A huge problem has been festering in the Mobile Legends community for quite a while now and it’s a problem that has affected players since launch till this day.
You guessed it: Toxicity. While we get that toxic players are supposed to be the norm in team-based games (especially MOBAs), the situation in Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) is particularly unique: Country Flags.
Moonton may have initially intended the flags to be some sort of motivation for competition, but it has grown into a different, more racist and xenophobic beast altogether.
Reddit posts like these are plenty and a quick google search showed at least an entire page of search results dedicated to offending the Indonesian players (who occupy a vast majority of the server).
One particular Reddit thread posted just three months ago was locked by the mods because of how toxic the content was. Quoting the original post,
“One fine day I am gonna stay away from ML, because of Indonesian players. Say what u want about (sic) its not a specific country, I played long enough to tell which nations are the worse, I am from sg. 90% of of sg players are sane and sound, 90% of them have wr above 55%, 90% of them play to win and not play to take away the fun from other players.”But the post suddenly sinks into sheer xenophobia, “1 thing they like to say, singapore poor, really? Indonesian saying singapore poor? C’mon man, go to school if u need some economics studies stop trolling and losing in ML.”
Apart from the pretty atrocious language, it is clear that the hate is pouring on Indonesian players, for simply being, well, Indonesians.
There is one quick and simple way to fix this: country flags are huge red flags that Moonton needs to do away with. This comes especially so since country flags can be changed every two months or bought with diamonds. What then is the point of flags when players can falsify their origin anyway? What other reason is there to place a country flag than to drive a wedge between players and countries?
And while there is at least some good that comes with said flags, such as unintentionally learning new languages, we strongly believe the bad strictly outweighs the good.
Games are already bad enough with toxic behavior. Giving people a flag to direct their hate at is just adding oil to the flame.
Do the right thing, burn down the (virtual) flags.
