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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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 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.

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.