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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I played Undertale and was kind of underwhelmed. The fandom would have you thinking it was the greatest game ever made
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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…
Nicest has got to be Stardew Valley.
Based on years of experience moderating a public Discord server:
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Weirdest - Trails. Unfortunately, this is weird in the problematic way; think Pragmata. Some of the most well-known names in the fandom are that kind of weird. The series doesn’t do itself any favors leaning into it a bit, too. Adding to it is the perception that series fans are gatekeeping when they tell you to play the series in order when in reality, yes, the developers are insane enough to keep building a continuous narrative that’s gone 20 years, One Piece-style. Hard to convince people of that when video game series just don’t do that.
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Nicest - Stardew Valley. I agree with the others here on that.
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Meanest - Fire Emblem. I’ve seen some wars, holy hell. Aside from general fandom insularity from out-groups, there are intense, internecine wars going on within the fandom over the newer parasocial elements in the series. And then there are waifu wars on top of that within the part of the fandom that’s embraced the parasocial stuff. It’s a fandom crucible.
I hate that in Sky 1 and 2, Agate and Tita develop a nice, positive, younger sister and older sibling dynamic; and then in future games, the fan-standins in the world push this needlessly, uh…”mature” relationship.
She just wanted a sibling because she was an only child, dudes. Some people just cannot feel out dad/daughter or brother/sister relationships without the standard anime incest crowd.
At least the first instance of that unfortunate trend in the game had some reasonable basis for it (same age, no relation, meeting just before puberty)
It happened again in the newest game, too. I was so disappointed. Thought we were past this 😭
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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.
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.
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
The Animal Crossing fandom is all three at once.
Some players are super nice and helpful. They do things like giveaways, share when they have high turnip prices, and let others in their town to recruit moving villagers.
Then you also have people who literally charge entry fees for their island. They’ll use this to sell items and villagers to other players. I’ve even heard of people running scams this way. Even worse is the people who charge real money (this is generally frowned upon in most communities, but pretty lucrative on eBay and Etsy).
The Animal Crossing ethnostate people are also weird to me but it’s their island! I personally like my hodgepodge of little weirdos.
