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.
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.