Unbelievable from what I’ve read about just now. This is games-related because it is targeting a gaming community, one that has seemingly taken things too far than they needed to go.
Summary: A user, who I will not name, issued a challenge to the developers of Helldivers 2 to play their game on the hardest difficulty on a mission mode that is known for being difficult, poorly designed and glitchy. Should the developers complete it, he will donate $1,000 to charity of his choosing.
The fanbase? They didn’t take this kindly and have now been making it a campaign to make that user’s life a living hell. Even up to making said user lose their IRL jobs. I’m surprised the user hasn’t killed themselves yet and I hope it never gets to that point.
If you’ve been on the Helldivers 2 subreddit and Steam community, you will know what is going on. I am talking of this because, I hope to never ever see this kind of behavior happen within the Fediverse, because we are supposed to be better than this. I’m not surprised that the rapid dogpiling in rabid irrationality, happened from Reddit because that’s where a lot of it comes from.
There is way more to this drama than I am speaking of, but all it has been doing, is making me disgusted over game-based communities who allow this to happen. I’m disgusted at the people who could’ve nipped it in the bud before it got out of control but didn’t. I’m disgusted at Reddit for predictably allowing it to happen.
I have not felt this disgusted towards something since the Night in the Woods incident. Absolutely disgraceful.
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When you fail to moderate toxicity, it gets worse. Both Reddit and the Steam forums are among the most vile, toxic, hateful social cesspits on the internet. Spez is a greedy piece of shit, but Valve should be ashamed of what they enable and tolerate.
You can’t tell me that Valve cannot hire a dedicated team of forum mediators to help mitigate the toxicity happening in their forums. They’re a multi-billion dollar company that could’ve made it happen ten times over by now, but choose not to and prefer people to be subjected to a snail team that takes their time getting to you. While letting the worst of autonomy take action.
Steam is toxic yea but to compare with reddit? Thats wild. At least in steam discussions everybody just hates you while Reddit has some true degens
Yeah I don’t remember the last time Steam users bullied someone into suicide. I can think of at least three people who’ve been killed by Reddit.
Game is fun.
Game supports upto 4 people.
Game does not require a community.
The reddit community around the game has been toxic as long as the game has existed. They bitch and moan and complain about every little aspect of the game, that barely impacts the game. I’ve enjoyed the game a lot more since I left the community.
Game is fun. It’s a damn co-op. It rarely goes sideways in game. This is pure community drama, I’ve never participated in reddit and steam forums and glad I haven’t.
Ironically I gave up on the community for the complete opposite reason, you can’t criticize the game because criticism is always met with “you’re an enemy of super earth”. I get it, Super earth is a fascist civilization and Helldivers are the extension of that fascism and a lot of it is on the nose and it’s okay to joke about dissenters, sometimes. But you don’t need to scream “enemies of democracy” every single time someone criticizes the game. The game is fun but it’s not perfect. There are real problems with the game, one of which has lead to this complete embarrassment of the community.
In short, the Helldivers 2 community is toxic in every aspect and anyone interested in Helldivers is better off ignoring the subreddit, the steam community and probably also the official discord. Instead join !helldivers2@lemmy.ca where this drama isn’t even mentioned.
The same people who would be susceptible to fascist thought are the same people who think Starship Troopers is about the good guys
Now you understand why media like HellDivers always ends up with the fan base that it does.
Reddit communities around games in general are awful. I swear no one in those subreddits actually enjoys the game they supposedly dump thousands of hours into.
When I was on Reddit I remember there having to be specifically “no salt” versions of game subreddits because the main sub for the game got taken over by people shitting on it.
It’s not even just gamers or even Reddit users though. The online world has just normalized hyper-toxicity at all times. We all treat every comment like an argument. We’ve been taught hate as a default. Even the bots trained on us talk like that.
Hey now that’s not entirely true. The crusader kings community at least used to enjoy it, IDK been off reddit for several years so I don’t know if they’ve changed. Regardless the inbred ugly eugenics programs were always amusing.
Right, like it is an extremely low stakes game that you are supposed to lose sometimes. It costs you nothing to lose, and people are still upset when the developers “Nerf a top tier gun into the ground” by making it sway .5 percent more and that makes the game unplayable.
Remember, half the community doesn’t realise the plot is parody of them and not actually glorifying their ideals.
Unfortunately even as parody/satire they don’t really show us a better faction.
Helldivers is no parody. What are you talking about. :)
We seriously need to give up on the sarcastic, parodic pro-capitalist games, and go back to ripping heads off of virtual fascists.
Duke nukem and castle wolfenstiens love baby will save gaming.
That’s honestly why I’m torn on Warhammer 40k movies and series, some idiots really do not get it that EVERYONE is horrible in that universe and that the racist, fascist, xenocidal, fanatic, militarist theocracy that has the skull as their main item of decor is evil and a parody on thatcherite conservatism cranked up to 12 (because 11 wasn’t enough).
