http://i.imgur.com/DIqDWG6.jpg

because its a solution not an issue

also yeah thats how you get over suicide

I know, right? I don't even think we need suicide hotlines when all you need to do is just stop being suicidal.

That's a dank meme and I don't know how the English language works.

To be clear, are you saying that comp players being rude to pub players is a solution, not an issue?

Yeah, and obviously the process is as quick and painless as flipping an internal switch to the "Don't be suicidal" setting, right?

How can a grown man possibly be this naive?

this thread has now turned into talk about suicide, we've reached threat level aids bring in the nuke

im not here to help people not kill themselves, im here to play tf2.

let's keep this on topic please.

look i support everything you've said in this thread but please don't slaughter your prepositions like this

Yeah I'm not sure why I tried using "whom". I'm pretty bad at knowing when to use it.

Anyway I'm sick and need to sleep and this thread isn't going anywhere so I'm just gonna dip out

ok i'm about to get REALLY off topic, but i'm pretty sure "whom" is for the direct object of the sentence, and in "to whom is it referring to?", the picture is the subject and "whom" is the object.

anyway this thread is dead, nobody seems to support any idea that would encourage people to join competitive tf2 so there's not a whole lot to discuss

tf2 and tftv is a big enough game/community to attract douches but its also small in comparsion to other games so they have more of an impact and are memorable. its like a small town compared to other games' big cities. ppl remember "toxic" people cause they arent the norm and also there just arent that many people. ppl can also remember beefs and hold grudges from shit talkers in the tiny (in comparision) amount of actual competetive content played easier

other communities like cs and hltv are just so big that itsa given that every single thread and game will contain shitposting/talking or a troll or dickhead or cheater so you just kind of tune it out

sorry for bumperino

After reading paragraphs of peoples' comments,

I wanted to state, that I know that there is an enormous amount of people who probably spent countless hours on TF2 and have a great deal of dedication, to which have a legitimate care for their friends, and for the love of game of TF2; which i think is an awesome thing to see and promotes the unity of a community. :)

Although, people in general can be duplicitous or two faced as you will, there will always be a few bad apples where ever you go in game or in the world.

With that being said, i don't think the team-fortress 2 community could EVER reach the level of toxicity as other communities; since i believe there are more good apples in this community.

The Team Fortress 2 community is a great community, if given the chance to shine**. :)

The funniest part of this thread is how you guys are interpreting each other's arguments in a different way than intended and then say that argument is wrong.

I think people need motivation, they need to see the "diamond in the rough" like meb said, usually when people see crazy kills from fragmovies/montages they say "jesus man that was crazy i wish i could do that" so they get interested in the game, actually that was the reason I started playing comp games years ago, the problem is that in TF2 is not easy to turn that "i wish i could do that" to "i WANT to do that/i WILL do that" because new people normally don't know where to start, there's no matchmaking, a lot of them will surely get kicked out of the lobbies if they try tf2center, most of them don't have contacts to ask about 6s, most of them don't know about tftv and I'm pretty sure most of them are lazy fucks who can't write "tf2 competitive" in google.

People need a place to start not only with info like playcomp.tf but a place where they can actually start to play.

If they play pubs and they like it they will probably stay in the pub side of the game but if we show them what you can do when you git gud at this game (or when you have 2000 hours of mge) then maybe they will want to surpass themselves and get that "i WANT to do that" idea, or they will lost their lives playing mge 24/7.

Those are my thoughts.

TL;DR: dust off your window movie maker nerds

I hear 'Losing your life in mge' and all i see is this: http://www.twitch.tv/saamaas/c/5035394

This one goes out to the thread...or the game...take your pick

That and how the thread became a bit toxic itself. Also I hope stabby's words don't leave such a huge impact on the tf2 community.

Whether or not Ruwin made a mistake on stream and didn't own up to it, the vitriolic nature and exponentially-growing intensity of the reaction to Ruwin's stream perfectly represents the toxicity of this community. That other communities are just as much or more toxic than TF2's community is not the type of excuse your mother/teacher/therapist/mentor would accept in any other circumstance so why should we accept it here? That the toxicity comes from a small, vocal minority of the community doesn't mean the toxicity isn't impactful, because: emphasis on "vocal." Whether or not Ruwin could have had a thicker skin, the loud, vitriolic feedback to a streamer who primarily attempted to use his stream to be entertaining and helpful did likely cause him to stop streaming (with the excuse being "he was mean one time so we can open the floodgates of meanness to him", ignoring the amicability of 99% of Ruwin's stream). That's less viewers being entertained and educated by a TF2 stream. That's a simple, obvious loss to the community.

And for what? A mistake unrepresentative of Ruwin's stream as a whole? (The way I perceive it, people here reacted the way they did, not because Ruwin did what he did, but because it was an excuse to join in a ganging-up of Ruwin and to levy insults about his stream that had nothing directly to do with what he did.)

