Valve -- Do Something. Racism and Discrimination in Team Fortress 2

[PathDoc15]

tl,dr : hold Valve accountable for their silence surrounding issues of discrimination, be active community members in making our servers safe for everyone, spread this around because we need to be talking about this more.

Hello,

My name is Path, and I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 since it came out in 2007. In the time I have played this game, I have been active in the trading community, tried my hand at competitive, and enjoy playing casual with friends. I have almost 3,000 hours logged in the game, with an additional 400 in an alt. I’ve been here for a while, and this gives credibility to what I am about to say, even though I am not completely familiar with the ins-and-outs of the technical lingo.

The racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and general discrimination that is on display in the community is disappointing, toxic, and unacceptable. Whether it be through bots, real players, or the most successful competitive teams: blatant discrimination against marginalized community members is everywhere. I’ve tried to call people out on this before or ask them to explain themselves, but it hit me the other day that this is a problem that needs attention from elsewhere.

For those who don’t remember, or have intentionally forgot, let’s chat briefly about when the TF2 community has looked it’s worst:

• In 2018, uberchain comes out with stories of assault by players in the community and is ignored by both Valve and the community at large. Multiple top-tier competitive players (degu and pred) went as far to dismiss her trauma and spout racial epithets at her. Link found here: https://twitter.com/uberchain/status/1026205810823639040?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1026205810823639040%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eurogamer.net%2Farticles%2F2018-08-14-valves-forgotten-game-team-fortress-2s-shocking-toxicity-problem
  
• Around the same time, Tagg leaves the TF2 community for continually being burdened by the racism and harmful comments of people he played with. Valve remains silent. Link to his take found here: https://www.teamfortress.tv/16106/rip-tagg#21
  
• Arekk (scout for Froyo) publicly uses a transphobic slur to address former comp-tf2 player Nursey. Nursey has their own controversies, but is by no means the only person this has happened to. Valve remains silent. Apology found here: https://twitter.com/NURBEYYY/status/1024512528523698176
  
• Anyone who has played casual for over an hour in the last few years knows the situation with racist bots that spam chat with slurs and degrading remarks. Valve has “restricted certain accounts from using chat in public modes,” but clearly it’s not doing much. If you want to read more, here’s a link that more thoroughly describes this issue: https://www.engadget.com/tf2-racist-bots-valve-problem-interview-steam-194444105.html
  
• TF2’s most popular streamer Grant “b4nny” Vincent has broadcasted over and over again his team’s scrimmages in which the words “gay” and “r*tarded” are used to describe members of the opposing team. This is one of the best TF2 players to ever play the game. Valve has done nothing.
  
• Earlier this year, a number of game developers joined the “Fair Play Alliance” which seeks to create “a world where games are free of harassment, discrimination, and abuse.” Valve was one of the few companies to not join
  
• Also earlier this year, Valve was one of the only AAA gaming companies to remain silent and donate no money to the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the US. This speaks immensely to their values.
  
• From my OWN experience, I have briefly interacted with top 25 traders who regularly use slurs and “edgelord” language in their trading. The sexism among them is sickening. Very infrequently are they banned from trade servers, and when they are it is off a repeated offense.
  
• Many of my examples come from this article that explains the problem in depth, but for anyone who has been here for a while, these events are not forgettable: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-08-14-valves-forgotten-game-team-fortress-2s-shocking-toxicity-problem

Community members are frustrated by this, and while many server owners and advocates are doing their best to stop this behavior, Valve has done nothing. It benefits no one except for a few free-speech advocate edgelords to have a community that is this toxic. In fact, it looks terrible on behalf of the company that this game has been out for nearly a decade and a half and blatant discrimination is still a problem. Valve -- you are a private company that can choose who and what kind of language defines your community. Your silence is OBVIOUS, and as a long term community member, it’s not acceptable. In case it isn’t obvious what you all can/should do to stand behind your marginalized community members who are increasingly sparse, here’s a few ideas:

• Instaban people from casual and Valve sponsored competitive when they use homophobic, racist, transphobic, xenophobic, or discriminatory slurs. Many other popular game companies do this. Clearly you know how -- there’s a feature in the game that lets you censor hate speech.
  
• Pay attention to the amount of bots that are in EVERY Valve server spewing hate speech. Ban them. You’re game developers. You can figure out how, I can’t help but figure that you all aren’t trying.
  
