I’m a casual Half Life enjoyer. Spent some time on the subreddit and man is it off the wall.
Tunic has an interesting fandom. That writing system has inspired a lot of cool stuff. The subreddit is censored six ways from Sunday because of how spoiler-sensitive the game is, but I have to wonder what random passers-by must think.
The Undertale fandom has permanently put me off trying the game. It’s not really my kind of game anyway, but I enjoy the soundtrack.
Minecraft has to have had the biggest demographic shift in its player base I’ve ever seen. I bought the game when it was in beta. Most fans were adults who were able to give a random Swede 20 bucks via PayPal. After the game’s release, and especially after the console ports and eventual MS buyout, the average age got younger and younger. I miss the old Minecraft forums.
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Nicest: Slay the spire. I still miss interacting with the slay the spire sub, they’re very wholesome and managed the influx of new players well.
Weirdest: Rimworld. Everything is always about making a perfect cannibalism machine to maximize human leather hats and warcrimes. In a wholesome way.
Meanest: LoL. While it has become much better I can imagine there’s still pointless hostility happening there.
Nicest: Factorio. No matter what you build, people will applaud you for it. Someone comes in, excusing their design for neither being efficient nor pretty. “If you had fun building it, it’s already great.”
Worst: War Thunder. So much toxicity in the chat it’s impressive. Plus a fair bit of edgy kids dabbling in racism and neo nazism. I guess that’s a side effect of being Free to Play
EDIT: Downvoted by war thunder players.
War Thunder is a game that I only know exists because of how many times it’s made the news from actual military vehicle schematics being leaked by forum users hellbent on winning arguments.
edit: After writing this comment I went to double-check I was remembering the right game by searching lemmy for “war thunder” and immediately found this exchange, which I find funny:
IIRC, Raytheon also asks people in hiring interviews if they play War Thunder.
The only way to play Factorio wrong is to play in a way where you’re not having fun and the community kinda embodies that spirit. That said, I have seen a lot of things that made me go “hmm…” in the FactoriOhNo subreddit over the years.
I clicked on this post to say something about Factorio. Great community. Super helpful.
Everyone who plays Factorio knows that the best builds emerge from the knot of conveyors and pipes that got you to bue science. Sure, you could design for scale, but where’s the fun in that?
I played Undertale and was kind of underwhelmed. The fandom would have you thinking it was the greatest game ever made
IDK, I was stupidly obsessed with Final Fantasy VII as a kid, to the point that I wanted to do a school project on it (I didn’t follow through thankfully). After playing other JRPGs I now know the story is by no means unique or groundbreaking, even if the game as a whole is well-executed.
I could see a naive young’un thinking Undertale is super unique but re-evaluating it later. Other “quirky” RPGs have come before (specifically the Mother series), so if you’ve played Earthbound first Undertale may not be so unique. I haven’t played Undertale, but I’ve read and watched plenty of content about it, enough to know what the game is doing.
Yeah, I think my mistake was not realize the praise was coming from a much younger demographic. I was really surprised by how little gameplay there is.
Ooh, the weirdest goes to Helldivers 2’s fanbase without a doubt. It’s so fucking toxic. But I say weird and not mean because they’re the friendliest bunch around as long as you don’t make your opinion of the game’s balance clear. But once you do… the fandom is split into two halves, and they fucking hate each other. So as to not take sides I’ll explain each side from the other’s view point:
On one side you have the “cry-divers”, who complain about literally everything the devs do. They bitch and moan all day long about balance and how the devs’ vision for the game isn’t the same as theirs. The devs could give them everything they wanted but also include a tiny little nerf, and the only thing you’d hear from them is endless crying about how PvE games should never have nerfs.
On the other side, you have the “glaze-divers”. They will defend the devs no matter what they do. Devs just nerfed the weakest gun in the game? Devs just blatantly lied to their community in their patch notes? Devs just shot your dog? Call the glaze divers.
Now obviously its more nuanced than this. But they sure don’t know this. It’s gotten so bad that someone in the first camp offered the devs an innocent challenge to demonstrate the poor balance of the game. And then someone (multiple people?) in the latter camp doxxed them, and then got them kicked out of the place they volunteer at for safety reasons because they got sent too many death threats. They might have gotten fired from their job too, but I don’t remember. It’s wild.
I stopped playing helldivers some time ago. And it’s quite annoying. People play the hardest difficulty and then complain that their gun is too weak and the game is too hard. Juat play an easier difficulty. Other people play it just fine.
