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.
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
League
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.
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…
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.
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. 🤦♂️
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.
Undertale’s fandom makes 10x more sense when you realize it started off with the same people from the Homestuck fandom (Toby fox used to do Homestuck stuff before Undertale).
Deep Rock Galactic has a great fandom since everything about the game is about cooperating with others. Risk of Rain’s fandom is also pretty chill.
Every fandom that gets popular enough will eventually become kinda toxic and have gatekeepers and people who take the game way too seriously. I wouldn’t put too much stock into fanbases unless it’s a multiplayer only game.
Deep rocks is half genuinely nice redditors, and half of the worst human beings you’ve ever seen. Both spam “rock and stone” under every coop game
Been a while since I’ve been in the community, but Deep Rock Galactic definitely has the nicest community… too nice, in fact. In my experience, they’ve got (or had, again, it’s been a while) a bit of a toxic positivity problem. The community was so over the top with their positivity and friendliness that there was no room to discuss any actual complaints or issues.
That said, it’s definitely a better problem to have than a lot of the games in this thread. The devs are genuinely cool people. I bought both supporter packs and have never regretted it. I just wish they didn’t basically halt development so they could work on side games right as Helldivers 2 was getting popular.
As someone in both Undertale and RoR2’s fandoms, I’m distinctly proud to be in at least one of them lol
It’s just nice to play silly game to watch my numbers go up and then I die
Rock and stone! Deep Rock is absolutely the most wholesome fandom in gaming, as far as I know. The devs just keep making new free content, along with thank you packs for the community to buy, if they want to support them, and it keeps working. I should buy more people that game.
Gatekeeping is necessary for many things, though. Otherwise the thing will be changed into something its not and the thing you loved will become something different that you don’t love. Taken from you by other people coming in demanding the game be changed to fit their tastes instead of enjoying the game as the developers and artists originally created it to be.
For example, Survival Horror as a genre has been all but erased by the “Action Shooter with Horror elements and Over The Shoulder Camera” genre every big name is copy-pasting nowadays. The only Survival Horror games coming out now are the very occasional indie game.
Gatekeeping isnt inherently toxic. Yes, some people can be overly obnoxious about it, but usually that is an indicator that their favorites have been victimized before, and they dont want to lose another one. Becoming mainstream almost always destroys niche stuff, and most of the time it is better to remain niche than erase your identity to “appeal to a wider audience.” Lots of examples of that ending badly.
gatekeeping is toxic in 2 ways, by the games convulted mechanics, difficuluies, and the “superfans” that criticize or say things to discourage to enter thier community.
Maybe you have a different definition of gatekeeping, because for me it always meant fans keeping other fans out of the fandom for various reasons. I don’t see how that prevents other developers from developing similar games or the genre from shifting with new trends.
I dont think gatekeeping should prevent new people from playing a game, per se, but I dont see anything wrong with telling people to play a different game if they are demanding the game change to fit their tastes.
Basically, if someone is acting like they know better than the developers, and their “improvements” don’t fit in line with how the game plays or feels, then their opinions on the game shouldn’t really matter. They have a problem with the game, and the problem is that they should play a different one.
I don’t go around saying how Final Fantasy should stop being a turn based JRPG just because turn based combat and random battles make me go to sleep from boredom. I just don’t play those games because they aren’t for me.
I guess thats really the issue: not every game (or movie, book, comic, etc) is for every person. Expecting that every game should change to fit your own tastes is toxic, and shouldn’t be allowed in communities. Unfortunately, all too often it is allowed and the result is disastrous. It alienates the core fans that would spend money and soon after the entitled people leave to ruin the next shiny thing.
Yeah, I don’t see that as gatekeeping. The gatekeeping I’ve seen, is knowledge checking newbies, then dismissing and griefing them for not already knowing everything as “fake fans”. Demanding streamers play a game a certain way, because that’s considered the optimal/correct way. Generally being elitist and smug towards any newcomer in the community, actively pushing them out.
are you gatekeeping gatekeeping?
Are you gatekeeping gatekeeping gatekeeping?
are y… never mind, yes i am
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.
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.
Yes and no for the story events. There were a few community events that were time limited, though most of them didn’t add to the lore much, if at all. There have been some things where stations are threatened, and the first time it happened it was a big event. Now that’s a standard thing that happens occasionally in the game, and the community has to defeat the ship before it destroys a relay. (Honestly, it’s pretty boring, but the rewards are good.) So there are a few world state things, but not much, and they don’t really contribute to the lore, just the feel of the world.
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.








