The comments in here are really disappointing and a reflection of where this community has gone in general.
Excusing toxic gamer communities, accusing the developer of things for pointing it out? All because the game not in a good state is toxic in itself and really not what this community should be.
I’ve played CS2 for weeks. Days of hours. Have completely enjoyed it.
It’s not finished and they’re honest about that. Also, comparisons to CS in it’s finished state (easy to do unconsciously) overlook just how many DLCs it took to get to full maturity.
I enjoy the game and have no regrets for buying. I don’t feel deceived since I could have asked for as refund.
I think some of this is a specific kind of FOMO. Fear of missing out (on what could have been). I’m hoping they do enough to fix the parenthetical.
Edit to add: my computer has great specs for late 2020. It’s not top of the line, but it has everything I thought it would need, CPU, RAM, GPU. That may impact my experience.
The game was unplayable on my 5 year old laptop. But it’s not really a gaming rig anyhow…
It’s becoming Reddit. Which is what we wanted last year? I know what you mean though. There is a difference between now and then with our community. Probably related to user count?
Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding what kind of commentary you were expecting.
Leading up to release as soon as the first reviews pointed out bad performance (see thread), many on Lemmy were bashing CO/Paradox for putting out a beta-stage product as if it was fully released, and Lemmings and people at large were never real fans of being unpaid QA testers for game companies.
Mind you, I love this game, and there’s a lot in there that I can tell CO devs put their heart and soul in. But I see a comment or a post every now and then saying “Lemmy is becoming so toxic, like Reddit” [1][2][3][4] and I’m trying to figure out what exactly has changed, if you can help me out here.
I’m expecting this community not to say that a company deserves a toxic community and that being toxic is a totally normal and expected thing.
A few months ago, even , this was a place where people would talk about the game news and not revel in your average Gamer toxicity.
Now it’s just, I guess, reddit, but worse because the toxic voices are louder in a smaller echo chamber. The people who don’t ascribe to this kind of thing leave. The toxic people are all that is left.
I understand your point, and agree that you have received negative replies that prove this community accepts a level of toxicity that may not have been there before. (To me it feels like the same level, but perhaps I’ve just ignored it or become numb to it)
I encourage people to engage in these topics with a level head but there will be exceptions at times.
Reading the second half of this comments reminded me of this long read I was introduced to over in Beehaw.org (the evaporative cooling section). Left unchecked, only the jerks will be left and the nice people give up and leave. If a slower, nicer place for discussion is what you’re looking for, Beehaw was where I found that vibe the most.
I absolutely agree. There’s a line between constructive criticism/feedback and toxicity, some cases are obvious but others I don’t know where exactly to draw it. Those that aren’t interested in the game after being let down may be best advised to refund and move on with their life.
Unfortunately, I don’t know where to strike a good balance to avoid both an "echo chamber where any dissent is extinguished’, and a ‘cesspool of toxic jerks talking ironically’.
Eh, for game-released-in-a-disappointing state there’s always two points for me:
A personal thing, learn to not buy day 1 or even before. Let other people do that, then avoid ever putting yourself in a frustrated position by simply never buying the broken/unfinished game to begin with. Money - and time - better spent on other hobbies, or well, other games.
On a specific level, I always feel that just saying “I’m sorry, but because of X, Y and Z I don’t feel like the game is in any shape to be worth the money asked” and then refunding it is the only real proper feedback to go about it. Voice your reasoning, then undo the purchase to withhold the money. That’s more than enough brain space wasted on an unfinished game you’re not enjoying, anyways.
Those that aren’t interested in the game after being let down may be best advised to refund and move on with their life.
It’s okay to hold a company responsible for the sale of a poor product. You don’t have to give them a free pass and just go away.
You can let them know what they did wrong, and if they’re smart, they won’t do the same wrong thing again, the next time they sell their next product.
And any human being on the planet, when they are not listened to, will become upset and rude. The point is for any company to strive for the win-win, and listen to their customers, and not just try to sell them the next bad product and repeat the same bad cycle.
For sure. I might have weasel-worded my comment with “may be best advised” as it’s not all cases.
