Which games have great communities, and what do you like about them?

Without a doubt, Factorio.

I mostly frequent /r/Factorio, but from what I have seen, the Factorio forums are just as good.

The most toxicity I have ever seen is some people being a bit too puritanical with factory building methods. Those posts usually get rejected by the community pretty quick. There was also a controversial developer decision not too long ago that caused a lot of the community to become armchair game designers, but that petered out quick enough.

Also an honorable mention to the fuelrats community of Elite Dangerous. I was a rat for a bit, and it made for some of the greatest gaming experiences I have had. The rats have made some very impressive rescues before. I remember reading about some where a rat would spend a few days (real life days) traveling to deliver a bit of fuel or fabrication materials.

Final Fantasy XIV has the friendliest community I've seen out of any MMORPG. By comparison, World of Warcraft is incredibly toxic.

A few years ago when Warlords of Draenor was a year into release, I boosted a mage to level 100 and queued for a random Heroic. I enter Heroic Auchindoun and within two trash pulls get vote kicked out of the instance and slapped with a Dungeon Deserter debuff, meaning that I cannot queue for another dungeon for thirty minutes because the game had penalised me for "deserting" the group.

My attempt to reason with the people in the group and demand some kind of explanation or apology from them resulted in me being called a retard and rudely put on ignore list.

I then proceeded to take screenshots of the messages I received, tracked down the guild master and lodged a complaint about the toxic behaviour of his subordinates, hoping he would be disgusted enough to look into the matter and actually kick these elitist douches from his guild. The reply I got back from the GM was less than pleasant. He called me severely handicapped and told me to stick to playing Call of Duty single player. In the end I reported him to Blizzard and presumably landed him with a suspension.

Here is why I think World of Warcraft is a cesspool of toxicity and elitism. Back in the old days, before cross realm everything was a thing, you had a reputation to uphold on your server. If you were a dick to others, you would very quickly be ostracised from the realm's community. Etiquette isn't important anymore, because changes to the game have made the community aspects of it irrelevant. Classic is definitely a return to form.

Final Fantasy XIV by comparison has nice instance groups. FFXIV players are polite, friendly and will help you out in whatever way they can. If you make errors, they will politely point it out and not go into berserk mode. From the perspective of someone who has been playing online multiplayer games for years and has seen severe levels of toxicity, that game is a culture shock.

Haven't played it in years but I remember the Dwarf Fortress community as being pretty friendly. They were always happy to help new people get started and mostly they just shared stories about the things they built or the misadventures their dorfs got up to. There's also a lot of humour around the over-the-top and sometimes surreal situations that can happen, like when cats started getting drunk for some reason:

"I added taverns to fortress mode, so the dwarves will go to a proper establishment, get mugs, and make orders, and they’ll drink in the mug," Adams said. "And, you know, things happen, mugs get spilled, there’s some alcohol on the ground.

"Now, the cats would walk into the taverns, right, and because of the old blood footprint code from, like, eight years ago or something, they would get alcohol on their feet. It was originally so people could pad blood around, but now any liquid, right, so they get alcohol on their feet. And then I wanted to add cleaning stuff so when people were bathing, or I even made eyelids work for no reason, because I do random things sometimes. So cats will lick and clean themselves, and on a lark, when I made them clean themselves I’m like, ‘Well, it’s a cat. When you do lick cleaning, you actually ingest the thing that you’re cleaning off, right? They make hairballs, so they must swallow something, right?' And so the cats, when they cleaned the alcohol off their feet, they all got drunk. Because they were drinking.

But the numbers were off on that. I had never thought about, you know, activating inebriation syndromes back when I was adding the cleaning stuff. I was just like, ‘Well, they ingest it and they get a full dose,’ but a full dose is a whole mug of alcohol for a cat-sized creature, and it does all the blood alcohol size-based calculations, so the cats would get sick and vomit all over the tavern."

TrackMania!

For those not familiar, it's a time-trial racing game series that successfully mixes the rich and ridiculous setup of an arcade racer (loops, wallrides, outrageous speeds) with the precision of a sim racer (controls are extremely tight and precise). You can start and re-start a track at will, and, in multiplayer, have ~5 minutes to try to get the best time in the lobby before it moves to the next one and you start the process over again. Because it's entirely focused on time-trials and restarts are allowed whenever, there is no car collision. You'll see other cars on the track, but you can pass right through them. They can't affect your game whatsoever. If you really want to, you can turn off other player's models, so the only thing you'll see of them are their times on the leaderboard and any comments they make in chat.

