Bleszinski: “If I had a nickel for every time I was called a fag on the internet, I could retire”

It is slow this week, huh?

You’ve no idea.

He obviously goes on Xbox Live a lot.

You know something: I’ve played “openly” on Live twice, I think, and I had a 360 at launch. Which means I’ve never been called a “fag” on the internet. I’m missing out, clearly.

…and plays with a lot of his countrymen. Seriously, Whizzo got called a Fag for two minutes solid on XBL t’other night, so he said. What sort of person purposely gets into an online game just to continuously call someone a fag?

Aside from an American, of course…

Actually, if that’s not a mirror image pic in the header of this story…he HAS got his ear stud in the “wrong” ear.

Seems gamertags are the least of Microsoft’s problems.

I thought the whole Live gay-hate thing was a bit of a myth. How wrong I was.

Oddly enough… I’ve never been abused on Live. But I think that’s because I usually play when the American kids are asleep.

It was everyone being called a fag not just me, it was also for 10 solid minutes, Christ knows why anyone does that but I think he may have been scouting for action.

I’ve only once played against an American and he was very nice. He said “what’s up?” at the beginning of our ice hockey match, beat the living shit out of me and spent the last few minutes of the game just skating around with the puck refusing to let me have it and punching me occasionally. A thoroughly fulfilling experience.

Hmm another post eaten by the “spam” filter, I wonder if this one will turn up?

patlike: Are you sure he didn’t say “what up”? Perhaps even “‘sup?”.

The testing of the filter continues, will post number 3 escape its clutches?

I think I’d quite like to be tarted and feathered.

I give up!

I have never played a game online.

PT: It was probably “sup?”, thinking about it. He didn’t say anything else after that. He was too busy winning.

Blerklol. Actually, you’re not missing much. Co-op’s fun, though.

I don’t mind playing multiplayer on a single console. I just never felt the need to play against people I can’t see.

patlike = Fag

DP: \o/

Blerk: The only time I think it really “works” is in MMOs, because that’s the whole point of the game. I played Gears matches a few times and it was pretty shit. Co-op’s great because you don’t lose the thread of what’s going on, though.

I’d never really ventured online until Mario Kart Wii – and actually, I think the lack of voice comms is one thing Nintendo has really got right. You just dip in and play, then drop out when you’ve had enough. Perfoect for playing against people you don’t know.

Whenever I’ve actually played against people I do know, the stock phrases are enough to get you into a game and then there’s always the phone and text messaging to sort out anything else.

I really don’t feel the need to talk to strangers, or receive abuse from sore losers / gloating victors.

Wow!

Online gaming is the future of gaming. I’m suprised to see people saying that they’ve only ever done it once or twice.

I’m on LIVE almost every day, so I know its best and worst bits.

You do get people spewing out hate, but it’s not a constant by any means. Sometimes you can go weeks without hearing anything, sometimes you might hear lots of hate speech all in one day.

The best thing to do is to play in a clan if possible, because just like in real life, people tend to only attack people who don’t have anyone else to defend them.

Playing people and competing against people from all over the world is an infinitely better experience than just playing a few mates every now and then. It’s especially good when you come up against a bunch of foul mouthed Americans and beat them so bad that they quit before the next match in utter silence.

If you have a good group of friends you regularly play against then online voice comms is great. Switching to friends only chat is also a massively good feature on Live. Though you do miss out on some classic idiot quotes from some randoms.

Having said all that the best online experience with PS3 is Everybody’s Golf which is limited to short text messages. It’s a great chilled out experience to end an evening on and the limitation to text only really adds to it. Helps if you have a BT keyboard mind . If there is one game which makes me glad I got a PS3 – it’s Everybody’s Golf.

“I really don’t feel the need to talk to strangers, or receive abuse from sore losers / gloating victors.”

You don’t have to.

Sometimes I feel like just playing COD4 without talking to or hearing anyone, so I just play Free-For-All on my own and plug my headset in with the mic off and the volume down so that I don’t have to.

I still get to play other people and enjoy the multiplayer that way.

I would disagree that online gaming is ‘the future of gaming’. It’s a part of that future for sure, but it will never be the be-all, end-all of gaming.

I have very little interest in competing with other gamers. I like to choose which games I play and when I want to play them rather than be tied to whatever everyone else is currently playing and particular times and places.

Give me a nice single-player title any day.

That’s the worst thing about online gaming, definitely: the waiting around for everyone else. When it works it’s awesome, but a lot of the time-sink aspect of MMOs is the fact you’re forced to work with other people and, obviously, people are completely unreliable.

I say that it’s the future, because I think that the vast majority of gamers prefer social gaming to an isolated experience. Just look at the latest most played games on LIVE list, which is basically the most played games on 360′s connected to LIVE.

It’s full of MP games because that’s the way that most people are going.

I can appreciate that different people want different things from gaming, and that people from a certain skill level might get intimidated by the steep learning curve that online gaming can put you in, but the biggest selling games these days are usually known for their online aspect.

You say that Gears is crap, but people are still playing it, paying for expansion packs and making associated micro-transactions. (gamerpics, themes, etc)

I know for a fact that this is the direction that the biggest publishers in the world are looking to expand.

It’s not the be all and end all of gaming, but I don’t think that it’ll be far off.

“That’s the worst thing about online gaming, definitely: the waiting around for everyone else.”

I agree that one of the problems with it is that it’s all very ‘current or nothing’ stuff.

You can get a game of COD4 in seconds these days, but if you wanted to jump into a game of COD2, for example, you might be trying for hours just to get a single game.

I’d be interested to see some stats about online/offline usage of the top ten Xbox Live titles. I wonder whether online gaming is actually as popular as online gaming fans seem to think it is. I suspect that for every person who plays Gears online, there’s at least twice as many who don’t. There are nearly 20 million 360s in the world, but only 8 million Live users. And not all of them will be Gold users.

Someone do a survey. Pat! Get morriss on it.

There’s 12 million Gold account users now.

I’ve played a lot of Gears online and a lot of Halo 2. Played a bit of Uno (hardcore!) but mostly on-line co-op for games like Halo 3 and Gears of War etc.. For me, that’s what ‘teh fut0rz’ all about. Can’t wait to try Fable 2 co-op etc.

Still, on the whole gaming is a very solitary experience for me. I like getting bogged down like you do with a book or a film.

You can get some idea from online leader boards. CoD4 for example. On the 360 it seems the majority at least try the online aspect and a significant number have put a lot of hours in to it too. I compared number of units sold to number of people in leader board and also position of friends in lists where I know how much time they have put in.

Actually scratch the previous comment it’s 12 million Live accounts so a mixture of both types, of course you can own a 360 but be in a country that doesn’t have Live support (Greece for example) which just seems daft!

morriss: Uno is hardcore with the vision cam. =)

So is Cliffy B saying he’s not gay then? Perhaps it’s all a conspiracy. Maybe the homosexual community is cunningly using neuro-linguistic programming to ‘turn’ us all!!!111

I’ll be honest here, if there’s one thing that annoys me about Xbox Live it’s voice chat in general. In theory it’s a good thing, but in reality I have no wish to talk to strange men on the internet.

It’s even worse when you have 30-something ‘men’ in the same game with pre-pubescent boys. The whole thing’s just rather icky.

30-somethings should have better things to do with their lives. Painting the house, mowing the lawn, reading the news paper and walking the dog to name but a few.

Old people playing games is just wrong

Hey Tonka… Screw you. =*(