Plagued /r/TNOmod and the Reddit HOI4 modding community - When a subreddit for a video game mod turns to utter insanity

[FruitFever]

The real irony is the few Russians who get asked about fictional warlord they would like to unify Russia typically answer with the more authoritarian factions because they might actually be able to stand up to further German encroachment rather then the LibSoc factions; They then proceed to get purged from the TNO discord in 2 milliseconds for racism/fascism/transphobia/etc.

What really seems to piss of the Devs is that they love Yazov, whose entire goal is wiring the Russian state solely for causing WW3 and surviving it in bunkers, loving the entire revenge story while devs get angry because, "it is supposed to show that vengeance is bad you can not like it, god I hate all russians!"

Maybe a bit offtopic here, but Isn't the usual commie excuse for Stalins brutality that "ooh, he HAD to do that so they could stand up to the Nazies!!11"?

 

[local asuka]

It's very likely with the sheer size of the team that if they can get any sort of organization going they'll still be able to make progress. TNO, if nothing else, is not new to losing enormous chunks of it's team and still going on, though Panzer was always there to tape something together and whip the team back into some sort of shape. Given that the lead dev went "on break" the day before the leaks hit and Panzer outright leaving the discord I think there's a chance this actually kills the mod but I wouldn't actually expect it to happen. Even with the nightmarish organization and purges the team is still pretty massive. It'll probably continue to explode every few months or so, though.

Maybe a bit offtopic here, but Isn't the usual commie excuse for Stalins brutality that "ooh, he HAD to do that so they could stand up to the Nazies!!11"?

Also off-topic, I've heard that one of the real driving forces behind Stalin's Five Year Plans working were big, american companies like Ford setting up shop, though I haven't really looked much into that so take it with a grain of salt. Stalin's purges also utterly crippled the Union to the point where despite having a massive material and logistical superiority over the germans (also fueled by the west) It still took them 4 years to push the germans out and they only did so at an atrocious cost.

 

[Blood Bath & Beyond]

Why do trannies always have the most chad jaw lines? It's like a rule

This is just blatantly false. One trannie with a chad jawline doesn't make up for the million-billion others with mush mouth thumb heads.

 

[Azure_Comet]

lead dev went "on break" the day before the leaks hit and Panzer outright leaving the discord I think there's a chance this actually kills the mod but I wouldn't actually expect it to

I honestly think they made a "Dev" discord to work in and hide tbh.

 

[Kanuckski]

It's very likely with the sheer size of the team that if they can get any sort of organization going they'll still be able to make progress. TNO, if nothing else, is not new to losing enormous chunks of it's team and still going on, though Panzer was always there to tape something together and whip the team back into some sort of shape. Given that the lead dev went "on break" the day before the leaks hit and Panzer outright leaving the discord I think there's a chance this actually kills the mod but I wouldn't actually expect it to happen. Even with the nightmarish organization and purges the team is still pretty massive. It'll probably continue to explode every few months or so, though.

Also off-topic, I've heard that one of the real driving forces behind Stalin's Five Year Plans working were big, american companies like Ford setting up shop, though I haven't really looked much into that so take it with a grain of salt. Stalin's purges also utterly crippled the Union to the point where despite having a massive material and logistical superiority over the germans (also fueled by the west) It still took them 4 years to push the germans out and they only did so at an atrocious cost.

I don't know if Pinkpanzer left and just rejoined but he's in the server currently. I know there was a period during this drama where he had all his roles removed, but he's currently in the server with the Team Member and Developer roles. Prior he had the special Founder role and claimed he didn't plan to come back in a developer role. I do think this is a sign of a lot of internal restructuring, But, I'm just barely not enough of an autist to check everyone with development roles. Apparently there were 210 people before the start of this though.

 

[HumanHive]

It's very likely with the sheer size of the team that if they can get any sort of organization going they'll still be able to make progress. TNO, if nothing else, is not new to losing enormous chunks of it's team and still going on, though Panzer was always there to tape something together and whip the team back into some sort of shape. Given that the lead dev went "on break" the day before the leaks hit and Panzer outright leaving the discord I think there's a chance this actually kills the mod but I wouldn't actually expect it to happen. Even with the nightmarish organization and purges the team is still pretty massive. It'll probably continue to explode every few months or so, though.

