Why Fandom Cant Have Nice Things / Video Games

• Nintendo has its own page.

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General

• A lot of developers have cited high piracy rates as a reason for including draconian DRM, flat-out not porting their games to PC at all, or refusing to export their games to other regions. For example:
  • Demigod had faith in its fans and released the game sans Copy Protection. The result? An estimated 93% piracy rate that choked the servers to death and caused review scores to plummet thanks to untold amounts of lag and connection issues. For that matter; a lot of Copy Protection and DRM in general, as you can see from several other examples on this page. It used to not be as intrusive as it was; but because of people who decided to pirate the game anyways, and then the players sticking it to the man who pirated it out of spite pirated it anyways to claim their piracy, thus further falsifying DRM.
  • Crysis, due to its high system requirements, was widely pirated, often just to use as a benchmark. When the sequel was announced to be not only on the PC, but the Xbox 360 and PS3 as well (in part because pirating is a lot harder on consoles), the series' PC fans cried bloody murder, worried that the lower capabilities of consoles would result in a lower-quality PC version - which for a time turned out to be correct, until CryTek released a DirectX 11 patch that added a lot of nice features that consoles couldn't do.
  • Cliff Bleszinski announced that the sequels to the original Gears of War would not be released on PC, as the PC version of the first game had been so thoroughly pirated. He also hates the nickname CliffyB now since people used it so often as a form of insult.^note Ironically, he was the one who first said "call me CliffyB."
• One reason for why pre-release video game demos have become rarer is that, if a demo includes Dummied Out data from the final game, data miners can uncover spoilers for the final game and release them in the Internet. While removing said data is an option, it can greatly increase the work needed to create a demo since it requires the demo to go through additional testing to ensure the removal of supposedly non-required assets doesn't have unintended consequences.
• The exploitation of a Good Bad Bug in a multiplayer game can be considered this when people start to report it, which causes it to get fixed in an Obvious Rule Patch the following weeks, days, or even hours. However, for every person who stormed on the boards complaining about an exploit being fixed, there were about one or two others thanking people for fixing it.
• People who stream their multiplayer games live have been known to stop doing so because someone they were playing against was using their stream to spy on them. This is especially prevalent in games like StarCraft II, Defense of the Ancients, and League of Legends. Similarly, people who do a Let's Play of a game or stream games live can get harassed by trolls and certain fans alike until they disable comments or refuse to finish their Let's Play. This can get upsetting for the rest of the fan base who legitimately like the content.
• Video game magazines who release trial CDs of games or special promotional codes often have to either give people codes or release it in a plastic bag. This is because some people would go into stores and take the CDs or codes out of the magazines without buying them. Thus, the codes and bags were created to make people buy the magazine first.
• Publishers for fighting games with cosmetics shop system are against user-created costume mods such as Street Fighter 6 & Tekken 8 to prevent jeopardizing cosmetic costumes and battle passes.

Others

• The City of Heroes developers were known to take sabbaticals from the forums due to particularly intense fans. In fact, the original powers designer was permanently driven from the forums due to an especially rabid group of fans.
• Fortnite: Battle Royale had a location during Chapter 1 called "The Block" where fan-created buildings would appear, which did not return for any future chapters. While an official reason was never given, most point to a controversy where one of the maps contained a hangman noose next to a kicked-over chair.
• World of Warcraft:
  • This is often cited, though not by name, in the official forums, as reasons why Blizzard refuses to reveal specific details of upcoming plans for the game, up to and especially including release dates for new content. It's an open question whether fans of the game are driven crazier by lack of information or by being given information, instead replying with "Soon."
  • Moderator burnout is apparently a very real problem due to the game's vast vitriolic fanbase. Many serious players refuse to read the official forums, preferring to read the official Blizzard posts through third-party websites. Case in point, with a jar of ashes.
  • Blizzard developer and forum "bad cop" Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street dealt with the community almost exclusively through blogs partly for this reason.
  • In a less drastic example, the forum mods often deliberately avoid posting in threads where they feel a worthwhile discussion is occurring because the mere presence of a moderator post tends to derail such conversations into players exclusively responding to the moderator instead of continuing the discussion with each other, at best.
  • To try and curb some of the vitriol on the official forums, Blizzard proposed a "Real ID" system where people would have to post with their real legal name instead of a user name. This idea was met with instant backlash, as people argued that this could be used to stalk people. As if to prove their own point, when one developer posted with his own real name in an attempt to cool the flames, he was doxxed with all of his personal information being revealed less than fifteen minutes after the post was made. Blizzard abandoned the Real ID concept just three days after the announcement, partly because the fandom went on an Internet Counterattack to harass one of their own developers.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Mike Pollock, the current English voice actor of Dr. Eggman, once used his Eggman voice in a fan interview to say "Snooping as usual, I see" and "I hate that hedgehog!" by request. Once he figured out the significance of the former, he declared that he wouldn't do vocal requests again.^note In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "Boogey-Mania", Dr. Robotnik puts unusual emphasis on "Snooping as usual, I see", causing it to sound like he's saying "penis". This became very popular among the YouTube Poop crowd. While Pollock would later ease up on this sentiment, he did add some rules for future vocal requests.^note 5 lines; 50 words; Eggman voice can't be used for fan projects; it costs a $5 Starbucks Gift Card. Pollock later voiced the line as Eggman in Sonic Boom in reference to the meme, but took care to not emphasize the memetic syllables.
