When it comes to cheating communities in video games, you're usually thinking of a toxic hellscape with borderline illegal activity, toxicity and hate. Cheaters have a reputation of being bad, toxic people who find joy in activities such as doxxing and swatting, and I must admit for a good reason.
Cheaters in games such as Minecraft or CS2 completely fit this description. Toxic assholes with huge egos who insult and dox anyone they don't like. I've never really been into the community myself, for exactly those reasons, but even just following client and ac updates will already show you how certain members behave. This has been the norm for every game where I've looked into the cheating scene, with one exception...
Now, of course, when you're talking about a whole community, there will always be people who do not fit your criteria, and I'm sure you could find examples that do not match anything I will be talking about today. The norm, however, shows a clear tendency, so let's get into this.
I have, at the time of writing this, been a part of the Shell Shockers community for more than two years under this identity. During this time, I had to make the shocking observation that, for once, this rule does not apply. The Shell Shockers legit community is not a better place than the cheating community. Far from it. How and why that's the case is what I will be looking at tonight.
Like many other games, you can't just speak of the one "legit" community. For Shell, you should further divide this group into three smaller ones: the school kids, the competitive players and everyone else.
The first group, the school kids, is not really noteworthy. Backend statistic leaks have shown that most of Shell Shocker's playerbase comes from schools, with activity spiking during school times and player counts literally collapsing during holidays. In theory, this should lead to the school kids group being the biggest part of the community. This, however, is not the case, because of my definition of community.
For this article, I will only consider someone as being "in the community" if they are active on any social media (mainly Discord though) about the game.
These school kids only play the game in breaks, but never go further. Most probably are underage and aren't even allowed by both their parents and the platform itself to own a Discord account, for example. This leads to only a small fraction of the school kids being part of the community. But how do they behave?
Well, to be brief, you can tell they're underage. You can REALLY tell.
This part of the community usually does not interact too much. You get really broken english in most cases with content a 10 year old would ask. The school kids are more annoying than toxic, as they don't even know how to use the platform correctly in most cases, constantly misuse channels and CLEARLY haven't been chatting online for a long time. No, this group is not the one I will focus on today.
Same with the group I labeled as "everyone else". These are streamers, fans of said streamers, modders or even actual normal, mature members. They're hit or miss when it comes to personality, but overally also without any major toxicity problem and therefore not of concern in this fine night.
Well, that only leaves one group, doesn't it? The competitve players. Oh boy, where do I start with this?
First of all, even just the concept of a "competitive Shell scene" is kids just old enough to not fall into the "school kids" group wanting to larp a competitive scene before larping was even used in that context, but mommy didn't allow the bad "Valorant" or "Counter-Strike" games with the evil guns. Looking at it from the outside, it is almost amusing how this has been probably the biggest and most active part of the community (which, as we established, doesn't mean they're the biggest part of the playerbase, far from it) without the developers giving a single fuck about them. Sure, they get in-game cosmetic slop in form of codes, but even those have been dying out recently. There have been zero ingame features made to make hosting competitive games easier, even with constant suggestions from members of this group. But still, this group remains alive somehow. Interesting.
Now, competitive gamers are known as being more emotional and having bigger egos, but surely it's not that bad to where you could be calling it a problem, right?
Before we go any further, I do feel the need to mention that it is currently 00:37 and I am in no way qualified to make any scientifically accurate statement on this. Listen, just let me rant, ok? You've gone this far after all, have you not?
As I have already spoilered before, this group consists of people barely mature enough to not fall under the "school kids" category. They know how to use discord, they speak good enough english and don't just ask stupid questions. I say barely here because the age we're talking about should be around 13-16 years old. And guess what, in that age group you have a ton of wannabe cool kids. And there's a lot of them here.
At a certain age you realize that all these people do is trash on other people to boost their ego and to fit into the group. If you're not trashing on someone else, you're gonna get peer pressured into doing or else you're next with being trashed. Now, trashed is maybe too strong of a word to use here, as in reality all we see are pathetic attempts at downtalking someone, but it's what best fits here without losing that sweet aggressive sound. Note that most of these people are not trying to talk bad about someone, they just have to join the one guy doing it because otherwise they'd not be part of the group anymore, also known as deindividuation. Not hating or even defending the victim would make them look weak, and exclude them from the group.