Toxicity is unhealthy, but I am optimistic it will become less so once CO and Paradox follow through on their promises. The two big ones being 1. actually being able to play the game on consoles and modest hardware and 2. mods
For some reason people seem to experience the most rage, vocalization frustration, etc. when it comes to having their entertainment fucked with (whether pricing, content itself, etc). Companies can cause global recession or market crashes, be responsible for child labor resulting in death and dismemberment, or engage in flat out fraud, but those companies will never bring out the toxicity, death threats, entitlement, and communal anger like a video game or film/tv company that impacts the entertainment of the masses. When people used to think of the most evil company in America back in the early 2010’s, EA was more hated than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or AIG. That never made sense to me.
For some reason people seem to experience the most rage, vocalization frustration, etc. when it comes to having their entertainment fucked with (whether pricing, content itself, etc).
You should never fuck around with the plebs and their ‘bread and circuses’, especially if your government is not doing well.
Companies can cause global recession or market crashes … or engage in flat out fraud, but those companies will never bring out the toxicity, death threats, entitlement, and communal anger
People are pissed off at inflation, the general cost of everything (including AAA games), laws and punishments not being applied evenly/fairly, etc., these days.
I think the latter part of your comment is a bit hyperbolic (especially part of your comment that I edited out when quoting it in my response).
The defunct Consumerist used to run a poll. forbes.com/…/ea-voted-worst-company-in-america-ag… . It was always strange how EA beat out the companies that I think do more harm to society for several years. For some reason it’s entertainment companies that draw a lot of vocal ire from consumers, despite financial institutions, pharma, telecoms, oil, factory farms, etc. doing more explicit and literal harm.
Your comment was vague. I know there’s these days, but I was talking about a theme I have been seeing since around 2010. In the past 23 years we’ve had differing levels of inflation and what not, but entertainment seems to still draw communal vocal ire in ways that seem disproportional to more impactful issues caused by corporations.
Toxic” is different to everyone though. That’s why these comment sections always go in circles. To some people saying “paradox are crooks and they have no respect for us and they’re ripping us off by using us as beta testers,” is toxic to some. And to others it is seen as constructive criticism. So when someone says “this community is toxic”. I don’t really know what they’re saying. “Toxic” has just become a lazy buzz word that makes discussing this kind of thing pointless.
For me it’s the over representation of self described communists that take over every thread to poetically or unpoetically just keep saying capitalism=bad and then do shit like justify bad behavior because capitalism=bad or pretend to care about making sure employees get paid while advocating for piracy of everything being justified.
I have no problem discussing political opinions. I hate how every thread gets co opted by un critical hot takes for the circle jerk of up votes. It’s frustrating that any post about digital media has the top comments all saying “Yarrrr, time to sail the high sees.” Or anytime there’s any news about a corporation, the top comment seems to be “fuck capitalism and those greedy greedy share holders.” Those kinds of comments aren’t critical, aren’t contributing to any meaningful conversation. On reddit I think it succeeded when you had communities of enthusiasts having conversations about the thing they are enthusiastic about. Lemmy seems to have a lot more people enthusiastic about a political position just try to spread that on any and all communities.
The comments in here are really disappointing and a reflection of what this community has become, corporate bootlickers.
Excusing companies scamming customers because gamers dared to point out the scam? All because the companies quarterly profits weren’t up enough, is a really toxic state and not what this community should be.
At this point, I’m mad they’re about to launch the DLC for every damn feature. Everyone should avoid being toxic, but Paradox/Colossal Order aren’t blameless here. They shipped the game half-finished, and are gonna screw you out of your money. Just go back to the first Skylines.
Don’t be mad, just wait to buy it till they offer a nice package deal (do we have a patient gamers community here?). If enough users do that, they hopefully change their business model.
Overall I also think that paid add-ons are quite okay, if they actually add new stuff and if the base game is a finished product in itself. Ensures that developers continue to take care of the game without subscriptions and leads to games that one can play for a decade (like CK2). But yeah, Paradox overdoes this.
I’m surprised they didn’t see this coming. A lot of people had high expectations because of the impact the first game had and if it wasn’t better in every way there was bound to be some negative feedback.