  • Pollock has refused fan requests to recite the infamous Eggman speech from the Real-Time Fandub of Sonic Adventure 2, since its excessive profanity and sexual content could put his job at risk. He even posted a video on his YouTube channel telling people to not give him such requests, calling himself a "character caretaker" and asking people to let the official team members put words in his mouth.
  • Pollock has also gone to make official sub-pages on his website explaining his roles in some infamous pieces of media like Vídeo Brinquedo's movies, due to the giant amount of people badgering him about it over the years, stating that no, he doesn't regret doing them (given how easy they were to do and earn pay for), and no, those roles have not jeopardized his career (clients looking for freelance voice artists typically don't focus on resumes).
  • Stephen Frost had made an effort to stay close to the fanbase throughout the creation of Sonic Boom, but when the vitriol got too thick (up to and including death threats and wishes for the brand and/or company to go under), he stated his intent to back away from the Sega forums for the time being.
• Valve Software:
  • Valve has had much better dealings in face to face encounters; when Gabe Newell encountered a couple of protesters sitting in front of the Valve offices bearing plaintive placards asking where the hell Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (or just Half-Life 3) was, he just explained he couldn't tell them and it was cool, though someone else did have the cops escort the folks off on loitering charges.
  • Back when Valve was beta-testing Dota 2, they used to send people more than one invite so they could give it to their friends. However, after these invites started popping up for sale on eBay, Valve stopped giving more than one invite until Steam Marketplace was released, which allowed invites to be sold there while also giving Valve a small cut of the money from each sale.
  • Valve used to be pretty prompt with replying to people on the Steam forums for Left 4 Dead 2, but after some fans kept flaming Valve for everything that went wrong or how Valve never fulfilled its promises, Valve has stopped replying to people on the forums anymore unless it's about something important.
  • In February 2013, the "/me" chat command, which colored a user's text for action messages, is no longer available to anyone thanks to a few users who believed that the colored text meant the person talking to them was clearly a Valve employee, causing the person with colored text to get their accounts stolen.
  • There's also the Tux incident with Team Fortress 2. Originally, Tux, a cosmetic item exclusive to Linux users who played the game within a certain timeframe, was stated as being tradeable after a certain amount of time after its distribution, similar to the Earbuds from the Mac release of the game. However, certain portions of the fanbase saw this as another rare item and devised ways of obtaining Tuxes illegitimately, such as using a Linux virtual box and creating multiple accounts for the sole purpose of having another Tux. Thus, Tuxes are still untradeable to everyone, including those who obtained the items legitimately.
    • The Team Fortress 2 Halloween events from 2010 to 2013 had special gift boxes that would randomly appear on maps and, when obtained, would grant the player Halloween cosmetic items. This led to the practice of making "gift servers" where players would idle as the game shuffled them around the map in the spots where boxes would spawn. By 2014, Valve had enough of this practice, as that year's Halloween event did not have any gift boxes spawn on the year's event map, meaning the only way to obtain that year's items without paying was to open the two free gift items. Valve cited gift farming as the reason for the change, and the players took it about as well as expected. ^note Previous gift boxes can still be obtained on the old event maps, though they do not have that year's event cosmetics. It's just the 2014 map that doesn't spawn gifts.
• This almost happened with Overkill Software, makers of PAYDAY: The Heist.
  • After the player base discovered how to unlock a secret with extreme and borderline ridiculous requirements, a good chunk of the players trashed Overkill for not making the secret easier to access and claimed that Overkill made the clues to the secret too obscure. Overkill had second thoughts about doing more secret hunts and interacting with the community, but both parties eventually cooled down and things returned to normal.
  • During PAYDAY 2's playable beta phase, some people were blatantly cheating with exploits in the game (for example, getting infinite supplies), so Overkill had to update the beta to patch out the exploit and, in the process, reset everyone's progress. A developer explained that due to the rampant cheating going around and having only four programmers on their team, Overkill dedicated their resources to stepping up security instead of creating free DLC and also clamped down on people making hysteric topics regarding cheating. Cue the people crying censorship.
• This is the reason we haven't gotten a proper English translation for Final Fantasy Legend III or the Summon Night series for the longest time, as Crimson Nocturnal shut down due to people complaining about slow updates and requests. However, some sources claim that the real reason CN disbanded is because of their leader's large ego combined with internal drama over translation styles, and this isn't the first time he has broken up the group.^note This almost caused the death of the English translation for Final Fantasy Legend II's DS remake.
  • A fan translation of the DS remake of Final Fantasy Legend III (under its Japanese title, SaGa 3: Champions of Time and Space - Shadow or Light) was eventually released by another group in 2013, and there have been efforts to translate at least Summon Night X and Summon Night: Swordcraft Story: Stone of Beginnings into English.
• Jagex stopped holding holiday events in Runescape for years because people constantly complained about not getting what they expected. They also tend to no longer state release dates because of the same reasons other companies do, miss one day and the forums flood with complaints. Finally, they have bounded event items to one's account after the party hat accidents.
  • The infamous 2007 Free Trade and Wilderness update (known in-house by the developers as the "Ultimate Update of Doom") was not just to prevent botting and real-world trading, but because botters were committing mass credit card fraud to buy members' accounts, causing credit card companies to threaten to deny Jagex use of their services, and because criminal organizations were using real-world trade websites to anonymously launder money.
