EKGaming’s Rebuttal series is about responding and refuting to claims in the gaming world. There’s a time for reporting, and a time for arguing, and that’s where our very own CapsLock comes in. He doesn’t speak for EKGaming, but we let him use our platform to rant because every once in awhile we actually agree with something he says.

There has been a lot of talk about trolls and toxicity this year – a lot. In just the past week, we’ve had articles re-examining the history of trolls as well as Twitch speaking about battling toxic behavior. That is, of course, in addition to Riot constantly battling it and Jeff Kaplan, the director of Overwatch saying it is delaying work on the game considerably. But here’s the real truth – the internet has always been like this, and it always will be.

All these arguments that the internet used to be friendly and that things are getting worse just aren’t true. The only difference is things are more popular. You increase the consumers and the population, you increase the problems. Simple math. When you have a few thousand people playing an online game, sure, it probably feels like utopia. You never interact with most of them and the game feels the way you want it to. But what happens when you reach millions of players like WoW did? Are we to believe that people just ‘magically became jerks’, or maybe there are simply jerks in this world, and now they are also a part of the culture we covet so much?

As far back as I can remember people were jerks. When I was playing Diablo II on battle.net I remember first learning what alt + F4 was when a guy made a room claiming he could help anyone duplicate items. “Walk somewhere safe, like far over in the corner, and just drop your items and push alt + F4.” That’s what he told the child version of me, and I did, and I got booted and he got my items. That stuff was rampant in battle.net. People cheated more than they played the game.

Ragnarok Online, a relic of 2002 and my first MMORPG, was filled with trolls and toxicity, but just a different kind. There were items that summoned random monsters, and high level players routinely spent hours and days farming them just so they could go into town where people where selling items and spawn the monsters, killing everyone so they would make no money. They would also do ‘mob trains’, dragging a horde of enemies around a dungeon then running out, leaving the mob to aggro whomever was closest.

And should we forget Barrens chat from World of Warcraft? I played WoW in beta and for nearly a decade after, and Barrens chat was always garbage – hot, stinking garbage. Did it get worse as WoW got bigger? Absolutely. But I was called more names, saw more stupidity, and saw more hate in Barrens chat of WoW than in any MOBA or FPS I’ve played since.

And let’s not pretend that before WoW, before battle.net, there wasn’t AOL chat. Yes, even in the days of AOL chat, people were huge jerks. Maybe the ‘kill yourself’ meme hadn’t been invented yet, but some variation of it always existed. 4chan pioneered ‘an hero’ for telling people to kill themselves, so that has been a part of internet culture basically as long as there has been a culture. Wherever people congregate, they are going to disagree, they are going to screw with each other, and they are going to be mean.

The problem isn’t DOTA 2, it isn’t LoL, and it isn’t Overwatch. The problem is the internet. If you take away all repercussions for being mean – you don’t get hit, you don’t get threatened, and you don’t see the look on a person’s face when you call them a piece of shit – then you take away 90% of the reason people aren’t mean. The fact is, most of us are mean, and some of us are monsters.

Twitch doesn’t need to battle toxicity like it’s a new phenomenon and neither does Overwatch. People are jerks. You know the solution? Give us tools to ignore them. One video game with one anti-bullying agenda isn’t going to stop the asshole in middle school from calling you fat, and it isn’t going to stop him from calling you a neckbeard online. Ignore the jerks, don’t try to fix them. They’ve existed as long as humans have, and they will continue to exist.