Luckily for me I haven’t been Live for too long so I haven’t encountered so many tools, but certain members of the 360indians.com haven’t been all that lucky and some of them have borne the brunt of this sort of discrimination:
Sameer AKA HundredProofSam loves playing PES6 and he plays online from time to time but what he didn’t expect was that his low ping (which happens if you connect to international servers) would earn him names like 'desi lagger' and comments like "Can’t you Indians afford a decent net connection?"
Another 360i member, Bush Pirate regales us with his experience with the mentally challenged:
"The worst stuff I heard was from a British guy last week in Gears (ranked) who continuously harassed a Bangladeshi guy (based in the UK) in game. He started off with religious slurs as the guy was obviously Moslem. Then he started calling him a 3rd world Ni**er and it got really offensive to the point where many of us left the game."
Diablo IV on the other hand has his strategies sorted out and here’s what he and his homies do to combat racism:
"They try to diss me or my friends because of my 'Asian' accent . But me and my friend(s) who I usually play with back me up, so in the end its the guy who gets dissed and kicked out. Lol it’s actually fun sometimes; they think they’re too cool and once you beat them fair and square they say that 'I' had host advantage."
There are lots more but one thing I’ve noticed is that the most amount of racism takes place while playing overtly Americanized games like Halo 2, Gears of War or Rainbow Six Vegas where they target people with low ping and automatically assume that he’s from some third world country. Pretty soon the poor guy is humiliated, abused for no fault of his and kicked out from the server as well.
Some people feel we’re making a big deal out of this and that people who find such racial slurs offensive should make their way to a different zone like Recreation or Family since the Underground Zone is described as a place where "anything goes—and usually does." A little competitive banter, strong yet healthy competition and a certain amount of trash talk never hurt anyone but why cross the line by making fun of people’s heritage or the way they speak; that’s like hitting below the belt and in fact there are some people out there who aren’t really interested in playing; it seems that they log onto Live just to make other players’ lives miserable.
The worst part in all this is that there’s nothing much you can do to punish such offenders. That’s right; these guys are probably thousands of miles away so there’s no way you can smack some sense into them; what you can do is submit a negative review against such players that’ll make them an un-preferred player and in a worse case scenario they’ll get banned for a day after which they’re back. Why isn't Microsoft taking stricter measures against these offenders? Why is online racism treated so lightly? Maybe there aren’t too many people voicing their opinion but we’re hoping that you do take the necessary action against such offenders because if enough people complain against such perpetrators, they will get permanently banned eventually.
I'm a member of 360i too
