Dicska

Clarification: I'm not a native English speaker. I've been gaming online for the past ~15-20 years, and it feels like there has been an increase in this kind of response in the past few years. Now, I know that it's not always serious: people started using it as 'no way' or meaning 'wow, serious?' recently.

BUT what has taken me aback is the frequency at which I've been seeing 'stfu' as a response to something I either meant seriously, or maybe said it in a light-hearted manner, but not necessarily as a joke - often as a first exchange. To me it still literally means Shut The Fuck Up, and whenever I see it, my immediate reaction is that the person on the other end actually meant it exactly as rude as I have always perceived it all my life.

Would you not take this as an offense, provided it's the first interaction between you and a completely random person? Would you immediately feel they are rude, neutral or straight out saying it very lightly? Is the usage really changing? Do you think they actually mean 'shut up', and they just add the 'f' because everyone else does it?

EDIT: Wow, thanks a lot for your angles! I forgot to mention, but let's assume that 'stfu' is the first and only response you see from this random person. I am also fine with dealing with different situations, I'm not primarily looking for advice (After ~20 years of online gaming experience, I can tell you I've seen most of it); I am mostly interested in your perspective: what vibe would you assume, based on only these four letters?

Sorry if this is not the right community for the question - this was the first one that came to my mind. I'm just wondering if I'm misinterpreting the meaning of the word 'local' in this context; or this is somehow pretty normal and due to the algorithm (in which case I'd like to know this algorithm a little more); or maybe because it's a bug.

UPDATE: I just reloaded the site, thinking I might have just pressed 'next' one too many times, making the algorithm run out of ideas. At the moment I don't see any more Evanston content, however, this has happened several times before, this is why I decided to write here, because it was the 4th/5th time already.

First I just accepted the fact that a bug prevents you from blocking people, but I had enough of toxic teammates today, did some search and neither a regular search nor a reddit focused one brought relevant results. It's like nobody had this bug, but now I'm unable to mute/block people.

The block button is there, you can press it, it even gives a sound effect, but it doesn't turn into a 'blocked' button, and the chaser brats just happily spew their toxicity all game.

Did I miss something? Is it just me? Is there a maximum number of people you can block, or something?

UPDATE: After verifying integrity of local game cache files, it's still the same, so I thought I would contact Epic support. Their upload limit is 9.5MB, which is kinda funny in 2025, but okay, millions of reports (surely), let's just upload the footage to my YT channel and link it as a non-public video (it looks like pea soup already, and it's ~17MB).

Their reply was "Due to system limitations I'm unable to review your video here, but I'll kindly request you to share it in one of our socials mentioned: Here"

The link leads to their website where they offer the following 3 options to upload my video:

• Reddit (not touching it with a stick, lol)
• Discord (DISCORD. A feckin' voice+text chat program. For dealing with reports. From a multi billionaire company. I'm not touching it with a stick, lol)
• X (not touching it with a stick, or anything else in the Universe)

So here we are, they have to believe my word, and if I'm lucky they will pass down the issue to some intern. If I'm not, they will be just waiting until I actually upload it to one of the above 3 atrocious platforms, and then maybe start working on it.

UPDATE #2: I did a little experiment and un-blocked one player on my block list in the main menu. I could suddenly block one player in-game. When trying to block a second player, it was "buggy" again. So I assumed that there was a certain limit to the number of people you can block (which is typically a power of 2, most likely 256). I went and counted the amount of players on my list. I did it by hand, so it might be off, but I counted 581 people, which isn't just a little off of 512. But it seems like there is a built-in limit.

...which means it's not a bug, it's a feature. Something that was put in the game intentionally, has always been there, and they still haven't done anything about it in the past year (I have sent them 2 reports since), even though it isn't some mysterious phenomenon that needs investigating, but a known limit that they should actually know about. All the while I can't even attach 3 screenshot pngs with my report because it exceeds the 9.5MB limit (in 2025). Anyway, I had enough and compressed a video about it to 8.7MB.

And no, blocking 581 people isn't unrealistic unfortunately, considering I've been playing the game for the past 10 years, which means 1-2 blocked people per week. And if you'd been playing RL for more than 4 days then you know that there can be MUCH more toxic and spammy players than 1-2 a week.

This has just happened to me for at least the 3rd time in one year. I cancelled the things I planned for today only to be at home for the delivery; I was sat at home all day and heard nothing. Then, around 2PM I found a red slip saying I should contact Royal Mail for a redelivery (I was at work yesterday when they first ~~tried~~ left a red slip). Obviously my only other day off is tomorrow (Wednesday), and the earliest they allow me to schedule it for is Thursday, so the earliest I can TRY to receive it is an entire week from now. Alternatively, I could have it redelivered to the post office near me, which closes before I could get back from work (EDIT: it ALSO opens after I have to leave for work, therefore completely useless for picking up stuff that arrives on my working day). This is super infuriating now.

Once I even found 2 red slips with different dates in my post box, even though it was empty the night before.

What's going on when this happens?

UPDATE:

So this morning, as a night owl, I decided to make a sacrifice and took an early train to the delivery office (which is open between 8AM and 10AM, but I get it, otherwise the parcels are en route during the day). I asked the guy at the window about it, being fully aware that he might or might not be part of the actual delivery process; not blaming, not interrogating, just simply asking if he knows what the heck is going on.

Yupp, he confirmed what everyone has been commenting about, lol. He didn't have anything other in mind, apart from the afternoon delivery guy cutting corners. I can still imagine it's because they are loaded with work (it happens to be the case at my job) and it's literally impossible to make everyone happy, but management refuses to pay more people. Or he's just lazy. I don't know, but the bottom line is, it wasn't because of some technical nuance, bureaucracy, barometric pressure change in the stratosphere or God knows what. Most likely, he had the parcel but decided to bring the red slip only.

My trust in humanity is in the negatives.

On a slightly more serious note: I really wonder what's going on in your mind when you press that button and cross anyway. Is it just because "I don't care", or is there more to it? If so: what?

EDIT: In case it's because you don't care: why do you press the button then?