They’re not complaining about negative feedback, are they? They’re complaining about the internet hate machine, which we should be mature enough here to admit is a bunch of juvenile, masturbatory bullshit from people that want to feel good about themselves without doing anything to actually earn that, and so just shit mercilessly in every way on anything they don’t like, because bullying others is a quick and easy way to feel strong for a brief time.
Isn’t that just a more extreme version of negative feedback?
The post the article is talking about does mention toxicity in the community and hints at it being directed at the devs but how much of that is people debating and talking about gripes they have with the game versus crude personal attacks?
All I was saying is this game received a lot of attention and hype so I felt like this was kind of an inevitably. They were never going to please everyone.
No, things becoming more extreme versions of themselves frequently alters their overall effects. To exaggerate to make my point clear, isn’t mass murder just an extreme form of target shooting?
Trying to identify something without taking its real effects into account is rather silly.
I get it but I feel like a vast majority of the criticism they are getting doesn’t fall under the extreme category or into bullying.
Some people might be making Gmanlives-style quips in the Steam reviews that might make themselves feel good but I think a majority of it’s just general disappointment and people expressing it.
“[It’s] not only directed towards our devs but also our fellow community members - resulting in people hesitating to engage with the community,” Hallikainen explained.
Yeah I think that goes with people voicing their disappointment. It’s like with Fallout 76 a lot of the community was split on it. Even now defending it can lead to dog piling.
People are debating in the community. It might not make for a super fun place to be that’s kind of just the reality of it for now.
Fallout 76 was also an unbelievable shitshow, and had very, very few honest defenders. Does it have to go full gamergate for you think its a problematic situation or something? Try to remember there’s a distinction between reasoned debate, like what you and I are doing right now, and trolling. Which I’m sure we could both switch to if we felt like it.
Criticism, for it to be useful, does have certain delivery requirements. The critic, in order to not be shit, has a certain responsibility to their criticism.
Now, gamers are a tough bunch. If a community is losing community, I think we can make some inferences about whats going on, and it’s probably not a bunch of well-reasoned and nuanced debate.
Try to remember there’s a distinction between reasoned debate, like what you and I are doing right now, and trolling. Which I’m sure we could both switch to if we felt like it.
Criticism, for it to be useful, does have certain delivery requirements. The critic, in order to not be shit, has a certain responsibility to their criticism.
I don’t think the bar is that high or that a majority of the negative discussion falls under bullying. It’s a lot of people disappointed in a game and voicing their frustration.
Saying a game sucks and has no redeeming qualities and encouraging them to get a refund when they ask for any kind of tech support for it on Reddit is kind of unoriginal and lazy but I don’t think that classifies as bullying.
For example this is from Reddit about someone liking the game. You get good responses like this
Subjectively or objectively?
Objectively it’s far from what they’ve promised, full of bugs and hardly optimized.
It’s also a promising platform that could evolve into an objectively amazing game somewhere down the road.
If you — subjectively — enjoy it in its current state that’s great!
But you do get some less constructive comments like
I bought CS2 and it’s utter shit.
But now I feel like a sucker to open CS1 again.
End result: I gave up on Cities Skyline completely. May fall out of habit of playing it at all.
CS2 could, but not certainly, be the death of the franchise if more people act like me
And
I could name a hundred things off the top of my head that could be better in this game. I still have a hundred hours though
Even sorting by controversial on Reddit it’s really not that bad. It sounds like there are some posts being removed but a majority of it is people voicing their frustration with modding support taking so long to implement and the game feeling like it’s lacking in some department.
Does it have to go full gamergate for you think its a problematic situation or something?
I feel like were going in circles here. I already acknowledged that there are going to be people that take it to the extreme and that’s wrong but it’s a very percentage of people.
Now, gamers are a tough bunch. If a community is losing community, I think we can make some inferences about whats going on, and it’s probably not a bunch of well-reasoned and nuanced debate.
I disagree. You see communities around games slow down all the time when new games, updates, and DLC steal the spotlight. A lot of the time you just need to wait for things to shift in a different direction. In the meantime people are going to sporadically talk about how they feel about the game and debate updates that come out.
