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Comment by MasterScrat | Hacker News Reader

I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Fortnite. This comes both from people who play a lot of video games, and from those who don't play at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Fortnite.

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I think I can see a pattern:

I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Comic Sans MS. This comes both from people who type a lot, and from those who don't type at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Comic Sans MS.

I code in a mono spaced comic sans

I've probably been guilty of that on more than one occasion and can explain 2.5 reasons why.

1) Battle royales suck. The entire genre. I grew up on arena shooters - your Quakes, your Unreal Tournaments, and so on. Getting booted all the way back out to the lobby to go through deployment again because of a single death isn't fun. It's making me replay the most boring aspect of the game. Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.

2) Fortnite's success killed two games I was really interested in - Paragon, a gorgeous third person MOBA, and a reboot of Unreal Tournament.

Those first two are very concrete and have nothing to do with tribalism. The last one is a bit murkier:

2.5) Fortnite seems to be aggressively marketed towards children, which means its players are probably disproportionately children. Minecraft had this problem too, but it had a single player mode and private servers which allowed you to sidestep it.

That one probably carries the whiff of "kids these days", but when you consider that the game is going to be designed to cater to the average player...

> Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.

Fortnite has numerous other game modes than solo BR where this would be the case. At it's most basic level you can play duos, trios or squads where you are "knocked" but can be revived by a teammate, or "rebooted" if you get knocked and eliminated. There are even more varied game modes that are even more arena-like: 50v50s where you immediately respawn with the same loot for example. I have no stats but I'd guess that these alternate modes are more popular than the main BR modes.

In response to your 1) may I recommend Counter Strike's Danger Zone mode? It has multiple respawns as long as your partner is still alive, and you can respawn anywhere you want on the map.

No clue if it's still in development but I recall a FPS where successfully hitting an enemy increased your size and decreased theirs. If you got a headshot, your head is now bigger and your opponent is now smaller. It seemed like a goofy way to level the playing field. That giant guy running around is probably at the top of the leaderboards right now. May have just been a gamejam project but looked neat.

Morphie's Law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBZ3POXEvRE

Cute, but seems more like a gimmick you might see on a dead Quake server than something you can base a game around.

I see a lot of gimmicky multiplayer games that sound fun and quirky but don't seem like they'd have any staying power. Like Cult of the Wind, that third-person deathmatch shooter where everyone is running around with their arms out pretending to be airplanes, and you can't shoot your (invisible) guns unless you're moving fast enough because that's not how airplanes work.

I love weird gimmicky indie games, so I thought I'd love Cult of the Wind, but...there really wasn't much there. And I realized an ultra-niche single-player game can find cult success, but an ultra-niche multiplayer-only game will probably never have enough people online at once to keep going, and sink without a ripple.

But people keep making them, so some of them must be succeeding, right?

There needs to be a mario party of niche shooters so that you can play them for a few minutes, then switch to a different mode. Otherwise the playerbase dwindles

That'd be awesome.

These are not reason to diss people who enjoy it. They're merely reasons why you don't personally enjoy it.

(I'd like to point out that you can setup games with your friends where you don't get booted out for dying.)

Is he "diss"ing people who enjoy though? Or just expressing why he personally doesn't enjoy it? It read more like the latter to me.

You must be a really bitter person if you hate a game and denounce people who play it just because you happen to dislike the genre. I personally love Battle Royales and the fact that you only have one life makes it so much more exciting. Saying that it's objectively "not fun" is simply false.

He is talking about why he doesn't like fortnite and discussing the kind of FPSs he prefers in a conversation about why some people don't like Fortnite. He isn't saying other people are wrong for liking Fortnite and certainly not denouncing those people. Ironically the only person being critical of anyone's opinions here is yourself.

No, he says that he's guilty of what the comment he replied to is describing. That is, "how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Fortnite". That's the context of his comment, not why he doesn't enjoy Fortnite in general.

But that still doesn't explicitly state anyone is denouncing anyone else. People will often vocalise a disdain for a product without denouncing other people who use said product.

Ok, maybe you're right but I read "how much hate and disdain I feel" as if he was getting denounced. Could be wrong of course and then my comment was unfound. With that said, I also don't understand how you can hate a game just because you don't like the genre.

