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.
i wish we had our own alsume on lemmy. i never even played the games but that subreddit is so fun
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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!
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 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 think the fighting game community tends to be one of the nicest (some game specific communities can be toxic tho). It’s usually very inclusive and generally friendly to newer players.
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.
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 this 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.
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.
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.
Man, I remember when the star map was just a path with dots on it and there was a total of 5 frames. Excal, Loki, and Mag were the starting frames.
I remember them adding the star map and people hating it cause it made figuring out how to navigate to new planets confusing as fuck before they added in the being able to walk around your Orbiter and the updated mission tracking menus.
But the community existed and we all helped each other figure it out and progress with each other. Guilds and friendship grew naturally with people who were at the same point of progression you were. Without that community helping figure things out the game wouldn’t have been able to get past those growing pains and become the absolute behemoth it is today.
It’s really weird. I played in those early days (there’s a handful of badges available for the game, so most people don’t have one, but I get to be special because there’s an alpha or beta badge), and I really enjoyed it. We had one tileset, and that was enough. Now, I’ll occasionally get the urge to play it again, and there’s so much more, but I’m so much less interested in it. Everything feels less impactful. It’s just too easy now, and there’s no reason to keep going. Back then you needed to progress to survive.
The community is still as nice as ever though. I’m glad that hasn’t changed. Not many games grow as much as they have and keep that. Studios should really try to examine what they did and try to replicate it. It’s something beyond game design. It must be partially how they communicate (weekly streams, and just very up front about their plans), and also how important that is to them. It’s so important that the community lead was made the game director. What other studio has done that?
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
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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Nicest has got to be Stardew Valley.
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.
