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: 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.
I clicked on this post to say something about Factorio. Great community. Super helpful.
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.
Warframe has all three. Late-game players will gladly carry new players through some of the early farms and often foist upon them a crapton of important items that are difficult to get in the early game (we remember and nobody should have to go through the early game alone).
There are some who call the game woke trash and trying to boycot it because the latest female warframe has a larger body type and they can’t goon to it, or because of a relationship between two male characters that is hinted at being romantic, or because there are two nonbinary characters (both of whom are far better executed than most in media)… and some who sent the developers death threats for making a particular farm easier for new players.
Sounds like Destiny 2. Saw many of the angry ones leave for Warframe after The Final Shape and they bug out about the same crap.
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.
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.
Commissar Kai just made an excellent video about this very thing.
We need more soup damnit, not more cake.
Kinda depends on weather the kids are on or the 9-5 adults. They each add different kinds of sodium.
When I played (before I kicked the addiction), Warframe had the nicest community ever. Everyone was always happy to help out
I’ll never forget how after DE accidentally added an extra zero onto the research cost of a middling clan-only weapon (the Hema, I think it was?) and refused to fix it, players made a bunch of freely joinable clans just to share the blueprint with others so they could avoid the weeks of grinding it could otherwise take to unlock it. And they kept this up for years despite it costing them their only clan slot.
Yeah the good old Hema. There’s now “adversary” version of it in the game that you can get in an hour or two. it’s significantly stronger than the original, but I believe the original Hema research has not changed. Warframe is full of silliness like that, and to some extent I think it’s fine. It creates stories and gives the player base something to bitch about together.
Man, I remember when the star map was just a path with dots on it and there was a total of 5 frames. Excal, Loki, and Mag were the starting frames.
I remember them adding the star map and people hating it cause it made figuring out how to navigate to new planets confusing as fuck before they added in the being able to walk around your Orbiter and the updated mission tracking menus.
But the community existed and we all helped each other figure it out and progress with each other. Guilds and friendship grew naturally with people who were at the same point of progression you were. Without that community helping figure things out the game wouldn’t have been able to get past those growing pains and become the absolute behemoth it is today.
I try to stay away from most fandoms. Any group of people given sufficient time tends to turn sour. I’ll say as someone not affiliated with the Undertale fandom, it’s a really great story with good combat mechanics and very basic RPG elements. Just my 2 cents.
Smash Brothers
Find your local tournament, get accepted by them. They will teach you new tech, be super friendly and accept you as one of their own. Then one of the TO’s will sexually harass and/or attempt to rape you. If it’s not a TO, it’s another member of the community.
Really weird and consistent shit.
A lot of indie games have amazing communities. Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program and Deep Rock Galactic, to name a few. Non-competitive games with active and friendly developers tend to have good fanbases.
On the other hand, a lot of indie games have incredibly toxic and user-hostile communities. Competitive games especially, though you’ll also see it when the community becomes upset with the developer (such as 7 Days to Die and pre-redemption No Man’s Sky).
And then there are the external factors. A game could become a meme or get covered by a pure cinnamon roll of a streamer and gather a wholesome fanbase despite its content (Doom 2016 comes to mind), or an existing friendly community could get overshadowed by a bunch of 4chan rejects if the wrong YouTuber covers the game (see any semi-obscure game reviewed by SsethTzeentach - I’m still upset about Starsector).
If you want something similar to old Minecraft, there’s Vintage Story which is basically hardcore-hardcore Minecraft. From what I’ve seen and can tell, the age demographic for that group is about early-20s+ as it has much deeper mechanics than Minecraft does (like accurate temperature and insulation, block gravity and cave-ins, actually physically shaping items into other useful items via forging or knapping, etc.).
I’ve only played for a bit, but it’s awesome. There’s a ton of mods for it already too.
Edit: there’s also a chisel mechanic in the game so you can shape individual blocks however you want, mix different materials together to create cool patterns and looks, and the edited blocks act like they should; like water and fish will go under if you make a bridge, you can make funky stairs or “slopes” too.
From what I’ve seen, The Stardew Valley crew is just chill and helpful.
The Destiny community has this weird love/hate relationship with the property. Closest thing to the Star Wars or Star Trek fans.
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.
It’s not just OSRS. RS3’s player base has a very vocal pool of extremely conservative incels. You can go to world 84 and drop a casual “Trump did [x]” comment to watch the entire community explode.
There’s a bit of this in the ffxiv community as well. Especially in the RP community, you’ll have people who use incel language also looking for ‘F+’ interactions. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around that worldview.
Nicest: TES. I’ve met some of the nicest people and some of my best friends in the TES community, especially back in my ESO days when I ran a large guild.
Meanest / Most toxic: Planetside 2. I considered Destiny 2 for this but Planetside 2’s community takes the cake. It’s an old game by this point and the only people left playing it are the seasoned, cranky vets that have been playing for thousands of hours and hate everything and have zero patience for anyone who dares try to learn the game. Death threats, harassment, stalking, TKing, etc is all a frequent occurrence. There used to be entire outfits (guilds/clans) of players that were dedicated to playing as dirty as possible or otherwise being huge assholes.
The Briggs AU server community was one of the best, most close-knit gaming communities I’ve ever been a part of (we’re talking over 10 years ago now). Winning the Server Smash match I participated in is still one of my best gaming memories.
Linux?
Weird, nice, or mean?
My experience with the desktop Linux crowd has been pretty crappy honestly. Lemmy is a perfect microcosm of that. Guys I just want my computer to get out of the way and let me do what I need to do. I don’t want to have to sacrifice a goat to the fickle Bluetooth gods just to get my headphones to pair.
But My experience with Linux on the server side has been amazing, both as an admin and interacting with other admins. The platform is so wonderfully versatile, and the RTFM crowd has mellowed out considerably.
I can’t say the same for Windows server. I took MCSA courses in college and the books were horribly written. I was one and a half courses deep before I knew what a “forest” was in context (a bunch of domains), and I only learned that from asking my supervisor at work. The textbooks had been using the term left and right without defining it the entire time. When I went online to ask for guidence or clarification, all I’d get was “You should really know this already.” No, I shouldn’t I’m paying for these classes precisely because I don’t know and I want to learn. MS advertises the MCSA as the foot in the door for windows server admins, which means they shouldn’t assume you’ve been a sysadmin for five years already.
They also don’t play to the strengths of the GUI, namely discoverability and less cognitive burden. A GUI should make administration easier by making it easy to find out what you can do and how you can do it, and not require you to remember how to do it. But the courses had you memorizing which buttons to click in which order. It was so stupid. And for what? What runs on Windows server? Just other stuff made by Microsoft? And it costs how much? No thanks.
Hmmm, well I’ve had good experiences getting help from the Linux community but I strongly get the impression they are not willing to accept a lot of criticism of the operating system.
I haven’t delved deep in fandoms of most games, but Final Fantasy XIV has a very nice community.