Also off-topic, I've heard that one of the real driving forces behind Stalin's Five Year Plans working were big, american companies like Ford setting up shop, though I haven't really looked much into that so take it with a grain of salt. Stalin's purges also utterly crippled the Union to the point where despite having a massive material and logistical superiority over the germans (also fueled by the west) It still took them 4 years to push the germans out and they only did so at an atrocious cost.

These teams are huge, but usually only one or two individuals actually do anything.

 

[Benuit]

I honestly think they made a "Dev" discord to work in and hide tbh.

They don’t (but probably should); Kaiserreich started the trend of Hoi4 mod community discords being the same as the development ones and thereby ran by the developers (funnily enough, KR was originally just a dev server, with public let in later).

As is inevitable when a community discord/reddit/whatever is run by the mods or developers of the mod or game, criticism is taken poorly, and generally leads to instantly reviled offshoot communities and drama, like this lovely thread has documented.

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

a guy doing a call out on the mod in a Reddit post mentioned he had taking a writing class and on the topic of alt history his teacher said "All alt history is written about the current time it's written in, not the past."

This is so true its painful. There is nothing more tedious to a player of a mod taking place in the past than lazy psychoanalysis-from-a-distance of historical figure's motives, and today's ideological passions superimposed over the lived-through subjectivity of decision-making, fog of war, and yesterday's more spiritual passions.

I personally find it disgustingly common for modders to exchange imposing the greatest outside subjectivity understandable to the viewer, so thoroughly as to reduce the mod to mere personal expression overriding the period's philosophical arguments, understandings, and on-going cultural progression. They cannot help themselves. How can someone want to play with and in history but never confront their modern biases? How do you wind up that doing that contradiction?

Nothing is better then to play alternative history where novel rivalries lead to caricatured ideologies by the everyday man's interpretation of events. America fighting a cold war against a surviving Fascist europe, Nazi or some sort of royalist (Fédération nationale des Camelots du Roi) or Mediterranean Clerical faction that fought Germany over the July Putsch in Austria heating up, would caricature Capitalism in 1960s post-war America rather differently then ours. You can play with the intellectuals refining the contradictory small-minded public sentiments together into some sort of unity, similar outcomes to OTL are described entirely from different angles, and similar descriptions to OTL refer to entirely different things.

Instead we get self-inserts and pedophiles writing about horny teenagers here and with Fallout:Frontier.

 

[Benuit]

These teams are huge, but usually only one or two individuals actually do anything.

TNO team structure is a mess, for a “volunteer” project they run it more like a factory. Testers must do a test a week or get kicked, writers must write 10 pieces of localization, coders must code 10 focuses, etc. So while they may actually be doing a lot of “work” it’s not going to be out of passion for the mod but rather fear of being removed, which also results in a ridiculous turnover rate, the server has nearly 300 “former (team) members”, and of course many more that have left.

Due to this no one’s actually going out of their way to better the mod - testers will open an issue report in the git and it won’t be resolved for months, if not ever. Compare to relatively sane mods such as Kaiserreich where you just open an issue on the (public!) github and your bug will be fixed within a business day.

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

These teams are huge, but usually only one or two individuals actually do anything.

Which can blow up the other way like in Fallout:Frontier where a guy whose name is "Devil's Wish", I think, wrote the majority by far but more enthusiastically than well. The rest of the team pretty much lumped things onto the mod around his environments and stories.

 

[Leblanc]

Is every modding community having some kinda insane troonbased melt down right now? Holy shit

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

Kaiserreich is, I dunno anything about RT56

I switched over to Kaiserredux after the last two or three rounds of re-writes. I liked the idea of Battle Pope maybe having to fight the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. Then everything changed.

Shame that it spiraled into such an autistic clusterfuck. I really liked TNO, mainly because of all the stupid cursed shit in it.
At least it's going down in such an open, hilarious way.
Never let troons onto your projects.
NEVER.

The Thousand Week Reich, or TWR, is an alternative but it doesn't have the greatness that is the burgundian system and Globalplänen which really is the centre of the whole mod.

 

[Iceland Heavy]

Maybe a bit offtopic here, but Isn't the usual commie excuse for Stalins brutality that "ooh, he HAD to do that so they could stand up to the Nazies!!11"?

