To the players who called me “garbage” or worst since the game’s release:
DISCLAIMER: The following letter was originally a post yesterday evening on the main Apex Legends subreddit. The post quickly got deleted for allegedly being a “duplicate topic”. I took me one hour to write it and I spent the entire evening feeling bad and not playing Apex Legends. I finally managed to sleep at 3 AM after a good warm bath.
What’s wrong with you?!
I’ve met two different players since Day 1 who rage quit or something, right after calling me “garbage”, “moron”, “*” or I don’t know what other names. (I’m happy to be a French-speaking player.)
Most of the time, I play with a mic and I make the effort to speak English. One of these players had its mic muted for the whole match (until he went all bully) and the other one literally plugged its mic and called me garbage. Man… Maybe you took that mic first to help me, but you didn’t have to say that word because you thought my aiming was poor. The match wasn’t even over, and I was doing my best. How the hell did you think I was gonna improve (or retake the match) with you insulting me and degrading me?
Luckily, I said all that over the mic before taking my XP and immediately shutting my PS4 down. (That helped me vent a little bit.)
I’ve been intimidated (bullied) during high school, 20 years ago, and I still bear the scars. I can only imagine how such harsh words could affect the guy I was at that time… Imagine… Imagine you come back to your home after a normal day at the school day of bullying at school (like most other school days)… Imagine that you come home after that, to play Apex Legends, only to find more bullies. —OK, I know that those toxic players might also be a victim of bullies at home or at school, but we need to stop this!— Gosh! It affected me today! This needs to stop.
Respawn. EA. Together, we need to do something. You launched Apex Legends last week and will launch Anthem soon. Give us the tools to document and report such behaviours, educate us, promote streamers and players who are welcoming and nice, etc. I’ll try myself to record all my games from now on, but I wonder whether other people’s voice chat will be recorded that way.
In the end, such toxic behaviours might drive away the players who are just trying to have having fun… If there are no direct or indirect consequences to such behaviours, bullies will stay bullies.
Anyway… I know this is a complex issue, but I wanted to vent my anger and my disappointment.
This thread is now locked, in case anyone was unfamiliar with AHQ policy, I'll break it down for you:
- Trolling = Bad
- Name calling/General abuse = Bad
Thanks.
