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« on: September 18, 2014, 09:16:23 pm »
Like everybody else who's been playing for more than a few weeks, I really love goio's community. I love how things are structured (for now) such that getting to know all the other regular players is inevitable, and how social the game is while remaining a serious competitive game. But I feel like the community has an overblown opinion of how inclusive it is, particularly when it comes to women.
I'm going to be blunt here: I get catcalled, told to suck various parts of people's anatomy, and have graphic things said about my body more in goio than I do in dota. You know, the game full of racist, misogynistic 14 year olds? Yeah, that dota. And while it pains me to say this, no one here seems at all interested in fixing this. As far as I can tell, making sure female players feel safe is secondary to making sure toxic, aggressive male players feel welcomed. I've had people threaten to rape me or other female players with mods or even muse employees literally in the lobby listening to it happen and to my knowledge nothing was ever done about it. If it was, it was only after it was way too late anyway.
The backlash to the girls of icarus event is just another aspect of this. One of the ideas behind it is to give female players a chance to play without having to worry about that stuff happening, and to connect with other people who they can talk about these issues with. But the community as a whole has reacted by lampooning it, decrying it as sexist, and making fun of it in lobby chat. Female-only events or subgroups are not unheard of, and many other communities have collectively acknowledged that they're a pretty reasonable thing to have. Why not goio?
It's like half the guys in this community are more upset at the idea of me wanting to be able to play without getting threatened or catcalled than they are at the reality of me getting threatened and catcalled.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm really disappointed. I like you guys, and I want to believe you're better than this.