If tf.tv could at least admit it reacted disproportionately to what Ruwin did instead of dropping the point that "Ruwin was mean on stream" as if that settled the matter, I would believe posters here when they say the reaction to Ruwin's stream wasn't the community being toxic, but I'm inclined to believe the point is rather a disingenuous excuse born of the same obliviousness to how assholishness here often takes a memetic nature (ironic considering the primary genuine criticism of Ruwin's stream) that grows fast to become the prevailing view of the vocal community which is evident in other places of this forum. For example, railing on the HL classes is allowed (even in threads where a new poster is asking a simple question) because "it's funny" and "how we do things here." It doesn't have to be. It's blatant elitism born of the same thing all elitism is born of: a desire to feel special. Stabby-Stabby being downvoted heavily in every thread here is a fault of tf.tv, not something inevitably to be expected. There's a time and place for everything, even HL jokes/ribbing. It's not like the forum is drowning in threads that it can't tolerate noob questions.

That may all seem small in the grand scheme of things, but assholishness from a small, vocal minority is "why we can't have nice things" all the time. They add up. They have indirect negative effects on things. They have subtle, almost unnoticeable effects on things. 99/100 times an instance of assholishness would be better if it didn't exist, even if minimally. Arguably, the effects are magnified if the community is small.

The memetic assholishness here is seen and it does turn people off from the comp scene (and popular streamers too apparently). That should be enough of an argument that the assholishness should stop. It shouldn't have be a prevailing reason TF2 "is dying" for it to stop, or even a significant reason. Competitiveness can be fine, especially in a forum largely centered around comp tf2. Ribbing can be fine. Trash talking can be fine. But being competitive towards nooby posters or entire classes in this game obviously establishes an audible voice in this forum which is against growing the comp scene. The argument that "those with thin skins wouldn't make it to the top anyway" doesn't cut it because 1) that ain't true (I don't know the extent of Ruwin's thin skin but he should at least provide a simple demonstration of how a thin skinned person in this or that way can have a thick enough skin to get good at this game once they commit themselves to it), and 2) the comp scene is always going to have "top" players so long as it exists at all, but it's not always going to have numbers. No matter how good b4nny or clockwork is at the game, the quality of their gameplay is not going to generate and maintain leagues and lans; convince valve to give a shit about comp TF2; etc. You need numbers. Being assholes to new posters or to streamers shouldn't be par for the course. You don't need to look at how things are done in other communities to settle that debate within yourself.

optimize, i agree with you! My only problem is how you fix that. People who act like assholes simply don't care about others, so it's not like they're just gonna "oh ok i'll be more respectful." I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

In virtually every large-enough group setting (e.g. forums) there are assholes and shitposters (not-assholes in nature who act like assholes in group for the "luls" and/or to troll and/or to fit in, thereby effectively being assholes). Tf.tv is going to have its share of that. But there are examples of systemic/institutionalized assholism here that tf.tv and/or the community can get rid of.

For example, not every forum so easily mocks noobs/ignorant posters. Many forums do, but not every one does. Do we really want a major hub of the comp TF2 scene to be one that does (insofar as tf.tv is not a (or the) major hub of the TF2 comp scene, hostility to noobs isn't helping). Tf.tv resembles 4chan in how it treats certain thing such as noob questions/comments and HL-class-related questions/comments: memetic insults That's not inevitable. That can stop and it should be encouraged to stop. The forum is small enough that simply being one less person who hops on the HL-railing train derails it a little bit.

The problem here isn't individual instances of assholism. It's assholism trains. The Ruwin incident reaction was an assholism train. Minus-fragging stabby-stabby into oblivion is an assholism train.

The people who join these trains aren't generally "people who...simply don't care about others." Their problem is trying to fit in with the hive. Talking about the hivemind assholism, accepting it exists, and discouraging it is the best way to deal with that. That and/or perhaps perhaps creating anti-assholism trains. Most people don't care one way or the other how we treat noobs for example, so if you're just another voice saying "don't be hostile to noobs" you'll bring some people to your side. You'll be accused of being too "hugbox-y" by some but you're being more reasonable by discouraging of excess, inappropriate competitiveness/ribbing/insults. Not everywhere is the place for those sorts of things.

Maybe a forum "For Newbies" to tf.tv/the comp scene where being anything but helpful to the OP and noobs in general is explicitly not allowed? The way I see it, "Why no pyros in 6v6?" is only a question someone hasn't been here a long enough time would ask. People can get tired of discussing that topic earnestly. In the "For Newbies" forum you either answer the question earnestly or discuss the topic earnestly or don't answer the question or discuss it at all. If such a question/topic is raised in "General Discussion" for example, the OP can be redirected to "For Newbies."