• Don’t tolerate high tier competitive players to be using hate speech. Ban them, either temporarily or permanently from casual and competitive. Encourage competitive leagues to do the same. Show where your values are by imposing them on the best players in the game.
  
• Set up a system to automatically filter discriminatory material from the workshop and steam discussion pages. I know there are moderators, but for TF2 they seem to not want to enforce policy (“Face it guys, I don't expect you be angels, but there's a limit. I'm trying to be pretty laid back here. Let's try to keep it that way eh?” -- Read before posting document). This is something I am willing to be wrong on, because I don’t frequent discussions that often, but I want to bring something like this to the table.

Valve -- it’s about time that you do your part. =

To the community -- we can do better than this too. We ALL have to hold the players who continually partake in this disgusting behavior accountable. Kick people from servers who are using discriminatory language. League owners -- ban members who are discriminating against other players or using devise language. The actions of the community can go a long way.

I’m sure this will get a bunch of hate, but I encourage people who agree that enough is enough to share this around and elevate the stories of others who have already voiced their frustrations and experiences. I know the community is tired of this incessant discrimination, and we do deserve better on behalf of the company.

For the time being, I am uninstalling the game and not going to give any more money to Valve. I’ve had enough of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Thanks for reading,
Path

Edit: common threads in the comments.

1) A lot of you are telling me to just mute people in the game. I've done that again and again, but I'm trying to have a conversation about who the burden of cleaning servers of pretty objectively toxic language should be on. It's my opinion that it should be on the company, not on the players. The reason for this is because it looks pretty bad as a company to settle for the default being discrimination/hate speech on your servers, and not really put in the time to try and prevent it -- this is an opinion after all and it can be wrong, but I can explain why I have it and why it makes sense after many thousands of hours playing this game.

2) There's a lot of "it's just a video game, leave if you don't want to play." I grew up playing this game, and I really do love it. I think the game play is like no other game I have gone to in the past, and that's the reason I am talking about something that bothers me and other members of the community that haven't already left because of it. It's the same when all of you complain that the game isn't being updated -- just leave if you have such a big problem with it. See the issue with that logic?

3) I mentioned the situation with Arekk and Nursey in my OP. Let me be clear -- the pedophilic actions that Nursey did looked much worse on the community than Arekk's use of transphobic language, and I by no means am trying to dismiss that. HOWEVER, the use of transphobic language (repeatedly) by top-tier players is not something to ignore. I am getting flamed in the comments for "cancel-culture lololol," but you all are totally dismissing my entire argument based off of one example I gave. Transphobia is a huge problem, and I can probably just dig through screenshots to find other examples from my personal experience. I thought through this post, with some of you it's clear you didn't.

4) This is the last thing, so I'll keep it brief. 80% of the comments are lecturing to me that "this is how the internet is, grow up." I don't need to be told this kind of stuff, because clearly I am familiar with TF2, it's community, and the internet as a whole. You don't gotta try and red-pill me on this one. I am trying to address something that if you take a step back and look at is a problem. It's a problem even when you compare it to other communities (which you shouldn't even have to). Read my post for it's content, be willing to engage with the idea of the company taking more responsibility, I am not saying anything I am not confident I know what I am talking about.

I appreciate all of the people who are interested in actually hearing me out, giving valid criticism, or giving positive feedback.

tl,dr : hold Valve accountable for their silence surrounding issues of discrimination, be active community members in making our servers safe for everyone, spread this around because we need to be talking about this more.

[Cheesepizza2]

inb4 millions of people lose hundreds of monies they spent because they said the funny word 10 years ago

[Colonel Amiga]

tldr: I'm gay

[Duchess Minty]

Who are you and why should I care about you leaving in protest? Also ingame muting is a thing.

[Mibber22 ✞👑]

Originally posted by Colonel Amiga:

tldr: I'm gay

I'm happy you felt confident telling us that :)

[Mibber22 ✞👑]

Excuse me, I'm African Caucasian and this post is tl:dr

[PathDoc15]

Originally posted by Lady Mint:

Who are you and why should I care about you leaving in protest? Also ingame muting is a thing.

I'm not saying you should care who I am, I'm just asking that the community think about what the game developers pay attention to. It shouldn't be on the individuals who play the game to have to mute and censor people that are explicitly discriminatory. That should be on the company, and throughout this game's entire history it never has been.