• Genshin Impact has seen the English-speaking fanbase from Twitter gain a reputation of being rabid, fanatical and toxic. The amount of English voice actors either leaving the site or making their accounts private is due to people consistently harassing them over their vocal performances, or just general complaining about the game (even things they logically have no control over). The English actor for Diluc, Sean Chiplock, has stated that he despises certain toxic parts of the game's fanbase due to how rabid they can be.
• League of Legends: Being a game with over 150 playable characters from over a decade of development, Riot occasionally pursues "visual-gameplay updates" to completely relaunch champions that have been seen as significantly outdated in terms of design and gameplay, a treatment often requested by fans, especially from much older champions. However, VGUs began facing increasing scrutiny by dedicated champion mains angered by any changes in general, the apotheosis of which being the 2018 Aatrox VGU, which changed him so drastically that fans were split right down the middle on whether Aatrox was genuinely improved or simply ruined. Riot decided in 2019 to drastically scale down the rate of VGUs, citing the potential alienation of longtime fans as a big reason why (between 2016-2018, VGUs came out almost as often as new characters, but they're nowadays it's only 1 or 2 a year).
• Despite the large amount of people who annoy him on Twitter, Hideki Kamiya mostly averts this as he still uses it to interact with his fans. He has even visited his fans on 4chan. He's gone on to state that he actually enjoys blocking people who he thinks are "idiots". Kamiya often complains and blocks people who do the following:
  • Being asked questions that he has already answered.
  • Kamiya will not answer Twitter questions regarding games in the Devil May Cry series past the first title.^note Due to Capcom's burning bridges with him and most of staff of Clover Studios, as well as the fact that DMC questions would oversaturate his Twitter feed. He will respond with a terse "whatever", pretending he doesn't know what the asker is talking about. In the case of persistent questioners, Kamiya will curse the asker out and block them, often with a scathing comment in Japanese.
  • Late in 2012, it was rationalized that he would intentionally dodge some questions because he had inked a deal with Nintendo behind the scenes to create a sequel of Bayonetta for the Wii U and didn't want many details leaking out. However, fan rage over the game being released for the Wii U angered Kamiya.
  • Kamiya decided that he wasn't going to develop a Star Fox game after being pestered by many fans when he expressed an interest in doing so. However, he relented in June 2015 when he announced that PlatinumGames was co-developing Star Fox Zero.
  • Anyone who badmouths Capcom. Despite what's happened between them and Kamiya, he still holds respect for Capcom, a.k.a. his "old home".
  • However, as of July 2018, Kamiya finally imposed a temporary ban on responding to him in any non-Japanese language, including English. The purpose of this ban, he claims, is to filter out people who don't read his posts before replying to them, with most of those people being non-Japanese. And he knows there are people who are going to hit him up in English anyway.
• Battlefront, makers of beloved war game Combat Missions, simply want no more to do with WW2 as it gets so many armchair commanders dropping into the site to tell people who actually served (either then, or any war since then) how terrible their tactics are despite how problematic logistics were or any number of other factors (a mild subversion as this has nothing to do with fan vs. creator but the disrespect amongst the fans to each other). They had been planning to drop it for their other lines for some time and make more modern war games, but the flame wars were the final straw.
• Take-Two Interactive:
  • After the "Hot Coffee" scandal with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,^note The game contained a sex scene that was disabled from accessing but not deleted; a Game Modder then enabled it by just changing a single bit. Rockstar Games Mis-blamed the modder in question until said modder proved in a press conference that he didn't do anything but enable it, which caused a massive controversy that hurt Rockstar's reputation. the "Second Edition" re-release removed mod support. When gamers found away around this, Rockstar released version 3.0, making it even harder to mod.
  • After they took down Lil Durk for The Trenches role-playing server due to exploitation by drops or purchasable via cryptocurrencies or crypto assets (including NFTs), they prohibited role-playing servers the use of paid/profit currencies in their online services such as Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online.
• A number of voice actors have understandably gotten sick and tired of being pestered by fans into divulging info about the next Grand Theft Auto, to the point that actor Ned Luke roasted YouTuber MrBossFTW for his clickbait videos about the series. While Young Maylay did run amok and went on a profanity-laced tirade at the Corrupt Corporate Executives running the industry as a result of being coaxed about GTA 6, Maylay's cousin, Shawn Fonteno, explained his side and clarified his cousin's sentiments over the issue.
• Dynasty Warriors Online used to have an arena mode, which was a smaller, faster version confront mode. The only thing it was used for was gem farming, so item drops were reduced. This still didn't fix the problem, so the staff decided the only way to fix the problem was to remove the Arena all together.
• Has occurred several times with BioWare:
  • In 2012, a number of fans took to harassing BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler, screaming that she was "the cancer that was killing BioWare" and blaming her for the homosexual content in Dragon Age II. This was based in part on an interview she'd given back in 2006 where she expressed a desire for an option to skip combat in favor of story. A flame war eventually broke out on Twitter and Hepler ended up deleting her account after someone sent death threats directed at her children. She denies that her leaving BioWare in 2013 was the direct result of this harassment despite some initial reports stating so, but it's not hard to imagine that the harassment had something to do with it.
  • After the massive backlash over Mass Effect 3's original ending, BioWare responded by announcing the Extended Cut. Though they expected it wouldn't change every fan's minds about it, and it didn't, it was certainly better received and managed to tone down the rage. However, the co-founders of BioWare retired from their positions in October 2012, though they vehemently denied it had anything to do with the backlash, saying that they had planned to since April of that year and gave EA six months' notice.
