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.
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.
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.
Hey bud ww3 about to erpt, this is not important
Hey Bud, how about you go out there and try changing the world on your own. Come back and let us know how it goes.
Same, please it’s better then this bullish.
Fun game but didn’t get too into it because you could feel the sweat immediately
Bandwagoning morons hate it when smart people criticize their entertainment.
It’s why I stopped playing all multiplayer games tbh. People are fucking feral.
I’ve not actually run into more than two or three assholes in helldivers. Almost everyone is cool. Idk if it’s because I exclusively play in7-10 difficulty on PC or what.
Lots of funny people, and almost everyone pulls their own weight and when shit goes wrong usually everyone has a laugh.
Also being the host helps cause I just kick the couple of people who are assholes lol
Exact opposite experience as you. I put in a good 25 hours before I dropped it from all the toxicity. If you accidentally hit someone or your laser drone friendly fired they grenade you, harass you on voice chat, and purposefully don’t revive. Always get kicked at the end of the match. I used to play CS:GO back when it wasnt free and I eventually left for the same reason. I feel just any online game where you have the ability to kill your own team devolves to this.
Warframe recently changed pugs to automatically and instantly disband upon mission completion. It’s kind of awesome. I actually don’t only play solo now.
Yea but like its the best way to avoid the feral people in the real world so kinda sucks.
I dropped like 250 hours when it first released. The community was pretty good then. Helpful and I was also helpful. But the game got old and of course other games to play. So I moved on. Came back when that 3rd race released and it just didn’t grab me again.
Sad day for a good game, but it’ll survive
Well thats really pathetic. All user did was challenge rhe devs to play the game they made. Absolutely insane to try to ruin someone’s life over it. Can’t they use that energy towards something good?
Can’t they use that energy towards something good?
No, that’s why they’re dependent on crap like helldivers.
It’s life-support for losers.
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.
Remember, half the community doesn’t realise the plot is parody of them and not actually glorifying their ideals.
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.
That is a great summary of the Warhammer 40k universe and I say that as a fan of it.
Whaaaaaat but not my tech communism fascists! Surely they are ok!
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
Unfortunately even as parody/satire they don’t really show us a better faction.
Okay, I know a lot about this issue, and it was one guy that doxxed him and a handful of users berating him. Its not “the community.” Its not acceptable. But neither is Arrowheads response, TBH. They should get Sony to get private investigators to catch the doxxer and make an example out of him, otherwise the doxxer wins. He gets what he wanted. This incident reflects on Arrowhead whether they want it or not, so they need to respond to it swiftly, not their “doxxing bad” public announcement.
As long as it isn’t Boeing’s private investigators.
If they’re investigating someone who doxxed a user for saying a game that’s too hard and buggy is too hard and buggy, then maybe they should hire Boeing’s PIs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit is a cesspit of crap like this. It’s really a shame people do this because if the shoe was on the other foot, each and every one of the people dogpiling would cry foul if it happened to them. So glad I left that place but I am extra critical of Fediverse because of my experience with Reddit in the past.
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.
Yeah, I’m glad to find actual coversations here, but it’s so much easier for someone to make a low effort toxic comment and I guess a lot of people are like me and taking long breaks between commenting. Hopefully this stays smaller due to Reddit still exsisting. Similar to how League of Legends is a pit that some of the most toxic gamers keep themselves in.
I’ve run into a few of the people that brought over their “Redditness” in how they act in the comments. Never a pleasure.
Unfortunately many gaming communities are very toxic and it is easy to get sucked into that vibe so its a downward spiral.
