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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The Destiny community has this weird love/hate relationship with the property. Closest thing to the Star Wars or Star Trek fans.
I think the Ark community is a little weird in so far as it is an extraction shooter, but the majority of players are opposed to PvP.
Dwarf Fortress has a community like a think tank of scientists all fucking around in game to find out new and novel ways that mechanics synergize with each other.
it is an extraction shooter, but the majority of players are opposed to PvP.
The extraction game mode uses very different mechanics than the standard game that basically try to shoehorn the game into fornite.
Ark pvp is basically competitive minecraft griefing + dinosaurs & guns. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Ark Raiders.
Since when did Ark: Survival Evolved have an extraction shooter in it? 🤨
Ark’s developers wanted it to be an extraction shooter, they tried like hell to make it one. Ark’s players had very different ideas, and to this day still refuse to participate in the extraction shooter mechanics. The two have never coexisted peacefully. Despite the developer’s best attempts, Ark is not an extraction shooter. It is a survival crafting dinosaur-pokemon, and nothing the developer does will ever change that. They have even tried to use Aquatica to destroy the modding community. It didn’t take. The game belongs to the players now. We will never give up. We want survival crafting dinosaur-pokemon, and we will continue along those lines whether the developer likes it or not (they do not like it, to be clear).
I guess I did need to add the Raiders part of the game name… I meant Ark Raiders. The new game. Not Ark: Survival Evolved/Ascended. I figured the extraction shooter part would be enough since one of them is an extraction shooter and the other is a survival game. 🤦♂️
Halo fans. Some of them are either Neo-Nazis/n-word users or the equivalent of your average Star Wars nerd, no in between.
I haven’t seen many nazis among Halo fans, I’m surprised. In lobbies ? IRL ?
When you join the Halo discords to find players it can get that way on there and in game chat sometimes. IRL wouldn’t know.
mmos were the only game specific crowds I specifically engaged with really. Mostly pretty nice. I mean mmo’s are basically social games so presumably people want to be social.
Meanest: The Deceit fandom has a high concentration of assholes. The devs have attempted to crack down on the numbers of racists and misogynists with limited success. The fandom is part of the reason half the lobby tends to die in a shootout before the first night arrives.
Weirdest: Snowbreak Containment Zone. The people from China who disagreed with a fictional character cheating on them with another fictional character migrated to this game. Here, the female cast wastes no time in expressing their undying love for the player every chance they get. Regrettably, the Containment Zone could be leaking because the CCP wants to toss the developers in jail for degeneracy.
Nicest: Honestly? The fandoms around small time visual novels. Controversy doesn’t really appear, so they’re quite nice, if rather vacant.
I was at first interested in playing a shooter with hot women in it. Don’t mind admitting that. But the way so many gacha games develop this parasocial, intimate bond with the self-insert player character (and of course, the players that vote for that behavior) becomes freaking creepy.
I want to be talking with New Character XYZ casually about how flimsy her dating life is, how she’s shallow for trying to get guys to pay her checks, and how she plans to take out frustration against monster-of-the-day baddies. I don’t want to meet and find out she’s so crazy for me she murdered every office worker that frowned in my direction that day, and that the VA lists her sessions for the game on her calendar as “that porno company”
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.
Huh. I guess I never really understood the game then, because I never saw any power differences between new and late game. Like, I could tell I wasn’t effective at the higher levels, but I couldn’t even figure out how to get there. Then a family member came to stay for a week, got addicted and played my account and suddenly everything was bonkers.
Plus, like most games of its type, coming in at the end of (how many now? I know I’ve seen like 15+ events) lore missions makes it awkward. Kind of like if I tried to go and play world of warcraft after leaving during the blood crusade.
For getting powerful, it’s mostly about mods. One important part about modding is realizing there are diminishing returns for adding the same thing. +100% ability strength doubles it. Adding +100% more only increases it by 50% (it’s still adding the same amount, but the total, with the amount added, is increasing less). Different gear will want different stats increased, but you almost never want to go all in into one thing.
For the story stuff, it doesn’t matter. Your game only has your progress. For the most part, the world state that you see is the same as your progress, not the progress of the game. You can take your time and you won’t miss anything. It isn’t like other MMOs where the world progresses without you.
Hah! As a once near-addicted path of exile player, I can understand the basic maths of the mods, I just never really had the entire system click for me.
As for the story, I thought you can’t do the old missions that were time sensitive. I remember playing when there was some ‘dreadnought’ event (I’m probably not remembering the name correctly) where you got to use the giant suit attachment in space, but I only had the chance to play it once or twice before it ended.
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.
I don’t know how it is these days but a cool Fandom used to be eve online. The game sucked. 99% of the time you didn’t do anything. Literally. Like to gain isk(money) you could go mining, you would go to an asteroid, click it, activate mining laser, wait, transfer ore to a hauling ship, wait, repeat for several hours. Oh you want to attack someone? Go there, click on them, set ship to rotate, set ship to auto fire, wait to determine if you win or they do.
That said you spent hours in voice comms just hanging out with your group. Many people used the time to make art. There were some who made songs about the game. Many people made life long friends as they were just talking every night for a few hours. This also led to a lot of creative incidents, like the guy who created his own insurance company for in-game property.
There were some assholes. One notable one being the guy who damaged the literal physical obelisk the company made engraved with all the player names and showcased at their convention. He scraped and carved a person’s name out who he was fighting with online. Didn’t hear the end result but I know the company was looking into legal repurcussions.
Plus there the added fact that you can buy a month of game play with RL money or with in-game money and things which are destroyed are gone for ever. That means you can calculate a ratio between in-game and rl money and know how much money that ship you just blew up cost.
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
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 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.
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.
IIRC, Raytheon also asks people in hiring interviews if they play War Thunder.
Weirdest: Five Nights at Freddy’s, Sonic the Hedgehog,
Nicest: Super Mecha Champions (when it was still up, but it was shut down on PC sadly), Goddess of Victory NIKKE
Meanest: Dead By Daylight (playing as Killer and trying to win or even worse actually winning will result in all but guaranteed death threats in end game chat from Survivor players), Undertale, Pokemon (actually basically anything Neu-Nintendo),
I never even realized dead by daylight had a chat function. I still remember one killer playing against my friends and I was trying to communicate by interpretive dance, and the experienced friend told us we were going to fake run to get points for everybody or something.
Its only visible to PC players. Playing on console doesnt have an end game.chat option. I think the chat may also be hidden by default now, but I haven’t played the game.in a while.
The cruelty squad fandom was insane with people dressing up in business suits for lets plays to get in that CEO mindset.
Also I find it amusing that most of the fear & hunger fandom is queer & horny.
Somehow nicest and meanest simultaneously is Trails probably in my experience lol. Trails fans love Trails but also hate it and hate you for not liking the same games they do. I wish there was a good Trails community somewhere.
You’re welcome to join us over at Seventh Heaven. It’s a generalist JRPG server but we do have a small cadre of Trails fans.
That said, Trails was going to be my vote for weirdest, heh.
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.
I’m amazed planetside 2 is still going. I shouldn’t be, considering the original lasted waaay longer than I thought it would. I still remember the fun when the one-shot shotguns were introduced. Light assault + shotgun + towers were the best fun I ever had. Outside of the mosquito dives, that is, until the freaking blues figured out that weird ‘accelerate at boost speeds vertically with a shotgun nose’ thing.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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