With this being really common when it comes to teens of this age, there's also the aspect of distance caused by all of this being online. Let's go to the year 2011 to explain what I mean.
If you're lucky, your favorite competitive shell player might already be born at this time, but more importantly for this article is the psychological experiment "Remote Control" by Derren Brown. In this experiment, a studio crowd with masks hiding their identity got to decide what would happen to Chris, a random man filmed with hidden cameras. The crowd would anonymously vote for whether something good or something bad happened to Chris. Without going into detail, they always picked the bad options, feeling safe behind their masks and only seeing Chris as a character on a screen, never as an actual human with feelings.
Applying this to Discord, we have the online avatar and identity as the mask. They only see the person they "trash" on as another avatar, not as the actual human behind that avatar. This really lowers the bar even more for trashtalking.
Now, the few people who actually do drive this motion are probably only doing it because Discord gives them a place to freely let out all their feelings without any teacher or parent to tell them it's wrong.
All of these aspects together lead to the toxic hell that is the Shell Shockers competitive scene. When taking this to the extreme, we also see doxxing as a semi-regular thing, with some members even proudly talking about how they dox. Huge egos are also a problem, as seen with the FPS debate, which is a VERY fun topic I should cover in-depth some day. The gist of it is that the comp. community for some reason deluded itself into thinking higher refresh rates give certain advantages, and when I as someone who actually knows what the fuck he's talking about come with facts and irrefutable proof, their ego is too big to just accept and admit they were wrong, with, of course, the addition of not wanting to go against the group. Again, deindividuation.
With this, we have explained one side of the initial discrepency. But what about the cheating community? Is it also this bad? Do we just have two evils here?
Surprisingly no. This is likely a result of this community being so small that you basically only have the client devs in it. When you're at a level of programming where you can work on a cheat client, you're very likely also mature enough where you don't just fall for every peer pressure or need to talk someone else down to validate yourself. The actual users of the cheats are barely active in the community, and therefore can't cause any trouble.
So yes, we have for once a really mild and actually pleasant cheating community while also having a comptitive community full of toxic 14yos with huge egos and no controlling instance.
So now this begs the question, why can't we fix it?
The first approach would be to spread awareness. To be honest here, this post is not trying to do that. It's more a rant, me complaining about something into nothingness. But awareness would help these kids mature faster and hopefully get out of this toxic state their developing minds go trough.
The issue is, you really can't talk to any of these people if they're more than one. The second they have another person from "the group" nearby, they need to show off in front of them. They can't show weakness and admit they were wrong, no. That would make them look uncool. So they'd try to rescue it by making fun of the person trying to show them how what they're doing is bad, trying to get that other group member to join in, with success in most cases. It's really funny how fast these people can change their minds on certain things just to fit into the group again, really, you see it all the time if you just start looking for it. This is the same reason why teachers or parents will never get through to these kinds of kids. The kids know it's true, but agreeing in front of the group would make them look really uncool and risk being excluded, so they just make fun of it, further fueling the problem. Get one of these people in a 1 on 1 talk alone, and boom, they're a completely different person.
To summarize this, we really can't do anything, except not partake in it. A controlling instance higher up isn't possible for the reasons listed above and it's too late to filter the bad guys out before the toxic groups could even form. But that's how it's always been, for years. People will survive. It sucks that we have to make life harder for everyone here, but hey, yall won't agree cuz that makes you uncool, even though you know I'm right.
You can take this as more of a vent post instead of a rant. I'm not really pissed off, no, but more mildly annoyed. I have come to a point where I pity the people in the groups more than the people they're trashing, and that for a good reason. Because if they never get the curve and mature, they will end up being toxic human garbage even as an adult, which the world would be better off if they weren't even born to begin with.
Remember to vent post about your fantasies for a sunshine and rainbows world too, though I've always been a bigger fan of cloudy autumn nights.
I have not read any sentence in here after initially typing it out. Fuck it. Submit.