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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5159 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

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So, I recently got into some online gaming again. Vermintide, Rocket League, that kind of stuff. And well, I have noticed some patterns.

Without fail, whenever someone with a cyrillic handle joins, they treat the game as a single player game in which they are the protagonist. Zero communication (that at least is understandable due to the language barrier), extremely selfish play, zero team play whatsoever, just CHAAAAAAAAAAAAARGE straight ahead and fuck it up for the whole team, сука блять. It's like every single gamer from Russia is 13 years old.

Am I wrong here? Any speculation as to why that is?

I will confidently assert that anyone who hasn’t played League of Legends on the Turkish servers during a school holiday season can imagine the depths of online gaming hell.

There is a contiuum of people in Russia (and other nations using Cyrillic). Those who know and are comfortable with English you won't generally notice as any different from the mean player. They're filtered out from this perception. Those who are left have some combination of tribalistic sentiment, anti social inclinations, and youthful immaturity which stops them from engaging normally.

and other nations using Cyrillic

They either have very large overlap with Russians (Belarus, Ukraine), or are small nations (Bulgaria, Mongolia, Tajikistan). Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan dropped using Cyrillic, Kazakhstan to follow next.

So likely person using Cyrillic be Russian.

I don't know much about the specific examples you gave, most of my online gaming experience is about League of Legends, but I can repeat what I've read about interesting anecdotes there. Korean players have a reputation for being much more individualistic and trying to maximize their own in-match resources to increase their impact on the game, as opposed to North American players who try harder to get their teammates to cooperate with their plans to take objectives that will provide large team buffs. The people I read describing their experience guessed it's because Korea has much lower ping, so a single person performing near-perfect micro(pressing buttons at the right times and places required to kill their opponents and avoid getting killed) will have a much larger impact on the game outcome in Korea than North America. Because in North America, even if you play perfectly, the restraint of not seeing an enemy attack until 60 milliseconds after its launched may make it unavoidable in a way it isn't in Korea where there's 10 millisecond ping. So in Korea, it's incentivized to get really good at really fast reaction speeds, and play the game more like it's a FPS. Whereas in North America, reaction speed counts for less, so it's more incentivized to get really good at strategy, and play the game more like it's chess, where you try to get your team and the enemy team positioned in a way that your victory is inevitable.

This is refuted by the fact that SEA players have the highest pings on average, on one the of the most reflex loaded FPS games, csgo, and still play exactly like you described. I dont know whats the deal but SEA players cant play as a team to save their lives. This includes east asians as well.

Players letting all their teammates die whilst hiding behind cover and not doing anything about it (baiting) is very frowned upon and immediately chastised in all regions but its the norm when playing in SEA servers. They are the opposite of Russians in ingame temperament, instead of charging they hide too much.

Did they not play sports as kids or whatever, I dont know.

Adding to the interesting speculation here: might language barriers play a much larger role than we think? North Americans all have a common lingua franca, Asians do not, at least not to that extent. And that also includes Russians. There is no reason to emphasise team play if you can't coordinate because you can't communicate. But that doesn't account for MEs being relatively good team players, unless they are mostly Arab-speaking.

FYI as a ME resident, all communication is done in English because you rarely get teammates who all speak the same language outisde of NA and because callouts and common strategies are standardized, for e.g the infamous RUSH B that the Russians are so fond of is one of those strategies, everyone knows immediately what to do when "RUSH B" is uttered.

There isnt much strategizing when playing with randoms either. I used to be very very high ranked so my definition of strategizing is more strict than most gamers.

To be clear about League of Legends, the USA+Canada is one region(NA), and Korea is its own region because League has just really taken off there. So Korea probably actually has even more of a lingua franca than NA, since NA would be mostly english speakers but have a few spanish and a few french speakers, where as Korea is almost all Korean.

Russian players being the way you described is one of the most common memes in gaming, CSGO at least. The CSGO analog is "RUSH B, cyka blyat" which is practically the same thing as CHAAARGGEEE. It's just Russian kids. Once you go into higher ranks you don't see that many of them around.

FYI, this specific selfish no teamwork main character playstyle is exactly how South East Asia servers in general are, across games. It doesn't matter if they are Indian, Pakistani, Phillipino, Indonesian, Korean, whatever. If they play in SEA servers, they will have 0 concept of teamwork. It seems to me Russians behave more like their Eastern counterparts than their Western ones even though most of the time you will run into Russians in EU servers.

In my experience, the best random teammates are Scandinavians. The team just works like a well-oiled machine if you get matched with a few Swedish/Danish guys.

I am aware that this dynamic might flip in other game genres like RTS or MOBA where East Asians tend to dominate.

My geographical taxonomy having played CSGO all over the world with randoms are as follows;

Middle East: Generally chill teammates, things work decently enough.

North America: Too much talking on mic, other than that about the same as Middle East, thinks work fine enough.

Europe: Things work great even with language barriers. Best teammates to have in general.

South East Asia: Worst teammates to have by far. Way too much ego and terrible teamwork. Criticism of playstyle gets met with extreme self harming prejudice.

My experience is that Brits are the worst, even worse than Russians.

Russians might be raging egomaniacs but at least they consistently want to win. Brits throw shitfits if other people don't do as they say and have superiority complexes because they are native English speakers.

Give me a russian demanding mid and screaming the entire game any day over some primadonna self appointed leader.

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