  • BioWare took a very careful approach to releasing information about Dragon Age: Inquisition, similar to the tactic Blizzard Entertainment used concerning World of Warcraft.
• CBJ, one of the devs of X: Rebirth, calls fans out on the endless whining about there being very little news from Egosoft about X Rebirth for about a year and a half. When they were posting a screenshot a week, people started demanding more info and videos, at which point ES said "screw this".
• Phil Fish, creator of Fez ended up supposedly cancelling Fez 2 as well as ports of Fez to other platforms and proclaimed he was getting out of the video game business after getting into a beef with Marcus Beer (a.k.a. The Annoyed Gamer) and going on a angry Twitter tirade.
• Super Meat Boy programmer Tommy Refenes spent half a year after the game was done making a portal for uploading and downloading fan-made maps. Several fans found an exploit, told Refenes about it (who told them that he couldn't fix it right then because he was on vacation and so was everyone at Valve), spread information about it on the net and hacked the servers. This, combined with the emotional distress from the Troubled Production of the last few months of the game, caused Refenes to not only lock that feature of the game out as soon as he could, but never look at the Super Meat Boy code again.
• Papers, Please, during its beta stage, allowed people to submit their names to be used for the randomly-generated immigrants. Well, it was supposed to be their names. Many submissions had to be removed because some wise guys tried to abuse it to sneak in names of celebrities, names of characters in other media, or obscene puns. And in one case, this was particularly unfortunate - one of the submitted names was Anita Sarkeesian, the host of Feminist Frequency...and the creator unknowingly used it for a prostitute.
• For Humble Indie Bundles, Steam keys were originally given for any amount donated. However, one bundle was running concurrent to a Steam promotion. Some people abused the system and bought many bundles for a penny each, and used the keys to legitimize accounts to gain an unfair advantage in the promotion. As a result, every bundle onward would require a donation of at least one dollar to get the Steam keys.
• On Halloween 2013, Wadjet Eye Games ran a promotion where people could get a Steam key of Blackwell Deception for free. However, it was horribly abused to gain multiple keys, and despite numerous attempts by the company to try to restrict the offer to one key per person, people worked their way around every one and made off with thirty thousand keys. Wadjet Eye Games eventually had to invalidate all of the keys, and stated that another promotion like that was unlikely.
• After one idiot groped and stripped his drunk wife on camera while playing The Playroom for the PS4, Sony has blocked total support for the game when it comes to streaming with the built-in Twitch function of the console. If you try to broadcast via the capture card, the broadcast will be taken down and the video will be removed, resulting in the player being banned on PlayStation Network.
• Star Trek Online:
  • For a couple years after launch, Cryptic sometimes held fan contests to solicit designs or names for new ship classes. This came back to bite them when they held a contest to design the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-F for the game.^note The Enterprise-E having been destroyed in an offscreen altercation with the Undine. Due to legal complications the contest had to be US-only, which infuriated non-US fans and led to discrimination allegations (one of the fan favorites was made by a Canadian), there were multiple accusations of entrants plagiarizing designs, and then CBS, the license-holder for Star Trek, vetoed the #1 fan favorite in favor of a design that hadn't even made the top ten, which became the Odyssey-class. Cryptic swore off soliciting any fan designs at all after this mess.
  • For over a year on the Star Trek Online forums, there was a highly popular topic called "What's your beef with the Galaxy Cryptic?" in which players complained about the Galaxy-class series of ships for the Federation, which has a flawed Character Class System implementation. When Cryptic revealed a "reboot", fans were ecstatic over it... until they found out that they just modified the class to be able to perform a certain skill while moving and most of the modifications went into the Galaxy-X ship and even that wasn't much. Players were livid and the topic quickly turned sour, especially when Cryptic began performing moves that certain players absolutely hated. When threats against Cryptic, PWE and its workers were made, the topic was locked and deleted, but a new one was put up by mods and told the players under no uncertain terms that if they pulled that bullshit again, discussions like that might be banned along with them. The Tier 6 upgrade released in 2015 was much better-received.
  • A few months later, Community Manager CaptainSmirk began limited-time codes for certain items for the viewers of the livestreams for the expansion Delta Rising. The first code, dealing with Section 31 costumes, went quite well. The second code the following week, dealing with the highly vaunted Red Matter Capacitor (which was a bonus item for players who bought the special edition game way back in the beginning) spread like wildfire on the Message Boards, Twitter, and on r/sto subreddit, which caused a lot of angry players to find out that not only was the code very limited in number, but the items were also Bound-To-Character (both of which weren't broadcasted when they were posted elsewhere). Smirk later said that codes like that would be held a lot more closer next time.
• This is a common issue in the Tales Series. The American fanbase had to deal with most games being No Export for You for a while, and a lot of fans complained about it. When the games did come out, some fans complained that the localization was "not like the Japanese one". This caused sales to decrease and fewer Tales games to be localized. From Namco's perspective, it's a case of "if people are going to complain no matter what we do, why bother?"
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • Win trading — giving people guaranteed wins in quests in exchange for gil or items — was very common in the PVP section of the game, which resulted in many people getting high ranks and gear with high stats (including Morale, which is a PVP only stat) without earning them fairly. Frontlines was a second PVP mode added later on to the game and it doesn't use the Morale stat. The act of making Morale useless in Frontlines was very likely done to make sure that people who bribed their way to the top can't have the big advantage over everyone when Frontlines was released. Unfortunately, the motion also punished legit players that earned their gear and ranks for PVP.