Ah, I didn’t realize you were mainly going off the subreddit, that makes more sense now. Reddit in general tends to have a milder tone compared to most internet spaces, in my experience. I imagine they’re talking about the Paradox Interactive official forums, which can have a more hardcore tone overall, pretty often I’d say. I actually tend to avoid them for that reason, despite being a pdx fan in general.
Even then can you think of some examples from their forum? Going to it myself is feeding my error messages likely due to my VPN or browser configuration
I’d really rather not dig through looking for the trolling to copy/paste. I’m not a cities skylines 2 player, so I don’t really have a horse in this race, except hating toxic internet bullshit in general.
Yeah I think expectations are too high, where people expected a perfect game like cities skylines forgetting that when it launched it was also a very rocky start.
Gamers in general are just very entitled, and very unforgiving
Nah man, that’s just entitlement. Wanting your $50 game to work well when you buy it is peak entitlement, you should be happy your game is running at 10fps with your 4080 RTX.
It wasn’t polished yes, graphics were not great and people were justified being disappointed and returning it if they felt like it was game breaking
But the vitriol is what I mean, the pure hate, the threats to developers, the anger thrown at them. That is what I’m referring to. If some graphical issues make you so mad that you need to literally threaten people then I think you shouldn’t game anymore. That’s where I say entitled and anger issues.
There’s always going to be a small group of people who take things too far once a game gets popular enough. I don’t think it’s right but I’d say it’s to be expected
I think people expected a CS2 with at least some of the cS1 dlc as standard (at least parks) instead we got a base game and then told there wouldn’t be a mod loader and we couldn’t use the steam library. That’s effectively nuked the ability for the community to “fix” the game.
The difference is that nobody was paying attention to CS1 until after a couple patches were released and the game picked up momentum as it was improved and more fleshed out.
Of course, but that’s not on a personal insults level, after all. It’s on a professional, “product unfit for purpose”, level. As part of a commercial transaction, a goods purchase.
Hence your course of action would be:
Refund the product.
As deemed necessary, avoid that brand in the future.
But just like when your power drill doesn’t work, calling the helpline then verbally abusing the call center person gets you nowhere, and just ruins someone else’s day who had no say in the product disappointing you. And you didn’t really improve your own situation either, you feel briefly improved by being able to vent but you are still sitting on having spent X money for an unfit product. At least get that money back, that’s some genuinely action being taken.
Honestly, if one person or entity chooses to act shifty, then it should be okay to be shitty back. Please, let’s have consequences. Let’s not “let it slide” in the name of decorum or politeness. What motivation would people have to act less shitty in the future if everyone just turns the cheek and deals with it? Lol
I didn’t. I never played the game. I wanted to play the first one but then saw how many DLCs it has. I don’t like this way of developing software, in bits and pieces, so I didn’t want to support it. This changes nothing about the rest of the discussion though.
I’m with you, that studio brought the Sims sales model into the new era. The only people who actually play all their content are either wealthy losers or pirates. Nothing is more unwelcoming than a small closed off community.
I’m proud to say the whole family were big on Sims 2-4 and we pirated every single version and all expansion packs as children. It was a gateway drug to more pirating in the future. Those are the real, open, and welcoming community.
Haha. I gave up on the first Sims because no one was putting up expansion packs to pirate and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to pay for them, so I got bored and quit and never came back to that game series.
Also I think there are a couple of copies of the first 2 sims floating around where you get robbed daily and the mailman hates you as an antipiracy measure.
Simulation speed grinds to a halt as soon as you slapdown a few high density buildings. You basically have to but endless low density sprawl or your city will grind to a halt. I think the Media team of colossal order deserve the toxicity they are receiving.
So because their job means interacting with the community that means they customers are allowed to go ham and be total assholes? That's like saying that just because you work retail you shouldn't be upset by customers being dicks.
It'll absolutely happen anyway due to the nature of humans, and having a thick skin will help you cope with working a job like that, but that doesn't mean the customers should be acting that way and that we should just normalize and enable that behavior just because that's the way it is. It just perpetuates the problem.