Tbf, the people playing on difficulty 10 are usually rocking meta builds like orbital napalms, thermites, and explosive crossbows. I doubt there’s many people playing the hardest difficulty with the Constitution and Sterilizer and unironically calling it balanced. And then when people see certain weapons under-performing on harder difficulties, they assume it’s a weapon balance issue (especially hating on light pen weapons), but I don’t think it is. At least not in most cases, there’s definitely a couple stinkers. I think it’s more of an issue with the game’s RNG.
Because if you get unlucky, you just won’t be able to use half of your loadout. For example, when diving against the terminids, you can get unlucky and get a hive guard seed or a bile spewer seed, where those are 75% of the enemies you encounter. Which is a problem if you happened to bring a light pen weapon or two, which are basically unable to hurt any of their heavily armored bodies, especially not in mass numbers. Or you could have brought a bolt action rifle against the predator strain and suddenly you’re stuck in a death loop.
The game desperately needs a way to either outright select the seed you want, or at least make specific seeds more common on certain planets or biomes. Because as it is, you’re more or less just encouraged to only use weapons that are generally good against all enemy sub factions, lest you get fucked over by RNG.
The Batman Arkham series. The series ended a while ago and the subreddit “devolved” into a giant meme, but if anyone has a serious question about something in the game they get the most helpful answers all the time.
i wish we had our own alsume on lemmy. i never even played the games but that subreddit is so fun
Undertale’s fandom makes 10x more sense when you realize it started off with the same people from the Homestuck fandom (Toby fox used to do Homestuck stuff before Undertale).
Deep Rock Galactic has a great fandom since everything about the game is about cooperating with others. Risk of Rain’s fandom is also pretty chill.
Every fandom that gets popular enough will eventually become kinda toxic and have gatekeepers and people who take the game way too seriously. I wouldn’t put too much stock into fanbases unless it’s a multiplayer only game.
Deep rocks is half genuinely nice redditors, and half of the worst human beings you’ve ever seen. Both spam “rock and stone” under every coop game
Been a while since I’ve been in the community, but Deep Rock Galactic definitely has the nicest community… too nice, in fact. In my experience, they’ve got (or had, again, it’s been a while) a bit of a toxic positivity problem. The community was so over the top with their positivity and friendliness that there was no room to discuss any actual complaints or issues.
That said, it’s definitely a better problem to have than a lot of the games in this thread. The devs are genuinely cool people. I bought both supporter packs and have never regretted it. I just wish they didn’t basically halt development so they could work on side games right as Helldivers 2 was getting popular.
Gatekeeping is necessary for many things, though. Otherwise the thing will be changed into something its not and the thing you loved will become something different that you don’t love. Taken from you by other people coming in demanding the game be changed to fit their tastes instead of enjoying the game as the developers and artists originally created it to be.
For example, Survival Horror as a genre has been all but erased by the “Action Shooter with Horror elements and Over The Shoulder Camera” genre every big name is copy-pasting nowadays. The only Survival Horror games coming out now are the very occasional indie game.
Gatekeeping isnt inherently toxic. Yes, some people can be overly obnoxious about it, but usually that is an indicator that their favorites have been victimized before, and they dont want to lose another one. Becoming mainstream almost always destroys niche stuff, and most of the time it is better to remain niche than erase your identity to “appeal to a wider audience.” Lots of examples of that ending badly.
gatekeeping is toxic in 2 ways, by the games convulted mechanics, difficuluies, and the “superfans” that criticize or say things to discourage to enter thier community.
One of the weirdest must be Final Fantasy XIV community.
On the one hand, they are a bunch of the nicest people you’ll find. I’ve seen several wow refugees coming and getting surprised because there’s actual etiquette in dungeons: You don’t vote-kick a disconnected player unless 10-15 minutes have passed because they could come back. And people take care of sprouts (newbies), like, really. If there’s a dungeon with a new player (a popup says there’s a newbie but doesn’t say who is it), people give tips about bosses and how to tackle everything. And if there’s a plot twist (there’s a HUGE ONE in Endwalker’s final boss battle), nobody will spoil it.
They have also… Limsa. A city you have to experience to understand. It’s weird, but in the cool sense of the word.
But… on the other hand… The hardcore raider subcommunity has to be one of the worst gang of crybabies ever. JFC they whine about everything. Never satisfied, extremely elitist…
I was doing the latest raid series with some friends this weekend who were catching up with the content, and they didn’t know the fights.
The first battle has new mechanics, and some people died to them. There was one guy who piped up, “This has been out for two years! How are people still dying to [mechanic]???” We beat the boss so it didn’t matter, but several people chimed in to say “hey, there are some new people here; it’s new to them.” Everyone was defending the people who died.
