I don’t really play that much anymore, really only when my brother is bugging me to play. Kind of got burned out on it when I used to play it too much

yeah I can already see myself having a bit more fun with it, and it seems to be a little less toxic here. It is difficult finding existing communities to follow though

I haven’t played regularly in a while but I was deep into Half-Life 2 Roleplay.

Haha Xonotic is a blast to drop into, and the online community were great (partly because they want new players to stay ;), one even taught me how to properly use the grappling rope in CTF online mid-game. I’m more used to Call of Duty ‘run-and-gun’ gameplay than Halo or anything with more tactical movement, so someone experienced in this kind of game would have even more fun. It’s worth pointing out that all the games I mentioned (and it’s only partly coincidence) are Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) which is community developed rather than commercially developed, similarly to Lemmy, Mastodon and others.

Alright here’s a quick rant for you:

The SuperTuxKart situation is a bit annoying, in mid-2019, a large chunk of the core staff stood down or left, including the lead, the co-project leader for 10 years and the social media manager. Two new leaders were elected (Alayan and Benau), and in the next couple of years Alayan has apparently disappeared.

Benau is a good dev, but not a good people person. They often give trollish replies in the main chat room antagonizing people who are reasonably annoyed and then laughing at them, I’ve seen them call two different volunteers ‘trolls’ and alienate them, people who very obviously weren’t malicious and did nothing but politely suggest actually useful and applicable improvements or contribute amateurish addons and ask why one wasn’t approved. Add on top of that randomly posting Musk and Donald Trump reaction stickers constantly in regular conversation. And the icing on the cake is that they’re too dismissive of suggestions to accommodate to artist who are less technically experienced. They’ll accept merge requests if someone has volunteered and made those technical or documentation improvements ready to add, sure, but it’s about a 0 on their priority list. And this isn’t trivial, it’s probably the critical important task: I’ve talked to an industry professional 3D artist and teacher who couldn’t get the tools working and was unable to contribute after (allegedly, I don’t know the details) not getting any help in the chat room. With the improvements later made by someone else to the tool setup process, this person probably would have made the major, much requested improvements they had set out to make (like the redesigned overworld map).

Now, look, Benau is a bit stressed handling more roles than they should have, and that probably doesn’t help, but they’re the lead decision maker for a lot of things and very active in the chat and feedback channel so they’re important when it comes to people’s impression and experience. It’s toxic to behave like this in a room for a family-oriented game. I mean, it would be toxic for a FPS too, but I’d just expect better from this genre of game. And when you’re a volunteer driven project, that can be enough to kill it. There’s certainly lost potential when experienced artists leave.