It is so hard to depict the factions of the empire in a light where you can somewhat identify with the individuals, stuck in the machine to be able to tell a story while at the same time making it look cool AND showing that “this is bad, this is really bad and stupid”. And keeping simpleminded fools from being taken in by that aura of power, toxic masculinity and fascism that oozes through every faction like a purulent infection designed by papa Nurgle himself.
Whaaaaaat but not my tech communism fascists! Surely they are ok!
That is a great summary of the Warhammer 40k universe and I say that as a fan of it.
Teach why Fascism is bad and doomed to failure instead of telling people they can’t tell one kind of joke.
The Boys worst fans lol
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There are people on the Fediverse who are trying desperately to shit in it enough to where it is comparable to Reddit.
People are clamoring for more people to be on the Fediverse? I don’t know anymore if more people available would be the answer. We could use more microcommunities, but I don’t know about people.
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Bandwagoning morons hate it when smart people criticize their entertainment.
I stopped playing Helldivers because at a certainly difficulty level it just becomes a torrential flood of enemies that you can’t really do anything about and it was boring…so I stopped.
P.S. It wasn’t the highest diffuculty setting.
D6-8 are like that. Its a flood of the light to midrange enemies that roll over you.
D9-10 are better because it fills in more heavies.
The fanbase? They didn’t take this kindly and have now been making it a campaign to make that user’s life a living hell.
I only browse the community stuff rather than engaging with it, but we’ve had very different experiences.
What I’ve seen is everybody discussing how messed up you’d have to be to do something like that, after a minority of players did all that horrible stuff, the fanbase overwhelmingly calling for those responsible to face punishment in court and to be permanently banned from the game and community.
As can be expected of any community, there’s always unhinged, bad people in the mix. There are bad people on Lemmy, there are bad people everywhere. That’s just life. As a society, we deal with them when they show themselves, and we take care of each other.
You can tar the whole community with one brush if you’d like, but that’s not a path towards anything positive. It only leads to people like me being offended and angry when you claim I’ve (as part of the fanbase) been on a campaign to make someone’s life hell.
It’s just not productive.
I have REALLY gotten sick of the “git gud” crowd.
I’ve recently been playing Tormented Souls 2. It has a good number of weapons to it, but some contention about ammo scarcity. I pointed out that while using your melee weapon on enemies, and using iframes, is technically viable, even if you’re really good at it, it becomes really samey and boring.
Someone immediately jumped on me as having a “skill issue”, and copy-pasting the generic “developer shouldn’t be forced to make the game your way” argument from every Dark Souls discussion.
Somehow, difficulty has become so entwined with masculine ego that people cannot seem to judge criticism of a game that has anything to do with its specific level of challenge.
I encountered these people while playing Divinity Original Sin too. They basically exploited the mechanism, stole everything, abused the chest/telekineses method, then felt good about themselves, look down on everyone who don’t play that way.
I’m tired of those crowds and the hardcore gamer crowds. They believe that they are the best of the best and should therefore, be the ones dictating how games should go. I’ve seen this in real-time with games like Rocket League, where the elitists controlled the asylum and their input was more valuable to Psyonix than compromising so as to make everyone happy.
You can’t even play a casual match anymore without getting penalized when you leave it, since it’s casual and the game places an AI bot in your place to remedy this. All because the elitists, who primarily play Competitive, felt that you should be penalized anyways even in modes where Competitive isn’t the primary focus. Imagine if you were playing single player games and whenever you died or your run ends, you decide to quit the game in frustration.
So you come back to the game later and you’re locked out from playing a single-player game because the people over in the multiplayer side of the spectrum, complained too much about how people quit games that wouldn’t otherwise affect them and the developer taking their side. That’s how ridiculous it got with Rocket League.
This is why I don’t play multiplayer with random people anymore, I am reluctant to gripe about frustrations I have with already hard games when I question the difficulty factor. Because all that it is going to turn into, is just dogpiling with people stabbing at me and screaming I should ‘git gud’ or ‘stop playing games because games are reserved for real gamers’ or ‘go back to playing your shitty 3-match game’.
I have REALLY gotten sick of the “git gud” crowd.
I’ve always been sick of it. It’s impacted how developers create games.
Once upon a time, hard and difficult games on 8-bit and 16-bit platforms were created accidentally, either because of design bugs, or developers not having time to run through proper play-test cycles, or only doing the play testing themselves. We put up with it because we were kids and had a limited budget for games, so we played what we had. It was never intentional, since they wanted to make sure it was balanced enough to appeal to the general audience, but still have difficulty levels for people who wanted to try out a second harder playthrough.
Then, games like Dark Souls came along, which pretended that hard games were a From Software invention, and propped up a community of egoists and digital sadomasochists. All they did was make the designs more deliberate, to the point of developer trolling. (I know this started earlier on in the indie scene, especially roguelikes, but Dark Souls popularized it.)