If you’re working retail and your job is to deal with customers I highly doubt your boss will let you withdraw communication with your customers because some of them were verbally mean.
I mean, you're right, that's just life™, but that's still fundementally fucked up. For profit companies have to do that because they want everyone's dollar, and if that means you're a better fit for a job because you can deal with people being awful, then... It's a shame we've ended up in that position, societally.
Retail usually calls the cops and bans customers who threaten or scream at employees, which is the real world version of withdrawing communication.
I get your fee fees are hurt because a video game was not perfect, but people flinging shit like caged monkeys get shut down in most jobs. Its not excusable just because muh vidya gaem
You can block emails as well. You can moderate your steam forums and youtube comment section and Twitter replies. I can’t think of a single place where CO is interacting with the community that they can’t block/ban users who are mean.
What’s your point then? Of course they have forums Steam and paradox forums and reddit are the main places to interact with Colossal order. CO has never said they are getting death threats so I don’t know where you get that from.
It seems that you’re getting misinformed by game journalist blogspam. CO is mad that the mood on their forums is sour and they are getting called out for releasing an undercooked buggy game for full price after months of misleading marketing. Everytime they post an update the comments are filled with sour posts complaining about real issues that have still not been fixed 3 months later.
If you get 10,000 death threats from 10,000 individual accounts, blocking or banning them does fuckall. You still recieved 10,000 death threats. And… Ive fuckin seen the twitter posts dude, I dont need CO to tell me about them. They likely arent mentioning them to prevent the risk of increasing their volume.
But, again, you are talking like a kiwifarm reject, so Im sure youre one of the people sending this “fanmail”
I don’t agree with that at all. There’s plenty of people I don’t respect and I will not treat respectfully yet I shouldn’t be barred from interacting with these people. Especially if they are a public figure with the power to influence change.
The president of the United States repealed row v wade. Should everyone opposed to that refrain from toxicity. I think they are well within their right to kick up a stink, be angry and make their voices heard.
Thanks for your honest thoughts on it and your experience. Even though CO media team doesn’t deserve toxicity imo, (I think Paradox management deserves it more), a lot is genuine feedback about people’s poor experiences with the game.
I pushed through a 100k pop play through at 10fps 720p by the end before I upgraded my PC. That would be unacceptable for most but I had fun.
I had fun as well and got to 160k. I tried to reduce population as much as I could but my city was way to developed.
For me there is no replay value until more is added. The cities are really plain and a lot of the default assets look like crap. I know it will be fixed in the future but CO has this attitude that we should be greatful for the shit that was released and are happy to keep us waiting months for basic fixes and features.
Public gaming is toxic by default. We’re not talking one person playing with their friend group, we’re talking gaming in the wild. Yeah, there’s gonna be exceptions, but the vast majority is mockery, lashing out, trolling, superiority and the like. I’ve disabled in game chats and voice for more than a decade because I’m sick of the BS.
So it’s not “happening” as a change, this is its normal state.
A game being called “literally unplayable” has been around since devs allowed early/beta access. Starfield is just the latest victim. No Man’s Sky is easily one of the worst, but they over-promised and far, far under-delivered.
Maybe if devs stopped talking their games up, making promises they don’t keep, showing gameplay that never makes it into the release version and then releasing buggy, broken junk they might stop receiving so much justifiable backlash.
I don’t assume making games is easy. However, devs constantly bowing to financial pressures in order to build hype, release unfinished games, and cut features is the real problem.
On one hand people can be jerks, on the other hand there definetaly is a trend of releasing broken games with a ‘patch it later’ mentality.
Its kind of hard to take a side because people being assholes isn’t the solution but remaining civil is just going to encourage the behaviour and we’ll get even more broken releases.
That’s true but, at the end of the day, it’s developers who have no control over how a game is released getting shat on and harrassed instead of the publishers actually responsible for it.
Then don’t buy games on release. There’s no rush. I’ve been pretty satisfied just buying games I want on sale and have still built up quite the backlog mainly getting titles at 75%+ off. No Man’s sky and subnautica were both just awesome games for me because the period where they were unfinished and disappointing was long past by the time I tried them.
