I used to have feelings similar to yours, and then I started playing Valorant with my wife. The amount of vitriol she gets simply for being a woman is staggering. I had no idea because I didn't come across women in tactical shooters very often, and I wasn't a jackass to them when I did. But it's something like every other game that someone is ridiculously rude to her because she's a woman. This is in addition to all of the normal toxicity that, e.g. I receive just for being a person playing a game where everyone has mics.
Before this discovery, I would have guessed that "someone inevitably gets their feelings hurt and points to some well-intentioned rule in the CoC to get the 'offender' shamed/removed even if no harm was intended" was a much larger percentage of the cases than it is. I also would have thought that anything that makes a lot of people uncomfortable that they might accidentally cross the line is worse than the current harm.
Now that I've much more personal experience with what it means to be a person who is an actual target of harassment, I realize that these edge cases make up a tiny proportion of the harassment that happens. And when you bring the hammer down on people who are unequivocally harassers, it is important that you do so in a way that's fair and not subject to recharacterization as unjust later, when no one who was there is a part of the conversation.
A great many good people being uncomfortable is unfortunate, but I also think it's a sign of the kind of cognitive dissonance that I experienced before playing with my wife. I had never experienced anything other than the usual toxicity, so I naively assumed that it couldn't be that prevalent. The fact that a CoC feels like overkill is, perhaps, evidence for the proposition that the problem with harassment is much more real than it might feel to those of us who are not targets of harassment.
And the kind of people who will harass someone so shamelessly are exactly the kind of people who will boldly lie about not being given a reason for their discipline, or who will loudly complain about the rules not being explicit, even though it's incredibly obvious to everyone present that their behavior was beyond the pale.
The edge cases are edge cases, and unfortunate, but I don't believe most cases are edge cases.
Valorant has a CoC. And yet, your wife suffered horrible toxicity and harassment in Valorant. This doesn't sound like their CoC was successful in curbing abuse.
Please don't resort to strawman arguments. I didn't say that all CoCs are useless in curbing abuse. I said that Valorant's CoC is useless in curbing abuse. As far as I can tell, Valorant is doing absolutely nothing to enforce their CoC against toxic players.
Apologies, do you have a CoC in mind that you think works?
And I’ve got an email from Riot that they banned someone I’d reported in Valorant, so they don’t do nothing. I don’t think either of us have enough evidence to know whether it’d be better or worse without the CoC.
> And I’ve got an email from Riot that they banned someone I’d reported in Valorant, so they don’t do nothing. I don’t think either of us have enough evidence to know whether it’d be better or worse without the CoC.
To the contrary, it's pretty easy to deduce that the CoC had nothing to do with the ban of the player you reported. Do you genuinely believe that a "CoC enforcement committee" sat down to review demos of the reported player and analyze whether their actions constituted CoC violations? No, that process is reserved for political enemies and occasional power trips. The ban was almost certainly a result of an automated process. For example, in CS:GO, if a player receives significantly more abuse reports than average, they will be muted by default. No human review is involved. I imagine the Valorant ban is something similar, because there is no way Riot could afford to pay actual humans to go through these reports.
Before this discovery, I would have guessed that "someone inevitably gets their feelings hurt and points to some well-intentioned rule in the CoC to get the 'offender' shamed/removed even if no harm was intended" was a much larger percentage of the cases than it is. I also would have thought that anything that makes a lot of people uncomfortable that they might accidentally cross the line is worse than the current harm.
Now that I've much more personal experience with what it means to be a person who is an actual target of harassment, I realize that these edge cases make up a tiny proportion of the harassment that happens. And when you bring the hammer down on people who are unequivocally harassers, it is important that you do so in a way that's fair and not subject to recharacterization as unjust later, when no one who was there is a part of the conversation.
A great many good people being uncomfortable is unfortunate, but I also think it's a sign of the kind of cognitive dissonance that I experienced before playing with my wife. I had never experienced anything other than the usual toxicity, so I naively assumed that it couldn't be that prevalent. The fact that a CoC feels like overkill is, perhaps, evidence for the proposition that the problem with harassment is much more real than it might feel to those of us who are not targets of harassment.
And the kind of people who will harass someone so shamelessly are exactly the kind of people who will boldly lie about not being given a reason for their discipline, or who will loudly complain about the rules not being explicit, even though it's incredibly obvious to everyone present that their behavior was beyond the pale.
The edge cases are edge cases, and unfortunate, but I don't believe most cases are edge cases.