The “git gud” crowd pushes this narrative of “if it’s possible to do, then it’s the player’s fault for not having the skill to do so”, to the point of personifying a game with statements like “the game is punishing me with bad RNG” or “the game is actively trying to kill me”. This completely ignores the developers’ responsibility of instituting balanced difficulty levels, since it’s the developers’ fault that “the game” does these things.
Again, it has really impacted how developers create games nowadays. First, the “git gud” crowd is loud enough that developers now think they deserve a voice, as if difficult games weren’t absolutely everywhere, even before Dark Souls. The popularity of speed running makes them think that have to cater to that crowd, and streamers streaming impossible challenges skews that difficulty Overton window even more. Developers think they have to make some impossibly difficult game, so that streamers, who famously play video games for a living for thousands of hours a year, will advertise their game and push it to the top.
imagine going to a game’s online community
just, no. don’t do it.
Supergiantgames community was really wholesome
I mean, there are certain games where the online community actually breathes a lot of life into a game. Lots of open-ended games have fantastic online communities. For instance, Factorio’s online community is largely focused on sharing factory blueprints, finding better ways to optimize your setups, and modding.
In fact, the biggest “controversy” surrounding Factorio is that the company’s founder is a bigot. The official Reddit sub actively turned against him. The mods even started deleting his inflammatory posts and comments for breaking the rules, which is a nice piece of irony. Imagine creating a game and then having the entire fanbase turn against you when you start blowing dog whistles.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know about the Factorio guy. What did he do?
But how else would I get the past 35 years of Doom WADs?
It makes me so ashamed. Because I love Helldivers 2. It’s one of my favourite games of all time, and I play it constantly. When I was just starting out, the community was wonderful. They helped me get acquainted with all the systems, had a very “fun is the most important part” outlook even when weapons were routinely getting nerfed into the ground, and there was even a Major Order to either save some children, or get some fancy new stratagem, of which the community overwhelmingly chose the former. Seeing people claiming to be part of that community do something like this, is an absolute fucking embarrassment. There is no excuse. Man just wanted to have fun, and do something unequivocally good. What the absolute fuck.
we are supposed to be better than this
Faulty logic; there are no ethics requirements for fediverse account creation.
For some instances there are ethics/behavior agreements, but maybe not all.
The loudest are often the weakest. I’m averagely sure there was a (biased) study made back when it was popular which suggested many of the most intense participants of an online community barely participate in the activity itself and are instead more interested in projecting themselves as leaders or a person of influence in order to dictate or direct actions and narratives.
I’m happy I don’t take part in gaming “communities.”
Have a few people you know in real life you can game with. Stop reading forums and youtube shorts and streamer takes on gaming. Seriously, just fucking stop. We have to let this attention-baiting, rage-inducing industry of influencers die already. Fuck that $1000 to charity, Jesus christ you could go outside and donate socks and canned food to a community pantry and literally change a family’s life for a week. No need to involve gaming at all.
Play games you like, read reviews if you must, but buy fewer games, play games less, make more friends, socialize, get the fuck out of your gaming chair, you’ll never be a famous twitch streamer. Your life is flying by while you’re lost in Helldivers 2 drama.
the Night in the Woods incident
I’m so out of the loop (it’s great for my own mental health) that I never heard of that one, and I quite enjoyed playing NitW
Okay so this is entirely going off the top of my head as I remembered it.
So in 2017, the MeToo movement was strong (actually I just learned it started as early as 2006 on MySpace, just gained lots of momentum by 2017). And, it was strong and going where lots of allegations were fired off from women who were sexually assaulted or objectified or other similar things afflicted to them.
And allegations were made towards Alec Holowka, who was the Developer/Programmer/Musician of Night in the Woods. He was alleged to have physically and emotionally abused Zoe Quinn in 2012. These allegations didn’t come to light until August of 2019. Within a day after the allegation, the team behind Night in the Woods immediately severed ties with Alec, they claimed they had evidence and all that.
Four days after the allegation and the severation, Alec committed suicide. Now this sparked a huge drama-storm of its own and has heavily divided the Night in the Woods community. Because, the allegations were left unresolved which made a lot of people think that Zoe Quinn just wanted to ruin Alec’s life. Keep in mind, MeToo was a wildfire of its own because as we’ve learned later on after that wave, people were found to have made lots of unproven allegations just to ruin another’s reputation.
Not to say all of them were unproven, it is just a large amount of alleged claims were. It was just exhausting to hear yet another allegation come up after so many years after the fact that it happened and then it becomes a giant he-said she-said dramasode that goes on and on and on. You can see the problem. Also, the whole GamerGate thing was happening too.
All I know from the whole thing was that people really, really hated Zoe Quinn. It was a huge messy situation that went off the rails, divided a community, alienated people about MeToo, made people hate Zoe .etc
Just, ugh. I hated everything about that incident. It’s just another incident where people didn’t sit the fuck down, analyze things closely, figure out who is telling the truth and coming to conclusions based on those findings. People rushed to conclusions right off the bat, immediately sided with Zoe just because she was a woman and demonized Alec just because he was a man.
Fun game but didn’t get too into it because you could feel the sweat immediately