And in my experience, toxicity doesn’t really encourage improving something so much as it encourages stopping to care how the toxic person feels about anything at all. Sometimes that caring even goes negative and the target of the toxicity can take pleasure in how much grief they’ve caused the person spewing out the vitriol.
Toxicity is for burning bridges, not encouraging better behaviour.
People who have studied game theory will know that a corporation’s bad behavior needs to be met with bad behavior, or they will simply keep taking advantage of consumers. Low level employees are innocent, but executives are willingly making bad decisions with the sole interest of lining their pockets.
Edit Lol I guess instead of learning basic game theory you can just downvote and continue your ignorance. Surely that won’t make the problem worse.
Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech. Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.
What I don’t understand is the trolls who hate on stuff forever. Like cyberpunk 2077 for example still has haters who miss absolutely no occasion to shit on the game.
Upper management is always full of the slimiest people out there, I just don’t think that justifies the hate towards devs who just want to make a game and already have to put up with said upper management.
That’s basic relationship stuff : game studios broke player trust. It’s up to them to win it back.
Now different people react differently to the break of trust. Some do react poorly to it. But I won’t blame people, and I won’t sympathise with studios I don’t already trust.
And sometimes they’re also assholes that disrespect players. Sometimes they’re too leniant and think a buggy mess is a game worth releasing. That’s disrespect. Being small is not an excuse to release an alpha version.
What you say actually mixes two quite distinct things, I feel:
Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech.
I disagree with this, and quite harshly so. Independent of what companies do, and some of the releases very much fit the “not respecting” part, that’s not in any way, shape or form an excuse to be abuse to some poor support or outreach rep who has to read your shit. They’re just doing their job, they haven’t even gotten to the playing-a-video-game-in-my-leisure-time part of the day yet.
Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.
That is however quite true, and leads to an extreme echo chamber enforcing and reinforcing negative and abuse comments. It gets clicks, which is ad impressions, so it gets lifted to the top.
I’m not saying the behaviour of the game studios justify people hate. I’m saying it fuels it.
The relationship between a game company and a player base is not a equal one. And I’m not saying all game studios are responsible, but you only need enough of them to behave poorly for people to grow defiance for all of them.
And in this, it’s up to the developers to win back players trust, not to players to forgive game dev blindly.
This bug was introduced with the last Patch last year before they went for christmas/new year holidays. They are back since 1 week now and i think and hope they patch it as soon as possible . To be fair its only a Problem early till midgame before you got youre economy half way working, after this point you dont have money Problems at all . I find the ai pathfinding + the cargo System more gamebreaking then the money bug
On steam checking new reviews shows people are unhappy and refunding but there’s hardly any vitriol there either. Moderators are quick but not that quick.
Over on the official forums we see complaints, disappointment and frustration but little in the way of outright hatred.
I’ve yet to run across anything that crosses a line in terms of content I would moderate, however that doesn’t mean moderators didn’t nuke such comments before I could see them.
This looks like the expected reaction to a game being broken on release. The devs are simply shifting blame to the community.
I wonder how much of the negative feedback is The Sims style issues where a lot of content is either going to be patched in later or come in as DLC but in the meantime something just feels like it’s missing.
A slightly separate issue than just bugs but then again didn’t some traffic issues in the original game get fixed that way?
This is a good time to introduce survivorship bias. You are looking at what is still there. Not what has been removed, burried or was done via dms/non public comms.
Or maybe you are right and they are just making up the toxicity remarks.
Seems more like the managers are shifting blame to both the devs and the community. The people who planned out the development timeline and didn’t provide an adequate amount of time for QA and bugfixes before release are the ones ultimately responsible.
So now they’re telling the paying customers to “stop being toxic to our devs” instead of taking responsibility for their decisions.
Players: “your game doesn’t work. It’s riddled with bugs. It has serious performance issues and doesn’t run on most hardware. It lacks modding support as well as basic features that were present in the previous game”
If there’s one thing to take from this, it’s that the toxicity just needs to be directed at those actually responsible. Not the devs, but at corporate forcing the game to release early.
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