  • Win carries — carrying another player to victory while said player Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing — were also plaguing non-PVP content and allowed players to earn gear and other rewards by simply paying another player to do all the work for them in raids and dungeons. While it wasn't the main deciding factor, Square decided to kill two birds with one stone by adding an item level requirement to some dungeons. This way, players are properly prepared, and it prevents people from being carried through most runs with bad gear.
  • For the longest time, the duty finder (especially for the Labyrinth of the Ancients and Sycrus Tower raids) was plagued with withdraw spam. When everyone is queued up, a player can choose to withdraw from the duty for whatever reason, but it causes everyone else to be re-queued as they have to wait for a replacement. Since there was no penalty for withdrawing after the ready window popped up, people would either troll everyone by joining and withdrawing, or fish for duties that were already in progress and withdraw if they didn't get one. Patch 2.4 added a penalty system; anyone who withdraws three times when the ready window pops up gets a thirty-minute ban on queueing up for any more duties. This thirty-minute penalty will come back for each withdraw after that until the next day.
  • The official forums worked like any other forum, and Square Enix needed people to test it in its beta stages. People started to clog the forums with spam, flame wars, and other annoying things, prompting Square Enix to slap down a heavy posting restriction where every user has a limited amount of posts they can make in a day based on their character's level and a 1000-character limit was also thrown in to prevent people from filling posts with text walls (whuch was eventually increased to 3000 characters). Then again, Square Enix wanted to test how the forums would work, and it could be argued that they got exactly what they wanted.
  • The abuse of parsers (third party add-ons that measures a player's DPS output) is the reason why the developers are very reluctant to make an official one. Because of people that use parsers to verbally harass people with low DPS (even in content where DPS checks aren't used), just openly mentioning in the game that you use parsers puts you at risk of someone reporting you. In patch 3.2, the developers created a training ground where players can whack a dummy whose HP is based off of various raid bosses (with some adjustments due to the content being for solo play) so that people can test their skill rotations for optimal DPS performance, but it doesn't give much information other than you know you are doing good if you can break the dummy before the time limit expires.
  • PVP isn't quite newbie friendly due to a lot of Serious Business players flying off the handle whenever someone in the party screws up. The developers decided that in patch 3.5, all forms of chat would be disabled and the only way to communicate would be through preformed macros that take up space on the hotbars. While the developers never stated why they made such a drastic change, it is likely due to the overabundance of players being openly hostile towards others, which can drive people away from PVP completely.
  • Previously any class could wear crafter/gatherer gear (Aside from artifact sets), which gave more options for glamour. However, this was abused by players who entered raids/dungeons equipped with the aformention gear for the purpose of spiritbonding or to inflate item levels in order to enter a dungeon/raid they normally wouldn't, which severely hindered groups from those just wanting to complete the dungeon/raid or are farming for a particular item. By Stormblood's release, only Disciples of Hand/Land can be equipped with any new sets for their respective classes.
  • The launch of Stormblood brought in a ton of players, to the point where simply trying to get into certain servers would take hours at a time if the congestion was high. The developers implemented an auto-kick measure where anyone that was AFK for too long would be logged out. Players trying to get around this countermeasure would spoof their AFK status such as leaving a menu open or going into crafting mode without actually crafting. This in turn made the queues even longer and many housing/apartments/private rooms were inaccessible due to the instance servers hosting them being perpetually clogged with AFK players. Presenting itself as a nuclear solution, the developers made a new countermeasure where every server on every data center would automatically log everyone out of the game once a day, no matter what they were doing (this includes quests or other instances) and they would not be able to log back in for 10 minutes. This also affected players on lower populated worlds and it especially includes the people that transferred off a congested server to avoid the queue problems in the first place. The restrictions were eventually lifted once everything became more stable.
  • The final two A Realm Reborn dungeons, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, are the only two dungeons which feature mid-dungeon cutscenes. Veteran players grinding for tomestones or experience points would rush from boss to boss, skipping every cutscene as they did. This left newbies with a Morton's Fork choice: watch the cutscenes and potentially get kicked for slowing everyone down, or skip the cutscenes and rob themselves of the emotional climax of ARR. Either way, they'd be missing out on something. It wasn't until patch 4.2 where the cutscenes in these two dungeons were made unskippable for every player, regardless of if they had run the dungeon or not. As compensation, the rewards for the two dungeons were also increased since they now had a much longer time investment, and they were given their own "Main Scenario" rotation in case veterans didn't want to get hit with an unexpected time sink. While there was some grumbling about this among the playerbase, it was generally accepted as the only plausible solution to the problem. Patch 6.1 further smoothed out the Main Scenario roulette by reworking the two dungeons in several ways — several areas that served no purpose except to pad out play time were removed, the fight against the Ultima Weapon was made as a separate trial in two parts, the fight against Lahabrea was made into a solo duty after fighting the Ultima Weapon, and the content was reduced from 8-man to 4-man in both dungeons so that there wasn't as many human players to worry about.
  • The part of the fandom that wants to play as a Kid Hero was given a hard "no" from Yoshi-P. He gave two reasons as to why. One: the Warrior of Light goes through a lot of shit over the course of their journey. While the Warrior of Light has a Vague Age, it's clear from the storyline that they're an adult, and it can be rather contentious to put a child through things like what the Warrior is expected to put up with. Two: Final Fantasy XIV is home to a community of role-players... and not all of them are wholesome role-players. While Yoshi-P and the game's moderators typically don't object to erotic roleplay as long as it's kept away from people who don't want to see it, it's impossible to defend allowing such players to roleplay a child in that kind of thing.
