"I had a few people message me saying that they would like to start a Discord for people to group up in and I think it's a pretty great idea," she said. This is a solution neutrondamage has been considering in the wake of her viral Reddit thread - and the subsequent harassment it resulted in. "It's very small, and not everyone is active, but it's nice to have a lot of regulars. "It's just this nice little community," Lauren continued.
#Overwatch online chat rooms free
These kinds of communities have homes all over the internet - like Reddit and Facebook - but one service that kept popping up in conversations with Overwatch players was Discord, a free online chat service that markets itself as a home for these kinds of gaming communities. To escape the hellish harassment they experience while solo-queuing - the term for joining an Overwatch game with five random teammates you don't know - many players escape to their own pre-established communities. To avoid harassment, Overwatch players flock to Discord Some called on Blizzard to implement harsher bans, and others advocated for bystanders in team chat to speak up when they hear someone else being harassed.īut a number of women - and other folks who are marginalized in the traditionally straight, masculine spaces of online first-person shooters - forgo the process of engaging with those toxic communities at all.
So where does Overwatch go from here? Suggestions from the Reddit community for fixing the game's harassment problem ran the gamut. Luckily, /r/Overwatch moderators stepped in and managed to delete most of the worst comments, but the experience made one thing clear: When women speak up about being harassed, they often become the targets of even more harassment. Neutrondamage told Mic via Reddit private message that once the thread picked up steam, she started receiving messages on Blizzard online service "asking for blowjobs," and she received a flood of notifications in her Reddit inbox from other users calling her a whore and a slut and telling her to kill herself. Much of the conversation was surprisingly civil and empathetic, but it incited a lot of backlash, too. The thread accumulated over 2,800 comments, many featuring other players' accounts of similar harassment in the game. Comments like "Hey, why aren't you in the kitchen making me a sandwich?" and "You're a small-tittied bitch" were the norm, she said - and when she played with a male partner, she'd hear lines like "Can I get a turn at pounding that pussy, my man?" 20, redditor neutrondamage started a conversation on the forum /r/Overwatch about the unwelcome messages she'd received via voice chat in the game.
For devoted players like her, the best option may be a network of private chat rooms that offer an escape from harassment altogether. A viral Reddit thread is exposing Overwatch's nasty underbelly of toxic, sexist behavior, and the fandom is responding by making life hell for the woman who brought it to light.
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