Kind of. Growing up playing Counter-Strike and Battlefield titles, toxicity was still a much rarer thing than these days. Hell, smacktalk wasn’t even a thing unless playing with friends and joking around.
Hrm, I encountered plenty of toxic assholes back on CS and BF/42/Vietnam/2, to the point that I had to explicitly seek out better communities, and then landed at Project Reality, being an alpha/beta tester / gameplay design concept discussion enthusiast (lol) with them for years.
Maybe I just had worse luck back then, or maybe its just way, way worse now with modern casual shooters.
Could be a bit of both.
…
I still remember the final test before PR 0.5 was released.
DBzao had written the first iteration of the injected python script that was to govern how you could request which kits depending on which squad you were in, who had what kits in your squad, how many kits were available to your whole team, etc.
Problem was… sometimes, for a completely indiscernible reason… some players just couldn’t use the system at all.
We spent 3 hours in TS … or maybe it was Ventrilo?.. we spent hours trying everything we could think of, could not identify any pattern.
As the session was being wound down, as we had basically given up… I had a realization.
I pulled up the in game scoreboard… many times.
I then started barking orders at various remaining players to see who could and could not use the kit system.
If a non alphanumeric character was in your username, you could not use the kit system.
DBzao didn’t believe this at first, pulled up his code, and then screamed.
… yep, he hadn’t properly handled strings or string conversions or special characters at some stage of the code.
We’d been stuck on this for almost 2 weeks, and 6 hours later, it was fixed and released.
Kind of. Growing up playing Counter-Strike and Battlefield titles, toxicity was still a much rarer thing than these days. Hell, smacktalk wasn’t even a thing unless playing with friends and joking around.
Hrm, I encountered plenty of toxic assholes back on CS and BF/42/Vietnam/2, to the point that I had to explicitly seek out better communities, and then landed at Project Reality, being an alpha/beta tester / gameplay design concept discussion enthusiast (lol) with them for years.
Maybe I just had worse luck back then, or maybe its just way, way worse now with modern casual shooters.
Could be a bit of both.
…
I still remember the final test before PR 0.5 was released.
DBzao had written the first iteration of the injected python script that was to govern how you could request which kits depending on which squad you were in, who had what kits in your squad, how many kits were available to your whole team, etc.
Problem was… sometimes, for a completely indiscernible reason… some players just couldn’t use the system at all.
We spent 3 hours in TS … or maybe it was Ventrilo?.. we spent hours trying everything we could think of, could not identify any pattern.
As the session was being wound down, as we had basically given up… I had a realization.
I pulled up the in game scoreboard… many times.
I then started barking orders at various remaining players to see who could and could not use the kit system.
If a non alphanumeric character was in your username, you could not use the kit system.
DBzao didn’t believe this at first, pulled up his code, and then screamed.
… yep, he hadn’t properly handled strings or string conversions or special characters at some stage of the code.
We’d been stuck on this for almost 2 weeks, and 6 hours later, it was fixed and released.