  • The Ishgard Restoration content allowed players to visit other servers and assist said servers with their progress. Due to Demand Overload (as well as people trolling others by making the problem worse), almost no one could get into the Firmament to contribute to the progression and this also included people getting locked out from their own home server. Within a day, the dev team changed the system where players visiting other servers can't visit the Firmament unless it's on their home server.
  • Data mining is a hot button issue between fans that want to see what's hidden in each patch and fans that don't want to be spoiled by said data mining. Square Enix themselves generally weren't bothered by data mining as long as people kept the methods of data mining to themselves, although they did openly state not to spoil anything. In 2019, several people were upset towards a raid team that had got the world first clear for Alexander Ultimate and accused them of cheating by using data mining to prove that the raid team cheated. The developers came down hard on data mining by suspending people that were openly data mining or were linked to data mining in some way. Because data mining was used to harass people, data mining in general is now a lot less open and is more private.
  • In the past, jobs that were getting adjustments would be reflected in in the prelimary patch notes or sometimes during a live letter. Due to misconceptions, backlash, and general complaining about certain jobs no longer being good, job changes are no longer posted until the patch goes live.
  • After a world first team for Alexander Ultimate streamed themselves openly using the Cactbot fight planner to change waymarks on the fly to help their performance in fights, in defiance of Square's don't-show-don't-ask-don't-tell policy on mods, Square Enix quietly changed it so that waymarks could no longer be laid down or altered in combat, but added way more letters and numbers to help plan it. Given that the other alternative was to crack down on the bot by making an example of a world first team during a WF race, this was probably the less controversial route.
  • The February 2020 live letter began with Yoshida spending the first half-hour decrying the modding scene, specifically those that go the extra mile in erotic role play by changing things like clothing and character models to do things that Final Fantasy XIV was not meant to do. While the whole segment reeked of "I am being paid to say this", Yoshida has ample reason to be concerned and stated as such because Final Fantasy XIV is a worldwide MMO that these modders are turning into a porn simulator, and different nations have different laws regarding porn, which could give the game the wrong kind of attention from the authorities.
  • The gifting of codes, items, and other things from the Online Store was altered in October 2022. After the change, you can't buy anything that gives a gameplay advantage (like mounts, level-skips or story-skips) for anyone but yourself, you must be friends with the recipient you're gifting the item to, and you have to have been friends for at least 72 hours before you can gift them anything. The official announcement noted that it was to combat Real Money Trade, including buying things for the sole purpose of selling them as gifts or buying things with the use of stolen credit card information.
  • Ultimate trials are meant to be ''the'' most difficult content at the time they are launched. Some player teams were caught cheating, which had Yoshida telling everyone to not cheat. When the trial for Omega Ultimate was released, the team that gotten world first clear were discovered to have been cheating by using a camera hack that let them zoom out way farther than it was possible to do normally. Not only did Yoshida declare he would not acknowledge the team being the world first, he expressed how disappointed he was to see people resort to cheating in something that was meant to be hard and stated that if people were going to cheat, then he might reconsider making future ultimate trials.
• Call of Duty:
  • Tactical Insertions in online multiplayer. Originally debuting in Modern Warfare 2, they were intended to allow players to choose where they would respawn after their next death. However, some of the community used Tac Inserts as a way to boost for easy XP and killstreaks along with unlockable equipment and camos. As a result, Tac Inserts were banished to the Infected game mode in both Call of Duty: Ghosts and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, though this has not discouraged boosting.
  • The Black Ops series allows players to create custom decals attached to their player card and emblazoned on their weapons in-game. So everybody used it to make swastikas made out of penises.
  • Many people working on the games had to leave their home or the industry altogether due to intense backlash over gameplay decisions. In one nasty instance, many Treyarch employees working on Call of Duty: Black Ops II had to resign and leave their homes after getting death and rape threats for nerfing the fire rate of several weapons.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • When the fourth game was first teased, Scott Cawthon's website was initially "glitched out", with 8s and 7s appearing in the tab name. By sheer coincidence, they led to a real pizzeria, which fans promptly started harassing with calls. As a result, Cawthon removed the numbers and commented on the issue on Reddit. But the pizzeria didn't hold any grudge against the fanbase and actually capitalized on the attention by introducing the "Fazbear's Pizzeria Special" as a hidden menu item.
  • Coinciding with the teaser, Sable Lynn, the main developer of Five Nights at Fuckboy's, started getting requests to make a fourth installment, despite her explicit statement of Five Nights at Fuckboy's 3 being the last in the series. The fans got insistent and unbearably demanding, to the point of harassing Sable endlessly on her Tumblr. Ultimately, when Sable couldn't take it anymore, she closed her Tumblr account and abandoned development of 3's final act, leaving the other developer, Joshua Shaw, to finish all the work on it. Sable eventually returned, knowing Shaw wouldn't have been able to complete 3 by its planned release date in mid-July.