THEN, oh boy, this guy - would you believe it - DIED in the next fight. And the crowd then… oooo did we make fun of that guy.
What I’m getting at is that one guy out of 24 tried to be a bit of a jerk, but then everyone else was like, “No. That’s not this game, bro.” It’s a community. It’s great.
At the end of the raid when we were all waiting on rolls for items, someone disconnected. “Hey, [another player] DC’d. That’s why the rolls are taking long.” Everyone was like, “no worries.” I said, “That’s fine. DC is better than Marvel right now anyway…” and then the group got to talking about movies and super heroes for a couple of minutes while we all waited for this one person to restart the game.
WoW could never.
I think that’s just the hardcore raiding crowd everywhere. I’ve seen it across multiple MMOs. When you’re that highly invested in something, any changes are going to get under your skin. Especially so if competition for seats is involved.
What I wish was more universal was the dungeon etiquette. It’s been a few years since I was in World of Warcraft, but the pick-up group dungeon experience there had the most toxic people I’ve ever seen in gaming by a long way. And I’ve solo queued in League of Legends!
DOTA 2 players might be the meanest. The game includes a reminder at the beginning of the match just for regular players to be nice with new players. That tells you a lot about the community (and, of course, the reminder is mostly useless). The match-accepting button gives some information and tells you the way your allies and enemies (in a single grade) normally behave, and pretty often they are in a red color that says “disruptive”. It’s bad. Unhinged chat and sometimes voice chat.
I play old school runescape. the community is either the nicest queer people you’ve ever met or absolute incels and there really not any in between.
The Outer Wilds hint community is very nearly an extension of the game. They’re very good about providing hints based on what you already know without giving things away, so you still feel good about figuring it out.
https://www.nicegamehints.com/ does that for a lot of games
Team Fortress 2 players are kind of the three at the same time ?
Silly and weird, fairly chill and nice overall. But the bot crisis showed an AWFUL side of this game too…
I think the fighting game community tends to be one of the nicest (some game specific communities can be toxic tho). It’s usually very inclusive and generally friendly to newer players.
Kerbal Space Program had a super nice community. Well, until KSP2’s cancellation, that brought a ton of haters seemingly out of nowhere. Fortunately I think that’s blown over and all the kind and creative people are moving over to Kitten Space Agency, which seems like a way better project.
Unfortunately I play Rocket League… this game is ridden with bad actors. I keep the text chat on because when you encounter good faith players it’s the nicest thing to be able to converse, but the price is really high. Almost constant abuse, under all its forms : racism, insults, etc. I think it’s mostly unattended teenagers, but boy do they ruin stuff.
The helldivers community seems to constantly be one patch away from burning down arrowhead studios, so there’s that.
Yeah, because Arrowhead just cant help themselves with trying to kill their game with every patch.
This comment is a decent example of the antagonistic relationship that helldivers seem to have with the devs. I doubt they are actively trying to ruin their own game, but mistakes are very regularly framed that way in feedback, and said feedback is usually very angry, and usually written in a way to insult the developers competence or choices.
I just don’t see that level of anger in most other games, and I really don’t know what’s so different in this case.
I used to think it was incompetence. But they were so smug in their update video where they proudly proclaimed “we didnt do anything to the Coyote.” No, instead, they nerfed it by nerfing ALL FIRE DAMAGE GLOBALLY. Meaning not only did they nerf the Coyote like they wanted, they also nerfed flamethrowers and incendiary weapons.
Then they repeated this with the tank. Right before they dropped the tank, they reduced its health AND INCREASED DURABLE DAMAGE ON ALL ENEMIES. Which nerfed the tank like they wanted, but also nerfed ALL VEHICLES AND TURRETS. So now all our vehicles, not just the tank but also the FRV and the mechs AND all the turrets, are armored with soggy paper.
Then they get backlash, they wheel out Pilestedt, and he says “we will change, we will listen, we will be more transparent.” Every. Single. Time. They have done this like six times, and they keep making the same mistakes. Making a good Helldivers 2 update isn’t even hard. But Arrowhead’s updates make it look like a monumental challenge. I dont even know what the devs do all day, most of the content made for their game is outsourced, they dont even make it themselves.
This isnt incompetence. Its Antagonistic DM Syndrome. It cant be anything other than intentional at this point.
It’s been a while since I’ve played the game or engaged with the community (1.5+ years?) but the devs would definitely nerf things the community found very fun. Like, dudes, it’s not a PvP game. Just leave it alone. Let people enjoy your jank. The constant shuffle of core mechanics turned it into a game that just felt unpredictable and unfinished. It’s what pushed me away.
