PieFedThe Helldivers 2 Community needs to get a fucking grip on itself
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
We seriously need to give up on the sarcastic, parodic pro-capitalist games, and go back to ripping heads off of virtual fascists.
Teach why Fascism is bad and doomed to failure instead of telling people they can’t tell one kind of joke.
Duke nukem and castle wolfenstiens love baby will save gaming.
Unfortunately even as parody/satire they don’t really show us a better faction.
Helldivers is no parody. What are you talking about. :)
edit: /s OBVIOUSLY
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.
Is there a good summary thread? I wonder how exactly this user lost their job as a result of this.
Edit: found this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HelldiversUnfiltered/comments/1rlj9qg/in_an_effort_to_cut_down_on_the_what_happened/
This part was particularly interesting…
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Theres a pretty good one by youtuber dolan darkest, cant link it now but its only 2 minutesish long
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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.
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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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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.
Today I realized I’m too outta the loop on games since halo 3.
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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’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’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.
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.
Finally something worth discussing on this post.
Isn’t it a similar “ego” phenomenon that someone would want the highest difficulty setting to be something they themselves can complete? I fear it’s solely because you get to select the difficulty level that anyone even has an issue with Helldivers.
If you use Call of Duty as the example, they match you with people at your ping and skill level. So why isn’t level 10 on helldivers considered to be the Challenger version of the game. If it followed any similar logic to the bell curve, then very few people should be able to complete it without a coordinated team effort using comms and highly tech focused builds.
Yet I started Helldivers a month ago and have completed a 99% full clear super helldive with 0 deaths with randoms (Fking lidar tower).
Anyways, I’m kind of thinking if they nerf the game it will be too easy. I envy that steep learning curve and great heights by which the game demands you rise.
Unfortunately, developers are left in a position where they have to simply decide. To favor the people who find entertainment in being able to finish the highest difficulty vs. the peoe who desire an never ending demand for evolution to higher skill.
I am happy with the dev team quite a bit due to the fact they do engage and adapt with their community. Much more than other games…
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
This is really a shame. The Helldivers community was really positive and supportive for quite a while after launch. I haven’t played since early last year so I have lost touch, but this is sad to hear.
There’s a surprisingly big chunk of the playerbase that ignores satire. Any game like that will attract these assholes, oldest example I can think of is TF2
Like as in they were too into role playing the German doktor?
Oh yeah, or an american supersoldier. Or just garden variety chuds. Though with TF2’s artstyle and hats and all of that they become a comic relief character
Lolol yeah I watched somewhere on yt that you don’t see Nazis appropriating the Nazi imagery in Mel Brooks’s The Producers because it was so ridiculous, it is impossible to take it positively.
IMO the soldier in TF2 should fall into this category too, he is comic relief, but maybe some people want to identify with the dumb, aggro, american numnuts goofy soldier? Idk lol.
I have played continuously, but o ly with friends, so I barely know what is going on in the community except when there are major changes like adding the hiveworlds where I peek in to see if there is something non-obvious to look out for.
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’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.
Faulty logic; there are no ethics requirements for fediverse account creation.
For some instances there are ethics/behavior agreements, but maybe not all.
Wild, I don’t play the game nor do I know anything about it really. (besides a few streams worth) To go to such extremes is wild. Although to donate $1.000 to a charity is also wild for something known to be difficult. Still, I love charity. So hope they take him up on it. But I much rather sit next to a fellow gamer then on a guilty conscience of doxing some one and forcing them into self harm or otherwise.
Wow this is is bad. This game’s community has been always a shithole - in reddit, discord, and also in the game itself.
I remember when a guy was mad that my mortar blasted him. He waited until we completed the map and the shuttle touched down, then messaged me and kicked me before the mission was completed.
I only play with my friends now, and avoid public servers. It’s a fun, but often messy and buggy game.
I stopped playing Helldivers because at a certain 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 difficulty 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.
Fun game but didn’t get too into it because you could feel the sweat immediately
Really?
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Is the original dev team even working on the game? Most projects go into maintenance mode after release and DLCv1. The talented folks move on to new things and you’re left with regular folks if you’re lucky and outsourced high turnover cube farms if you’re not. Of course the current devs are out of touch, it’s just a 9-5 for them.
I know I’ll never be trying or buying Helldivers after this, the community as a whole are just bad people who idolise Nazi imagery.
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.
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Okay, now replace “videogame” with “post on lemmy”, right?
(And maybe “here” with “hear”, but that’s neither hear nor their)
[slow clap]
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haha wow this comment is amazing satire! you really nailed the elitist, dismissive, generally toxic attitude of the people described in the OP!
Your devotion to playing the part is brilliant. you didn’t even put a /s at the end or anything!
bravo on your satirical masterpiece!
EDIT: Comment deleted? my work here is complete
*Hear *Don’t
Wow, chump. Maybe it’s you that should go back there. Is that why you’re from the reddithat instance?
That’s not games related
they came for gamers….
it’s subreddit drama, helldivers 2 gamers were unaffected