It's not really offtopic because it's pretty much spelled out in TNO's backstory. Stalin died in an ''''accident'''' so Bukharin took over, didn't end the NEP and didn't starve the Kulaks who ended up starving the USSR anyway. Then when the Nazis invade the Soviets have no industry and just Enemy at the Gates human wave into them and lose hard.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

It's not really offtopic because it's pretty much spelled out in TNO's backstory. Stalin died in an ''''accident'''' so Bukharin took over, didn't end the NEP and didn't starve the Kulaks who ended up starving the USSR anyway. Then when the Nazis invade the Soviets have no industry and just Enemy at the Gates human wave into them and lose hard.

Even that depends on the event chain in TNO.

In Serov's path, eventually he analyzes and comes to the conclusion that with the industry and manpower Russia had, Bukharin or not, they shouldn't have lost. The devs admitted this is a statement about how the setting is not realistic and that Serov basically almost comes to the conclusion that he's a character in an alt-history videogame mod.

Spoiler

But since he doesn't know what a videogame mod is and he's a loony Nazbol, he ends up creating a Stab in the Back myth that Koreans caused Russia to fail.

 

[Hex Cat]

This is what all community made video game content will be from now on, troon degeneracy as far as the eye can see. don't look forward to any mods anymore you'll save yourself alot of heartache.

 

[cyberdick]

This is what all community made video game content will be from now on, troon degeneracy as far as the eye can see. don't look forward to any mods anymore you'll save yourself alot of heartache.

yep, troons ruin everything is what I have learnt in the past 3 years. they were better off in their isolated tumblr blogs. Letting them into twatter/reddit/ etc was a big mistake. Just look at reddit now, transphobia a much worse crime than holocaust denial and anything can be transphobia

 

[Neo-Holstien]

I was at first only monitoring this topic because it's a good sign of where Paradox fandom has gone, but I am looking at the story of this mod specifically and it goes too far into the not plausible territory. Right off the bat - Hitler being alive in the 1960s. Most historians believe Hitler had Parkinson's by 1942 and it was quite advanced and visible at the end of the war (famous movies of it) - Hitler almost certainly dies before 1950. The 'Fatherland' scenario of an 80 year old Hitler was never likely.

I had assumed this mod started in the post war period presuming Hitler is incapacitated/dead by the late 40s (most likely).

The mod authors also seem ignorant of the actual Nazi factions. Yes, there is alot more to the world than just Germany, but since this is a 'what if Germany won' mod they ought to know a bit more about the history. One good (and true) storyline is that Himmler was not loyal to Hitler, a better story could have been built around this. Some other SS officers like Karl Wolff were selling out to the allies even before the war ended. Some even think Himmler knew of the July plot and allowed it to happen.

"people seem to think the axis had a plan for world domination because the allies did" -Curtis Yarvin, any axis victory where it is planet nazi is fantasy fag shit. the axis would be larger, but still not america in terms of strength and Colonizing Russia was not gonna happen. thousand week reich is just as autistic and nigger brained

 

[BootlegPopeye]

"people seem to think the axis had a plan for world domination because the allies did" -Curtis Yarvin, any axis victory where it is planet nazi is fantasy fag shit. the axis would be larger, but still not america in terms of strength and Colonizing Russia was not gonna happen. thousand week reich is just as autistic and nigger brained

Yeah, Germany lacked a blue water navy, so it can be written off immediately.. So 'swastikas over Washington' is both a bad plotline in Amazon Prime movies as well as video game mods made by troons. Yet the absurd 'fear' of New Hitler is arguably a foundational myth for the current Liberal World Empire malaise we live in.

 

[KiwiJoe]

"people seem to think the axis had a plan for world domination because the allies did" -Curtis Yarvin, any axis victory where it is planet nazi is fantasy fag shit. the axis would be larger, but still not america in terms of strength and Colonizing Russia was not gonna happen. thousand week reich is just as autistic and nigger brained

In that case, what would be Germany's plan for Russia after they defeat it, if they were not going go colonize it?

 

[Large]

In that case, what would be Germany's plan for Russia after they defeat it, if they were not going go colonize it?

Endless war around the Urals.
Yes really.