  • The circumstances of Scott Cawthon's retirement from the franchise is also this. To put it simply: one apparent Fan Hater posted a link of a list of Scott Cawthon's donations on Twitter, revealing that, among other things, he had donated to controversial political candidates, seemingly as a joke at the expense of Cawthon and the FNAF fanbase. This led to Cawthon getting heat, to the point of doxxing and death threats not only being sent out to him but his family, including his pregnant wife. Ultimately, Scott announced his retirement on Reddit and then on his website, and the Twitter hashtag #IStandWithScott began trending, with people on both sides of the political spectrum feeling disgusted at how this played out.
  • Scott Cawthon took down the fan-remake of the now-cancelled Five Nights at Freddy's Plus due to it using an AI copy of his voice for the Phone Guy, and spoke out against fans doing AI voices based on the other characters in the series.
• This heavily damaged the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater fandom. Back in the days of Tony Hawk's Underground 2, a bug was found where, by connecting a USB keyboard into the PS2, a player could exceed the online chat's mail restrictions on symbols. Said bug, when the player received an email filled with the symbol, would instantly freeze the console when the email was merely received. After trolls logged onto lobbies, quit then mass-PM'ed the people they were just online with, GameSpy responded by shutting down the online servers for the games and disabling the online game feature.
• Prior to 2018's KILL la KILL - IF by Arc System Works, most fans agreed that if a game of Kill la Kill were to be made, PlatinumGames should be the ones to develop it. Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of fans nagging Platinum about this, many in the company said that they would never develop the game. The only member who still expressed interest was Kenji Saito, the director of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which is often regarded as being a Kill la Kill game anyway.
• It's been reported that the shutting down of LEGO Universe was because it was becoming too expensive to moderate every single user creation and prevent people from crafting obscene items in a game that was meant to be child-friendly.
• The indie dev title Bear Simulator had all of its work stopped and its creator calling it quits after a PewDiePie video featuring it ends with PewDiePie trying to uninstall the game, getting a refund from Steam, then not-so-subtly giving him the middle finger. To PDP's credit, he did realize he went way too far, took down the video, and apologized.
• Tekken 7: Katsuhiro Harada trolled American fans after their negative reaction to Lucky Chloe by claiming he would replace her with a generic, bald, muscleman with a very limited moveset for the U.S. release. This never happened.
• Yandere Simulator is a work-in-progress game that its lone developer allows fans to play "debug build" versions. However, YandereDev has had to repeatedly go out of his way to tell the fanbase, whether in videos or on the blog, not to send him useless emails. In particular, he's complained about pointless suggestions, people volunteering for the game when it's clear they don't have a high-quality portfolio to show him, or giving him vague bug-reports. The reason why it irritates him so much is because it wastes his time when he could be working on the next update. He's even admitted in one video that it's caused him to lash out at people. As a general rule: YandereDev is only okay with emails if you're a volunteer with a great portfolio and experience, someone with a business inquiry, have a detailed bug report, or want to send him fanwork you've made (since he likes seeing it). Eventually he made a character, Midori Gurin, who he uses to satirize fans who waste his time and delay the game for everyone else.
• Ingress has the problem of property owners having to ask them to remove Portals (which requires players to visit points of interest in real life to access) due to unruly players, and Niantic complies with these requests. It's not as pronounced as in Niantic's later project Pokémon GO due to the game's comparatively small playerbase and in-game lore putting players in the role of covert agents (thus encouraging players to be on their best behavior and not make a big scene when they play), but it still happens.
• Moirai was a free indie game with an interesting premise: when the player first enters the mines, they have to decide whether a character lives or dies after asking them a series of pre-set questions, only to end up on the other end of the conversation moments later - it turns out that you're deciding the fate of the last person who played the game, and their responses to your questions are whatever the previous player typed in. Once the twist became widely known, in part because of popular Let's Play channels playing the game, players started typing in offensive responses and, in at least one case, running a script to crash the database by spamming the game with responses. The game ended up being pulled from Steam, and anyone who boots up a copy gets a message on the title screen saying that the game's no longer playable.
• Due to streamers complaining about not being able to monetize their content, the developer of the Industrial Revolution mod for Factorio announced that he was stopping work on the mod, then attempted to delete it. On December 2020, the creator eventually relented but can't be directly contacted. Also, rules about financial gains are still enforceable.
• When Undertale was still in its Kickstarter phase of development, one donor had given enough money to put a character of his into the game as an Easter Egg. The donor in question decided to use his fursona as the character, heavily toning his features down and renaming him to make him more suitable for the game. When people found out about the character, he generated a massive backlash for several reasons^note namely the high amount of money the donor paid, the fact that the character was used in fetish art outside the game, and a perception of the character's inclusion as a self-promotion attempt, which only got worse when anti-furry trolls jumped on the bandwagon. The overwhelmingly negative reception led to harassment directed at the donor; Toby Fox himself made a (now-deleted) tweet asking them to stop, but the donor nevertheless stepped away from both the furry and online art communities in the end.
• In late 2012, the fan-made game My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic underwent a closed beta, with the developers having their testers sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. One of the testers leaked the build onto the internet anyway, causing developers Mane6 to discontinue betas and to start completely reworking the game, delaying the game's intended release. In early 2013, the charity auction for EVO 2013 opened up, with users donating money to see a fighting game they wanted as a sort of side game. Fighting Is Magic's leaked build was nominated as an option, but the game did not receive a significant number of donations (it was always a contest between Skullgirls and eventual winner Super Smash Bros. Melee). Despite the developers begging their fans to stop donating to the game, fans did so anyway. The influx of donations meant that Hasbro's legal department was no longer able to "ignore" the project, so they had to step in and issue a Cease and Desist letter. Mane6 would eventually recover and go on to release Them's Fightin' Herds, heavily based on the work they did for Fighting is Magic, seven years later.