I know we have a "TF2 Help" forum but that forum serves anyone with inquiries.

the problem with comp tf2 is that, long before this issue of toxicity came to the forefront in the mind of pubbers (aka when we were on gotfrag and no one outside of comp had ever come to the forums one single time), the public community decided comp was elitist for "forcing" people to only play the cookie cutter classes and for banning unlocks because "they're too close-minded to figure out how to counter them"

the problem is, tf2 came out in 2007, a sort of weird middle ground between the cult enthusiast comp games of old and the behemoth developer-sponsored comp games of new. it had an enormous population, but no mechanism for promoting competitive. therefore, the very nature of the overall playerbase came to reflect that disorganized giant umbrella. the vast majority of players have no intention of ever playing a competitive game ever, and a substantial majority of even those with, say, 1000+ hours in tf2 have no desire to play comp either. we are SO outnumbered that, even of the small portion of people in that 1000+ hour range who decide to look into comp tf2, the vast majority will either not enjoy it or play it for an extremely short period of time, or just in tf2center or something. we are SO SO outnumbered that, even of the absolutely minute percentage of people who go into comp, the vast majority will gravitate towards highlander, as it sacrifices balance for more inclusiveness.

the thing about this reality is that, along the way, a lot of those people who don't have any interest in comp tf2 do have an interest in, at the very least, mentioning it in offhand remarks on pub servers, and a minority of those people might even discuss it on SPUF, reddit, or their community forums. however, if you do the math, even that tiny minority almost certainly outnumbers ours. plus, negative feedback sticks in people's minds way more than any positive feedback. every comp player can remember situations where THEY were on the defensive and stereotyped and strawmanned the same way the average lolmeme reddit pyro main gets stereotyped here. anyone remember that one time mesr made a very reasonable post on spuf asking valve to consider releasing updates on different days, or different times, or alerting esea about said updates so the client doesn't always break? that was literally someone using the official steam forums for their intended purpose, contacting the developer on behalf of a subgroup in the larger community. the amount of bile and ridicule spewed by that forum towards comp players was utterly unreal, it's dwarfed anything I've seen on this side of the equation.

does that mean toxicity isn't an issue or that it doesn't drive some people away? no, that's a different question. but it's simply a non-factor compared to other barriers in our little pr campaign, not just in the standard discussion of how many people know about comp tf2 but also in the average perception of it as a worthwhile endeavor.

also I dont mean to brag but

http://teamfortress.tv/thread/6333/remove-anonymity-from--frags

IM THE OG OF THIS SHIT

ded

make it start at +1 like reddit boom im a genius ez$

yeah either remove anonymity or remove the system altogether either would be a good change

Hello I'm new here I'd figure since this thread is about tf2 expanding and about the "toxicness" of the community I'd figure my first post here would be better than a generic hi I'm new thread.

In my opinion the things I see being the biggest turn offs for people is the 6s elitism and the phrase "play a real class" I think that quote is awful and undermines 4 out of the 9 classes and gives people the assumption that 6s is just Scout,Soldier,Medic,Demoman game featuring special guest Sniper (yes I know its not that but it gives the assumption it is). So when I see a play that involves say an Engineer or Heavy I get hyped cause those classes don't get used often outside of defensive play so seeing stuff like Engineer putting a sentry on the enemies last is really cool and makes me root for that team in a kind of underdog way, another thing that I see turning people off is when Mr.xXxAirsh0txXx soldier or xXxMeatSh0txXx scout show up and trash my team and my friend is like "we gotta stop him" so he uses mini sentry while they tunnel vision people to level up their stranges and rage in chat calling him a "nigger" or "faggot" or some combination of the 2 which just makes him mini more until they rage quit it gives us a laugh but it makes him think comp tf2 is "ban stuff I don't like" which its not and once I showed him highlander he got interested and maybe will join me in highlander if we get a team going, also a thing I noticed to kinda verify my elitism idea is I was helping one of my newer tf2 playing friends how to play so I joined the I think Mexico hosted DM server I found from this forum, he had fun but once he tried to go Pyro and Spy he wasn't able to pick them and it made him feel like those classes were not "real classes" so we got the fuck out and went to the MGE server instead. Now how do I feel about toxicity? I think it is a new buzzword but those situations do happen and negatively effect the image of comp tf2 so my solution is if you see those people do what I do and tell them to fuck off and then explain comp tf2 is nothing like those people make it out to be.

Sorry for any spelling errors and grammatical errors it's 4Am but I felt I had to post this let me know what you think (or how wrong I am).

Lange
Stabby
Ruwin
Pyyyour
Salamancer
Clockwork
Platinum
Harbleu
TLR
Seagull
Enigma
Rest of mix^
VanillaTV

^ list of people that quit tf2 fairly recently?

No that's just the list of people invited to the TFTV Christmas party.

Every competitive game has an issue with a large part of their player-base being toxic. This may be the old and jaded part of my mind talking here, but I don't think there is much that can be done about it.

The underlying issue is that young men in their teens and early twenties have an existential need to express their adulthood and alpha-male supremacy (Not a judgement, as I was a little fucker when I was young myself... just speaking from experience), When you put a bunch of these young males together in a competitive environment mixed with a modicum of anonymity, or at the very least, a buffer that assumes that your actions/words won't end in physical confrontation, you end up with the sort of trouble that this thread is bringing up.

What can you do? Not much, aside from understand why it's happening and ignore it the best you can.