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.
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.
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 played Undertale and was kind of underwhelmed. The fandom would have you thinking it was the greatest game ever made
rs, its includes ors and rs3. ors3 obsessed with gatekeeping and even annoying that affected the latter. pokemon especially its mostly not-children are the competitive part of playing the console games, game freak turned the post-switch pokemon into slop and people still try to buy it
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.
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.
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…
League
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.
I have at this point roughly 1.6k hours in a bunch of Monster Hunter games, though by and large the vast majority of them are in Generations and Generations Ultimate. I’ve never liked concerning myself with meta builds, certainly not in a cooperative PvE game that I regularly would play solo.
Now I’ll preface this by saying I’ve made some lifelong friends in the community, one of which I traveled halfway across the US to visit a few years ago. I don’t think the community is all bad, but I’ve found so many people who will do very little other than try to minmax DPS build via the current meta and shame others for not doing the same.
One not so bad instance I had was when I was trying to break into some higher tier armors. I was going into a fight that I figured would take a long time, knew was going to deal a decent bit of burst damage, could easily knock someone out after that burst was dealt, and most importantly had 3 people joining. Because of these factors, I went with a build where I would primarily support everyone else, then try to keep myself alive, then any time in between those priorities I would try to deal some damage. A large portion of my armor was kitted out to increase the effectiveness of my items, have them affect my teammates, make my items have chances to be reused, then I set up my inventory so I was carrying a lot of healing items and could craft more when necessary.
One of the players in that 4 man squad I remember specifically trying to shame me for bringing a lower damage weapon (chosen because it had more skill slots), having significantly lower armor rating than the others (because I only had mid game support armor, not late game), and for not dealing much damage (because I was trying to keep him and the others alive). I say this one wasn’t too bad because I also remember specifically that others in that very party pointing out that although I may not have had much armor it didn’t matter much since I didn’t engage much and they had noticed how much I was keeping them alive which would have otherwise failed us all the mission.
The worse situation I remember was getting sent DMs about how my build was bad, I was using awful skills, I had one particular armor set that was “a trap for new players”, and to “please just use [x] armor set”. They didn’t like I was using three skills each decided upon because they would fix reasons I kept getting combos interrupted then killed and told me none of them were necessary because “if you’re in the right spots then you won’t need any of those”,aka “git gud”. I could somewhat understand this mentality if we were in a PvP competitive setting, or if we were in a group together actively working to speedrun this monster, or if I had asked for feedback on my armor. This entire discussion came about because I was trying to share with the wider community: “hey I just found about this neat skill exclusive to this armor set!”
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.
I think the Ark Raider 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.
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. 🤦♂️
The correct name is ARC Raiders.
My bad. Obviously, I thought you meant Ark Survival. To me, the all the ascension and cosmetics mechanics they keep trying to use to monetize their playerbase are inspired by extraction shooters like Fortnite, I thought that’s what you meant, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. My opinions are my own (and I have a chip on my shoulder for Ark Survival’s devs) so take that for what it’s worth. Sorry for the confusion, and I appreciate the clarification.
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 Raiders.
OIC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04OrC6yrjFM
I also mixed up battle royale with extraction shooters.
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.
My friend keeps chat on, but refuses to say anything. His reasoning is that you can’t get banned for any quick chat messages, but everything typed is fair game. If you can get the other team to say something though… report time!
Me? I change my name to mess with the other players. I’ve made quite a few friends from casuals through that method. Plus if you can toe the line on what’s acceptable to type, you can catch the other guys typing out diatribes as you score.
KYS
[joking of course]
Great Pass! Great Pass!
What a save!
Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! [chat disabled for 4 seconds]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those of us left playing Titanfall 2 are generally a pretty great bunch. Most of the people who still play actually engage with the movement system and my word, that game has aged well. I love the community; it’s small enough to recognize people, but large enough to maintain an active base at all times of day. As for the meanest, definitely Rust. That community is such a cesspool. It’s not even funny. Nowhere else will you find such a wretched hive of bigotry and ideological subservience. Weirdest to my mind is probably the Batman Arkham one. From what I understand they have splintered, with one side developing an internally perpetuating sort of humor that focuses on making no sense, or being intentionally absurd in some way. The other side has remained largely a normal game community, but harbor an intense hatred for the splinter cell fandom insanity.







