing the structure of teamplay such that cooperation has a strong positive association with victory, while destructive behavior can be easily ignored, reversed, or punished. Good players should feel meaningful even if their team is incompetent.

The community can help by emphasizing accessibility and newbie helping, giving room to diverse opinions, and restricting the competitive urges to appropriate venues.

For an example of a game genre that has a terrible community because of its design, I would point to DotA and clones(LoL, HoN). The game is lengthy (typically 30-60 minutes), structured heavily a specific win/lose outcome, and good or bad play has a snowballing effect in the later stages because of the effects of experience gains and build strategies. Winning the game requires a team "as good as its weakest link," and because the number of strategies is enormous, it's very difficult to coordinate usefully during a pub match. Lastly, there's a strong positive feedback around killing opponents, which leads many players to believe that K/D ratio is the best way to measure skill; alas, only one or two players on a team of 5 can reasonably achieve a huge K/D in a single game, while the others are in various supporting roles.

The net result is that people rage all the time, and mostly at their own team, which is the worst kind of rage. Solving the problem would require extensive revision of the basic game design.

Rage is not nearly as bad in most FPS games because the rage is mostly confined to "that guy keeps killing me," while "my team sucks" runs a distant second. However I think there are things we can do to combat it within AoS:

For example, custom maps like the ones I am making actually counteract griefing and its associated rage, because all the effort of a grief gets wiped out when the map resets. And as such, the brief 0.3x era we had, where people used speedhacks to level the entire map, is over. Similarly, the emergence of "build servers" has helped confine the freeform in-game building to an appropriate venue, while players elsewhere are now playing "as intended" and are mostly making small fortifications. Those who want more elaborate and lasting structures can go to a build server or work on a custom map.

Giving power to server admins also helps the community, since it allows the admins to run their own sub-communities as they see fit. It has the side effects of making the game play differently everywhere and occasionally encouraging elite cliques, but if we want to encourage a centralized competitive game, there could also be regular official tournaments, ladders, etc.

It won't be easy to make the AoS community great, but I think it can be done, as long as Ben works with us :)

Hahahaha ikr same here

im always like
U mad bro?

I agree they funny i love it when the get mad at you and then just leave

We've all had them. Hell, we've all BEEN them at least once in our gametime. Even I consider myself quite the Rage Artiste. This topic is just a general question to the public of AoS: What's your opinion towards them? Hilarious? A burden to the server? Not a bother until the racism starts? Please voice yourselves, just out of my personal curiosity.

Personally, I think they're hysterical. By this I mean I don't laugh AT them for being a rager, I think everything they say just makes the game better because I'm cracking up all the time at their beastly anger voiced over text. Any game is better with at least one rager... They're not bad people at all, it's just I love watching people going over the brink, especially when I'm being the rager too. Who DOESN'T love watching a person lose every scrap of their civility and just let the guy who headshotted him get wailed on for being "teh gay"

(For a reference, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkI4DdKKqws)