[abcde666777]

I get the impression dating via games is becoming much more common in general.

Anecdotal example - I'm 39 and used to be an avid counterstrike player, and back in my days (2005-2014) it was 99.9% men. But every so often I play it now and I've been surprised by the number of women I've played with, and doubly surprised by the number of them who have made flirtatious advances. So much so that if I was single I'd almost consider it a reasonable avenue for meeting someone.

[globular-toast]

My sister used to game a fair bit and she got sent loads of free stuff by thirsty guys. She even got a mechanical keyboard sent to her. At least half the "girls" online are guys pretending to be girls to get those sweet benefits (can't say I blame them).

[ddtaylor]

There are also a lot of men with voice changers in CS2 now, for whatever reason. I have been playing a few times and then the "girl" cuts their voice changer and starts yelling at some guy hitting on her, etc. Very strange to witness when you're just trying to find out if this round is a buy round.

[eek2121]

With LLMs, this has become commonplace. Most folks don't realize how far real time video/audio generation has come. You should never ever trust the sound of a voice or a video call, pictures on a screen, etc. it can all be faked.

Behind every virtual "thirst trap" is some dude in another country hoping to scam some sucker out of money.

EDIT: oh and to be clear, I've no issues with meeting folks online. I met my spouse online a couple decades ago, and we quickly moved it offline.

I also know folks (guys) who run hobbyist setups that stream on platforms and pretend to be attractive young ladies. The voice quality is very believable, and the video is approaching realistic. With a bit of doctoring, it looks completely believable...and we are talking about the widely available stuff, NOT the stuff available behind closed doors.

What I am trying to say here is don't treat a relationship as real until you meet the person in real life and build an actual connection.

[ddtaylor]

I am so confused at why people are doing this. I mean, are they just doing it "for the lols" or are they raking in suckers from the gaming communities?

I keep a voice button bound to toggle on and off all comms, also known as a "clutch key", and usually in these scenarios I keep comms off quite a bit because there is a lot of non-game chatter and I tend to only talk during freeze time - since outbound voice still works for call outs. I'm just really bad at listening to people while I am trying to focus and it frustrates me to die because of lack of game sound awareness. So, I don't know if these are the same games where people are trying to beg for skins, etc.