• In Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, players could input their own usernames or custom names for their Fall Guy avatars. But just three days after the Steam release, custom player names were temporarily disabled due to some people using inappropriate names, using exploits to break the user interface, and generally just screwing with the game.
• Several Paladins characters got skins based on popular demand from fans, so when large amounts of fanart for Vora as an anthropomorphic orchid mantis started popping up, it seemed like it would also become a new skin... until the game's art director, ThunderBrush, found out that one community member responsible for the trend had been pestering artists into drawing Orchid Mantis Vora, and announced on Twitter that, in order to not reward such behavior, the skin would not be made.
• Roblox:
  • The comment sections under games and catalog items were removed in 2016 because of the massive amount of spam comments that were advertising "Free Robux" scam sites, which go against Roblox's terms of service (along with almost all of those sites being nothing but Phishing sites).^note Comments are still allowed in a few places on Roblox, such as contents in the Library (etc. models and decals and audio) and Group Walls.
  • Another thing removed in 2016 was the non-premium tickets currency, better known as "Tix". While no official reason was given as to why they were removed, one of the most common theories was that, due to being a non-premium currency, tickets were incredibly easy for players to exploit/gain (for example, a person could make another account and repeatedly join their own game, which would give them unlimited tickets since each join gives a ticket).
  • A removal that was due to exploitation was that of Guests, which were for players that didn't have Roblox accounts. Since Guests weren't tied to any accounts, they could repeatedly hack games with virtually no consequences due to them being unbannable through normal means.
  • Roblox's stricter censorship in the later 2010s was primarily due to the Roblox community as a whole having an infamous reputation for creating inappropriate assets, which would get Roblox criticized in the news due to it being a "kids" website. The most infamous example of Roblox's stricter censorship was their updated chat censoring, which would often censor words and numbers that aren't actually that inappropriate.
  • Roblox shut down its forums in December 2017 due to too much abuse from trolls on them.
• Gran Turismo's reason why the game went online-only for most functionality (aside for Arcade Mode) in Sport and 7 as the game's save system tied to your PSN account (via the internet connection) is according to the series creator Kazunori Yamauchi, he was aware players hacking and cheating their saves cause unfair disadvantages to make their progress quicker via the unauthorized PS4 Save Editor or the USB trick in the GT Simulation Mode, as well for the PS5 version via PS Plus cloud saving method (prevent reload scumming by refunding the purchased Credits).
• The art-style change in Return to Monkey Island sparked quite a few outcries with some parts of the Monkey Island fanbase. Some of the louder detractors went as far as to go to series-creator Ron Gilbert's personal blog to attack him over the art style in the comments. After receiving tons of harassment and personal attacks, Gilbert closed down the comments on the blog and declared that he wouldn't share any more details about the game through it.
  Ron: I'm shutting down comments. People are just being mean and I'm having to delete personal attack comments. It's an amazing game and everyone on the team is very proud of it. Play it or don't play it but don't ruin it for everyone else. I won't be posting anymore about the game. The joy of sharing has been driven from me.
• After anonymous individuals operating through 4chan made patches for both Trails into Reverie and Trails through Daybreak that inserted the spreadsheet translations created by translation group ZeroField into the games themselves (rather than ZF's intended method of simply running scripts through an external overlay program) without their consent, ZeroField was forced by NIS America (the current license holders for the Trails series) to remove their spreadsheets for all of the games they translated from Trails from Zero all the way up to Daybreak.
• The constant harassment, demands and death threats received by emulator developer Tahlreth led them to shutter any further development of AetherSX2, a semi-proprietary fork of PCSX2 for smart devices, much to the consternation and dismay of bona fide emulation enthusiasts who lament about the toxic attitudes exhibited by some gamers.
• Lily Gao, who voiced Ada Wong in the Resident Evil 4 (Remake), ended up wiping out her Instagram account after being harassed by fans who didn't like her performance of the character.
• Pizza Tower had a Discord server where the developers would frequently chat with fans and host a variety of events. However, it ended up getting shuttered in March of 2023 due to a combination of a ballooning userbase and several repeated raids where trolls would post gore and other NSFW content.
• Erica Lindbeck, who voiced characters like Futaba Sakura of Persona 5, deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts after being harassed by people when she expressed displeasure at an Artificial Intelligence cover of "Welcome to the Internet" that converted Bo Burnham's voice to Futaba's and asked that it be taken down. This also led to Cherami Leigh (who voices Makoto Niijima in Persona 5) shutting down her Cameo account (which she set up during the COVID-19 Pandemic due to conventions being cancelled).
• It is speculated that Capcom's stance against user-created mods for their games had something to do with a nude mod scandal where a naked Chun Li skin for Street Fighter 6 was accidentally activated in the middle of a tournament.
• Voice actor Cristina Valenzuela deleted her Twitter account after one user compiled a list of voice actors for Genshin Impact who supposedly supported Israel in the 2023-24 Israeli/Hamas War, which included Valenzuela's name. This list ended up prompting harassment and death threats towards Valenzuela on Twitter, despite the fact that Valenzuela had made no statements whatsoever about the war, one way or the other. In turn, the user who posted the list in the first place was driven off the site after they admitted that they screwed up, but this mea culpa was rejected by Valenzuela's fan base.

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