[Duchess Minty]

Originally posted by PathDoc15:

It shouldn't be on the individuals who play the game to have to mute and censor people that are explicitly discriminatory.

It's entirely on you if you want to continue seeing it or not, muting will remove the offensive language from your view while reporting will punish the individual and I highly suggest doing both if it bothers you so badly. Posting threads like this however is not the way to go about it since it could be considered naming and shaming which has a very real chance of you getting in trouble instead of your intended targets.

[PathDoc15]

Originally posted by Colonel Amiga:

tldr: I'm gay

This is the type of stuff I don't understand. It's like 1,000 words. Read it, think about it. If this stuff is not important to you, why isn't it?

[rad_knight]

its really not that bad, but okay.

[PathDoc15]

Originally posted by Lady Mint:

Originally posted by PathDoc15:

It shouldn't be on the individuals who play the game to have to mute and censor people that are explicitly discriminatory.

It's entirely on you if you want to continue seeing it or not, muting will remove the offensive language from your view while reporting will punish the individual and I highly suggest doing both if it bothers you so badly.

I have done this continually for many years, but clearly it's not doing anything! I'm curious as to why you are averse to having Valve step in and actually do something about what is clearly a problem in their community. Do you feel that people saying the n-word and other slurs should have a platform in the community? Why should they, by default, be allowed to be outwardly hateful to others?

[PathDoc15]

Originally posted by rad_knight:

its really not that bad, but okay.

I often play on servers in the south. It's about every other casual game I queue for that I run into ♥♥♥♥ like this. Are the many examples I gave of active community members being discriminatory not enough?

[Cee]

(Maybe bait, who knows who cares go ♥♥♥♥ a carrot, this is an interesting post nonetheless)

The tagg, uberchain and pre poopoofile allegation nursey situations are very showing of how the community can have some toxic behaviors. I'm personally guilty of some annoying behavior in the past but that's what happens when you grow up.

The situations shouldnt be taken lightly and the people in question should receive social shunning - and maybe freezing some accounts from casual or comp - but that's about as far as you want to go.

You can't really ban players from 3rd party competetive either. That could cause teams to die, meaning the comp scene at higher levels could die off, leaving no hope for valve support or community hype. Of course, if the comp scene would die from banning potentially toxic players, is all on themselves. But stuff like b4nny calling enemy gamers gay/retarded is pretty normal, and doesnt necessitate further action really. I'm confident in saying all (not 100%) players ever in the existence of gaming has gotten angry and said stuff of that mild sort - should we condemn everyone or move on?

[Duchess Minty]

Originally posted by PathDoc15:

I'm curious as to why you are averse to having Valve step in and actually do something about what is clearly a problem in their community.

I'm not, I'm literally saying report, mute/block and move on because that's all you can do.

Not answering the second part because that gets into political territory and I'm not interested in divulging my beliefs.

[♥Peachboy♥]

well, at least this isn't Cohen's Thread 2.0

[PathDoc15]

Originally posted by Sims Legit:

(Maybe bait, who knows who cares go ♥♥♥♥ a carrot, this is an interesting post nonetheless)

The tagg, uberchain and pre poopoofile allegation nursey situations are very showing of how the community can have some toxic behaviors. I'm personally guilty of some annoying behavior in the past but that's what happens when you grow up.

The situations shouldnt be taken lightly and the people in question should receive social shunning - and maybe freezing some accounts from casual or comp - but that's about as far as you want to go.

You can't really ban players from 3rd party competetive either. That could cause teams to die, meaning the comp scene at higher levels could die off, leaving no hope for valve support or community hype. Of course, if the comp scene would die from banning potentially toxic players, is all on themselves. But stuff like b4nny calling enemy gamers gay/retarded is pretty normal, and doesnt necessitate further action really. I'm confident in saying all (not 100%) players ever in the existence of gaming has gotten angry and said stuff of that mild sort - should we condemn everyone or move on?

I guess my take is like do we really value a dying competitive scene over the fundamental values and protection of others as a community? Other competitive players have called for B4nny to have to face consequences for acquiescing in the face of other's behavior. He gives these opinions a platform. I am aware of how normal this stuff is: to me that is the problem. There aren't many other communities where that offensive language is normalized and given a platform to the extent that it is here.