It very easy to strongly dislike a game. In fact I've even felt angry if I'm playing a game which doesn't feel fair. Most games are designed to stimulate an emotive response because if they didn't then most people might find them rather dull. Unfortunately sometimes that response can be negative (how many times have you read about people throwing their controllers across the room in rage?). The key is identifying negative responses and stopping. If a particularly game is known for annoying me then I'd of course stop playing it and describe it as something I legitimately hate. That strikes me as an appropriate use of the term "hate".

I waited anxiously for Fortnite since it was first teased in 2011. I was hyped in 2017 when it finally released. Paid full price which I almost never do but I waited so long for it.

It was fun until you hit what felt like a brick wall in progression. If I recall it got super grindy really quick. People hated it but the company got lucky by saving it by adding BR mode. Things quickly started to become free and the game is a completely different game than what I bought.

For me it's not that I hate people that play it. It's sort of like waiting in a long line to go to an amusement park you've been dying to go to. You pay to get in and it's terrible. Then they immediately open the gates and let everyone for free and change it to a water park. I'm just annoyed by the entire experience.

I'm pretty sure everybody knows Fortnite by its BR mode, so this only applies to you and a handful of other people.

It's always cool to hate on the biggest player in the field.

Having never played it, I love Fortnite, Minecraft, CoD, etc. It keeps all the little kids out of games I actually enjoy.

This I never understood. Why does it matter if kids are playing the games you enjoy?

It can be very obnoxious having a child on your team who doesn't care about working together. They also have a tendency to have to abandon games at random times, when I played destiny there were raids that could take a few hours, especially with people inexperienced with that raid, and my group decided to stop taking kids because pretty often they would get called off by mom and you'd have to start the whole process over again.

I'm a big fan of some FPSs but mostly the arena type ones. Quake, UT, CS. I'm not fussed if it's team based, CTP or whatever but it has to be something with a level playing field (by that I mean everyone has access to the same weapons, etc) and respawns. Needless to say, I couldn't get into Fortnite.

For when I want a long term profile, weapons that carry over between raids etc, then I'd invest that time into an RPG.

edit: it's worth adding that I have no issue with unique avatars in FPS. I just don't think it's fair being spawned 5 meters from someone with a customised minigun when the best pick up you can get on that level is a handgun.

> By that I mean Fortnite is something which long term players will have better weapons etc - often purchased.

There is no such thing in Fortnite.

Maybe I was just hopelessly bad at it then. Or played a few terrible maps? I didn't give Fortnite an extensive play (primarily because I didn't enjoy the few games I did play) but it definitely didn't have the same feel as the kind of FPSs I normally play -- games that I'm normally pretty good at too.

fortnite (and all other battle royale games) drop every player in with nothing or almost nothing, it's purely random which weapons you find after arriving, although this can be influenced by learning where weapons are likely to be, and how to check multiple spots the fastest to increase your chances of getting them.

I don't like fortnite at all though, everything feels exceptionally random (bullet spread, damage, weapons, kill zone, you name it, it's got a couple RNG calls), the build mechanic feels more like a crutch for not knowing how to play around cover unless you really put effort into learning it, and even then it's basically "build 3 walls quickly" or "destroy a wall to shoot through it" type "skill".

It just never grabbed me, I played a few casual rounds and did reasonably well (top 5-10 twice in my first 5 games, with a few kills at least on average, no wins or top 3s though) but it felt like I got lucky, either catching enemies out and getting their good guns, or killing people who could barely aim, then dying to someone sitting in a shelter on a cliff with a one-shot kill sniper that they picked up at the beginning of the game.

If I want the BR experience I'll play Apex, if I want a wacky kids game where you can only "heavily influence" what essentially feels like a ball of randomness, I'll play Mario Party.

It's the usual refrain: "How dare you like this [popular thing] I've never done and have no interest in." Usually followed by: "People like you are the reason [other thing] is gone."

I'm not sure it's tribalism that causes folks to respond this way, per se, but it has some elements of it. I suspect all hobbies and pursuits in life deal with such negative reactions - it's certainly a thing in all the hobbies I've had. (Who knew model railroading was such a warzone?)

Best thing a person can do is shrug and move on from the haters. Be glad you found something you enjoy that doesn't involve tearing other people down.

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