Cities: Skylines 2 developers have noticed 'a growing tendency of toxicity in our community'

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.

This place gets worse every week.

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.
- None of that excuses being toxic around the game though.
  At most, it excuses just refunding it. And then never interacting with it or the community around it ever again.
- 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'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.
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?
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...
- Regarding specs:
  Even youtube creators supposedly had trouble (at times) running it at a consistent framerate.
  Not that I had it when I bought it...It ran fine at 1440p ultra wide and (afaik) medium/high settings.
Toxic devs get a toxic community. Why should I express sympathy for them experiencing consequences?
- Yes, this is the kind of comment I am talking about when I am talking about how this community had gone downhill massively. Thank you for the example.
  It is not hard to say that the game isn't in a good state, but that is no excuse for toxicity. Unless you yourself are a part of the problem.
- How were the devs behaving toxic? I mean, should be easy enough to provide quotes, right?
Its the internet though. I don't know of a place on the internet where there's no toxicity.
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.
- There was no scam. They were upfront about the issues before release.
  Stating facts is not bootlicking. It's just being a mature, fair adult about things.
Slowly becoming the reddit replacement we don't deserve.

Such a toxic community! I popped over to reddit and saw posts like this

https://old.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines2/comments/19bq6q3/keep_running_into_a_bug_that_destroys_my_tax/kitiiqn/

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.

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.
- however that doesn’t mean moderators didn’t nuke such comments before I could see them.
  Im well aware of survivorship bias and even addressed it in my comment.
  It isn’t the first time devs have shifted blame for their failures to their customers.
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.
Thank you for the legwork!
"We released a garbage unfinished game that didn't run properly and wasn't that good, but it's the players fault."
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?

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.
That's more than mere negative criticism.
- 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.
- Very well said. It’s for this reason that I never admit openly that I am a gamer. It’s an embarrassing term.
There was no way the game was going to be better in every way, the previous game was being worked on for the better part of a decade.
- 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
- 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.
They may have expected typical gamers to be more respectful than they are.
Huge mistake.
- When they released CS1 it was in a similar state.
  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.

The statement still asks for criticism but asks for it to be polite.
You can say something is bad without sounding like an asshole.
- People don’t tend to be polite when they buy a dodgy product of any kind, why would video games be different?
- Exactly.
Shouldn’t expect toxicity.
What? You’re not hurting only the devs here (though, it still wouldn’t be okay to hurt the devs in the first place).
Let’s be honest here. Cities Skylines 2 community is so toxic it’s actually a burden even for players. The Steam forums and most online places dedicated to the game are full of entitled people who, instead of going for another game, spend their days shitting on it. Even going as far as jumping over people actually enjoying the game. That’s what toxicity means. And you can find any excuse you want, it’s not a sane behaviour.

Toxicity in our cities, in our Cities (Skylines 2 community)

You, what do you own the world? How do you own disorder, disorder?

"In the long run, this will really hurt not only the mood and the happiness of community members but also discourage creativity and modding, something we would be very sad to see."

jkjk I know it's coming and I love Cities Skylines 2 even in the state it's in, but people are understandably impatient and upset at waiting for promised features to arrive.

Have they even given a timeframe for when mods will release because I haven't seen them say anything about it since launch, I'm assuming because another team is developing it.
- Per CO's January 15th word of the week:
  As we have stated earlier, there is no higher priority than releasing the modding support for the game. The Editor UI is expected to be ready enough for the closed beta in a few weeks. There is an issue with the asset import still that we are hard at work solving. If the issue is not resolved in a reasonable time we’ll consider releasing the editor without the ability to import custom assets and just have the maps and code modding present. Whichever the resolution for the modding support is, we can’t wait to see your creations!
  closed beta in a few weeks, full release probably sometime thereafter.

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.

Whatever complaint you got about the game, saying that anyone « deserves toxicity » is not the clever take you think it is.
- I scammed hundreds of thousands of people how dare they post mean comments on my works social media.
I have so many high density buildings in my city and no appreciable FPS or slowdown issues.
How does your computer compare to recommended specs?
- I've got 160k people. Playing on 1080p with a 2070s and a ryzen 5600x
  Simulation speed is prioritized and graphics is turned down to medium but the game runs at about 0.8 to 1x speed.
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.

Listen the game isn't perfect and did have a rough launch, but they're actively working on fixing and improving it. I've had 8+ hour straight binges of gameplay on it and enjoy it plenty. Is it completely what I hoped for? Not exactly, and the game could use more optimization but I still very much enjoy it, personally. It's more enjoyable to me so far than the first game, especially with the new tools and features they've added.

Toxicity is so dumb with g*mers, just refund and leave an honest review then move on with your lives people, geez.

That's what they are doing... The marketing team cannot handle their game being returned so they call the community toxic. Career suicide imo
I didn't even think it was all that rough of a launch
- No console launch, no mod management, and optimization issues.
  Two out of three weren't expected. Maybe all three.
  That said, I like CS2 more than the original. I miss the added functions I got from some of the DLC (industries, airports), but I'm sure they won't pass up the opportunity to do it all over again and make money doing so. That is, provided there is a large enough community to buy DLCs.
  People love/loved CS. Whole TY channels grew up for just that one game. Those channels are branching out more now and that causes me concern.
  I don't blame the devs. I wish they'd waited to launch, but I can also understand the companies need money to function.
  We're in a critical time and I know the devs put a lot of heart into the game. If I was their leader, I'd be sympathetic too. Doesn't mean I'm seeing toxicity - just not the reception the devs may have expected after all that hype.

This is happening everywhere in gaming, people could be critical without being complete assholes, it's getting out of hand.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
No, most companies take positive action, not whine about toxic community
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.
- It does keep getting worse though, Starfield's started a fire that keeps raging on 4 months later.
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.
- 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.

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.
- My understanding is that there are performance problems too though. But I haven't kept up with it too closely.