It's a setup that doesn't really allow for griefing in any way. There's nothing a player can do that really degrades the experience for others (even chat can be turned off). I played it for years, and loved how calm, chill, and cool every server I joined was. The few times someone broke that vibe, they were usually kicked almost immediately.

The game is very precise and has a very high skill ceiling, to the point that winning is esteemed even when it's not you. There is absolutely no randomness to the game, so when someone snipes the top time by shaving off four thousandths of a second, the person they just ousted from the win isn't salty. They know that person simply played better than them! It's really about people versus the track rather than people versus people. Comments are frequently congratulatory. One of my favorite things to see is the cascade of "nt" comments (meaning "nice time") when someone sets a new world record on a track.

This can sound intimidating to people that aren't the top players, but honestly, I've never once seen someone be criticized for a lack of skill. In any standard lobby you'll have people of all skill levels, so that some people will post near WR times while others will post ones that are a minute behind that. Nobody makes fun of the people who are posting the lower times, and I think part of that is because everybody appreciates the skill that goes into the game, as previously mentioned. The whole game is about developing mastery and self-betterment (your primary competitor is yourself, as you are always trying to shave seconds off your own time).

Though these are certainly good aspects, it's not just that the community isn't toxic that makes it noteworthy. TrackMania lives on the back of its community because they're the ones that create all of the tracks! Think Mario Maker for racing, and you'll have an idea of the game. Though there are some stock tracks that come with the game, the truly great ones are all fan-made, and there are thousands of them. There are also tournaments and events and plenty of other fun community things.

The one caveat I can give to all of this is that the game is probably close to dead at this point. I haven't played in a year or so, and even then the fanbase was all but thinned out. I wouldn't be surprised if the only people left now are the hardcore players.

It's a real shame, as TrackMania is an absolutely incredible game that more people should play. The series first made a name for itself by having a free-to-play title, TrackMania Nations, long before free-to-play was "a thing". I keep hoping they'll do the same thing for the TrackMania 2 series, because having it go free is pretty much the only way they'll maintain a fanbase that gives the amazing multiplayer its life. While the game is still very satisfying solo, it truly shines with others.

I'd say the Stardew Valley Community is the most wholesome I've seen, especially since the multiplayer update. The game is a chill farming simulator so that could be why, but the mod community is brilliant and everyone always seems so willing to help out your farm or have a good laugh. Friendly to beginners as well and they've organized a lot of events on the discord and reddit sub.

The community behind CS:GO is surprisingly fantastic and upbeat at silver 1. A couple friends and I will hop on discord and play some competitive and during our many games together I dont recall any of our teammates being toxic. We are always cracking jokes and having a good time with our teammates, even when we are losing 16-0. I have noticed that we have to work a little harder to keep the morale up during those times that we are losing hard, or that someone is initially a bit standoffish, but so long as we keep a positive attitude just the two of us can help the entire team have a positive experience.

Part of it is I think most of us at silver 1 recognize that we are complete ass at the game and tend to not take it too seriously, so everyone is a lot more open to fucking around. When youre already at the bottom there is nowhere to go but up so why not goof off a bit?

There is a very small community that I have a great deal of respect for in spite of not being part of it, and that is the community built around Megazeux at DigitalMZX. It's a very small community based on a decades-old text-based game engine that they have extended in incredibly imaginative and unusual ways. And they have made games that really push the engine way past it's design goals. MZX is basically just an enhanced version of ZZT, designed to make ASCII adventure games in the same spirit as Kroz, yet the community has developed games with large sprites, platformers, first-person dungeon explorers, and even an SNES-style RPG with a hacked-in high color mode.

There is a very small community that I have a great deal of respect for in spite of not being part of it, and that is the community built around Megazeux at DigitalMZX. It's a very small community based on a decades-old text-based game engine that they have extended in incredibly imaginative and unusual ways. And they have made games that really push the engine way past it's design goals. MZX is basically just an enhanced version of ZZT, designed to make ASCII adventure games in the same spirit as Kroz, yet the community has developed games with large sprites, platformers, first-person dungeon explorers, and even an SNES-style RPG with a hacked-in high color mode.