With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.

Bully Hunters Spreading Misinformation About Online Harassment

An article written by Platinumparagon in regards to Bully Hunter‘s false data claims. She does a very good job of explaining what transpired in the recent events in regards to this ordeal. Just to summarize what she goes over in her article, there was a group calling themselves Bully Hunters and their original intention was to raise awareness around online harassment and bullying. They also presented a solution to this ongoing issue of online bullying by allowing everyday gamers to login to a website to “call” a Bully Hunter to their CS:GO game to have the bully hunter go and kill the person that is doing the bullying. This idea that they were going to send bully hunters after someone being harassed in CS:GO, specifically a team based game indicates little understanding of issue at hand and how that solution would not effectively solve the problem. On top of this their website, that is currently offline, was passing off extrapolated statistics as facts.  The host of the live stream event ZombiUnicorn originally went on record to say that “~3 million women have stopped playin games altogether bc of harassment.”

This issue with the misrepresentation of statistical research is what brought this whole movement to my attention and why I wanted to cover this topic. I also wanted to mention that according to this Polygon article the Bully Hunters program has officially shut down. I also wanted to include Vertagear’s official response and SteelSeries’s official response to their involvement in the Bully Hunters as I feel it’s important to make sure they are not forgotten in regards to their involvement even though that is not something I dive into much detail with my thoughts overall.

Source:cdn2.pu.nl

Wiggin’s thoughts on the subject :  Alright this story has blown up to incorporate quite a bunch of different companies, personalities and issues. The two main issues I want to talk about in relation to this whole Bully Hunters ordeal is the misuse of actual research and the proposed solution to an age old issue in gaming, harassment.

So the first and most glaring issue to me as someone has a background in the mental health field and a basic understanding of statistics is this misuse of the data and research done by Emily Matthew over at the Pricecharting blog. This study found that 63% of women reported being called derogatory names in relation to their gender. The sample size is only 874 participants and nowhere near the three million originally suggested by the tweet or the Bully Hunter’s own web page. As explained in Platinumparagon’s article the research only shows that “84 women stopped playing one online game because of harassment”. So this only says they stopped playing one game online not games all together and may even play a different online game. This is quite concerning news to hear because that means as a gaming community we are being so rude, inconsiderate and toxic to one another that we are actively causing potential friends and competitors to quit the hobby all together. This speaks volumes to the type of communities that exist in this gaming medium and is honestly quite disheartening to hear.  Not only are we misrepresenting research that we already don’t have a huge amount of studies for the sole purpose to push a brand or sell headphones but what data we do have corroborates this ongoing issue of online harassment of women and others in the gaming space. How do we expect this medium to grow and improve when we have hashtags that demand women be removed from gaming. Or how trolling is a somehow acceptable form entertainment for some even at the harassment and abuse of others. It is appalling that gamers feel it’s okay to insult or belittle people just because they are behind a keyboard. It just circles back to something someone once told me “treat others how you would like to be treated”.

The second issue with this Bully Hunters initiative is their proposed solution for this as I mentioned previously very real issue of online harassment and bullying was in essence bully the bullies. They wanted to create a online system that would allow people getting bullied to call upon a Bully Hunter so that they could kill the person doing the bullying. They only showed this in a very staged and prerecorded experience in Valves CS:GO of how it was supposed to work and I feel like they picked a poor game to show this on and it also highlighted why this type of system would never work in the real world. CS:GO is a team game and since these Bully Hunters are just players like everyone else there is no way to force them onto a team or even into the same game as the person being bullied. Not to mention Valve already has ways to mute and report players inside their game. This just wasn’t a well thought out solution for this very real problem. I am all for stopping online bullying as it affects all of us in a negative way. I want to be able to stand and support these plans to stop online bullying but they need to be well thought-out and not rely on misinformation of actual statistics to become popular and effective. We need developers to provide tools and for those tools to actually work properly and efficiently to keep a nice and friendly environment. I hope that we can someday get to a point where when we poll women or men about their online experience none of the come back and report that they stopped playing an online game due to the community being inappropriate towards them.

Battlefront 2 April Update

In the upcoming update for Battlefront 2, a limited time event of Ewoks vs. Imperials will be coming as explored by PCGamer.  Along with premium currency to purchase skins, officially known as Appearances and some information on future updates.

Source: PCGamer.com

Ozzy’s Thoughts:  They’re finally adding the skins we’ve wanted since before day 1, officially called “Appearances” for everyone.  Troopers, hero’s all get new looks…FINALLY.  The ewok vs. troopers is a bit…interesting?  If we get traps and such to fight them that’ll be fun and a reason to play the other side but if it’s just “throw bodies at them” it’ll get old fast.  And the future Seasons, which should be interesting since they’ll be focusing on something that whole time, a new movie or anniversary, is fine.  We’ll find out more of the new season soon in May (4^th perhaps?)  The premium currency is coming back and while it makes sense to be able to only buy skins with it, in the end it’s all about the worth of it right?  If you REALLY want Leia to look a certain way, you can buy it with in game money or premium.  But how much will be for both?  100,000 credits ingame and $5 of real money?  We’ll have to wait and see right now but I hope they learned their lesson from the launch debacle and don’t do anything stupid this time.