Honest curious question: what made you change your mind?

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Gamers have become total suckers as well, and on the whole are not very good with their money. From always pre-ordering to season passes to oceans of memorabilia.

Hardware has especially suffered. There used to be a time when gaming attracted technical people and there were brilliant forums and in depth review sites for hardware. Now most of those are dead with only a couple good ones left because everyone figured out you can just slap RGB lights on your product and call it a day. Gamers will buy it.

Prices go up and up, quality goes down, control over the product goes down, improvements per generation go down. But man there's never been more flashy marketing and lights.

You've obviously never been a part of the stardew valley community. It's incredibly wholesome.

100% This.

So steam has the little update ribbon for games in your library, and recently one popped up for The Outer Worlds in my feed. I thought it was odd since it's not a new game anymore so I checked it out and it was for some reason just the announcement for Outer Worlds 2. Thought that was odd too since that also happened awhile ago so I went to the discussion thread to see if there was an update to the announcement or something and I got to reading the comments. It was just the most toxic and vile cesspool of comments. Literal mud brained comments like "no woke game, no DEI this time, this game bad because I can't fuck the asexual brown girl and she should be white anyway because that doesn't make sense in outer space" and other vile bigoted shit. Like seriously guys? You hated the game so much that you have to spew your ignorant garbage brained thoughts on an announcement thread for the sequel? Fuck me these people are just the absolute sludge at the bottom of the barrel.

I'm all for protesting a game because the company is evil (you know which ones are) but holy hell people, the vast majority of the comments were not that at all. Just fucking go play something else. There are a hundred thousand other choices for any respective genre of game. Please just all of you fuck off.

I crank up the graphics settings as high as I can get them while getting at least 20fps consistently. I do think some games are just badly optimized though.

I also liked the original state of Minecraft dungeons and even got the first DLC when it was on sale but then they turned it into a grindy season based thing with subscriptions, yet another program ruined by Microsoft.

Apart from this I don't really have any strong opinions about games and don't really get why people behave like that.

Game puts out 58fps instead of 60? Trash. Throw it out. Start a media campaign about how shit the devs are at their jobs

To be fair, they're not entirely wrong about this one when it comes to current-gen games. They're wrong for their dickish entitled opinions, but they're not about how modern titles are requiring far more resources to run compared to the gains in visual quality.

And I'm not complaining about that because I think people are entitled to games meeting some bullshit metric like zero-latency with better-than-life quality on 8 year old hardware. For accessibility reasons, I legitimately can't play modern "AAA" games targeting 30 frames per second. It makes me suffer from severe motion sickness, and there's something about newer games that make them a lot worse (frame blending? Bad frame pacing?). The only thing that seems to help is running at a higher framerate, and it's getting increasingly difficult to find big-budget games that don't either rely on using upscaling and frame generation and/or a $1600 graphics card to achieve that.

That's not to say the developers are bad at their jobs. Rather, the industry trend seems to be that publishers are demanding more content in less time, and games aren't being given the time and budget needed for optimizing them before release.

I used to play DotA2. Some lobbies were fine. The memorable ones were incredibly toxic. I played for a couple of years, so it must have been fun, but all I remember was the racism, cruelty, and bitchiness in voice chat.

Starting with games like Rad Racer and RC Pro Am on the NES, I must have put 10s of thousands of hours into hundreds of different racing games over the years. But try to talk to anyone about it, and it's all gatekeeping all the time.

"Your favorite is too arcade-y for a real fan, noob." "You turn on anti-lock braking? You aren't sophisticated enough to join my clan, peasant." Shit like that. I'm sure lots of other genres have similar fuckwads that think they are the gods of the gaming world.

I feel like most self-proclaimed anarchists have very little interest in the political philosophy aspect of it. Which is a shame, because it's really far better than its reputation.

I'd consider myself a Star Wars fan, and one of the things that gets me about the current state of fandom is how opposed to nuance it is. Having measured opinions about things is right out; you need to decide if you're going to LOVE or HATE a thing, and if you don't then you're not welcome.

This is mine too.

I disconnected from R&M after the toxic fans went psycho over Schezwan sauce. There was some news blip that happened not long before that intelligent people tend to have a dark sense of humor, and it's like it made the worst of the worst decide that they must be super geniuses if they teabag someone in CS:GO after they kill them.

Do you have a tl;Dr?

I hadn't thought about fandom's based around people rather than properties (ex. Movie/game series). I imagine a lot of people feel that way about late Rooster Teeth.

The borderline pedophilia in so much anime is what turns me off. So many popular series are lolicon degeneracy but heavens forbid you try to call it out, or the anime fans come out in droves to tell you that you're an unappreciative normie who just doesn't get the themes and how profound they are.

I still watch some series, but I simply cannot engage with an anime community ever again.