I was watching Mo1st play Helldivers the other night and he mentioned someone's comment about it having the kernel anti-cheat, and one of his buddies immediately said "that guy's a redditor."

I had never felt more attacked yet agreed with something so much.

[–] neatchee@lemmy.world 140 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

If people knew what devs said (justifiably) about players when nobody is looking, the internet would implode.

Like, I'm not trying to be an asshole, but holy fuck gamers are the worst about actually knowing how games are made or the consequences of various decisions they want made.

I don't know why 80% of gamers think playing games means they know how to make games, but it infuriates many of us to no end. We get that it's just misguided desire to see the games improve but jfc it makes life incredibly difficult (especially for the CMs)

EDIT: Imagine someone told an architect "You should just remove that load bearing wall. This other building doesn't have one in that position and it's great. Why is it so hard for you?"

[–] eupraxia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I've attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you're spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I've spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that's playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that's breaking preventing them from logging in, that that's not actually my area of expertise and that I'm just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we've tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn't want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so... not really a choice there. And we can't admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I'm never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can't throw myself in front of that bus again. I'm gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

[–] neatchee@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I totally understand this. I used to do CM work and support stuff, and took the first chance I got to switch to a technical role.

It takes a special type of person to not be permanently fucked up by some of the stuff that gets said and done. I have the utmost respect for the CMs that are able to brush that stuff off over and over again. Cause I sure as shit can't

Especially the bit about publishers making bad decisions and being unable to even talk about it. That stuff hurts

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