The more active forums are where most of the problems are. It’s easy to moderate slower smaller discussions, but where Steam really lacks is in those more active forums where basically any game that has any real hype around it will turn into an absolute shitshow, especially if topics like lgbt people or women come up, or if the game happens to attract a really horny incel fandom.
My experience has been far less valuable. The steam forums are typically very poorly moderated, and bigotry runs wild in basically all of them.
It’s not inherent to Steam or forums as a concept, but unless the people running it take care to invest in resources for proper moderation, forums will just naturally trend towards toxic behaviour because it’s easier to be an asshole and harass good people out than it is to do the opposite.
The walkthroughs are great for niche games that don’t have many players, true. But at the same time, it’s not like Steam’s walkthroughs are the only ones or best ones on the Internet. Any game that has enough interest for people to make walkthroughs for are big enough to have a fanbase that maintains a wiki, or a subreddit, or a discord, or some other place where you can exchange the same info. Hell, you could even stay logged into your Steam account in the browser and just look at guides that way, while playing the game itself in another window.
They’re not useless, but if I were to think of the things that keep me using Steam as opposed to using a new launcher (or alternatively, the one thing a new launcher needs to get me to hop over from steam), walkthroughs aren’t really high priority imo.
They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.
But it can also be badly perceived when you go through the motions of exchanging pleasantries instead of just being up front about needing a favour. In either case, pleasantries are nice, but pleasantries that are being done just for the sake of pleasantries can be seen as rude and trying to establish needless or false familiarity.
I tried a few episodes because I thought the premise sounded kinda fun. On the plus side, it didn’t have a lot of the anime bullshit that makes something completely unwatchable (the amount of jiggling tits is a fairly reasonable 0), the art is cute, and it does kinda capture that feeling of watching a fun group’s D&D campaign as an anime.
In the negative… I tried watching like 4 or so episodes and they just all kinda felt samey. Every episode I watched followed a very similar arc, very similar jokes, and didn’t really hold my attention.
Nonspecific spoilers for what I meant by episodes being very samey:
Tap for spoiler
It felt like every episode arc was “party encounters threat (generally a monster). One party member tries to boldly go ahead and tackle the threat and fails. Another party member figures out or reveals they already know the gimmick. They kill the monster. One character starts cutting up and cooking the monster. Other characters object because it sounds really gross. In the end, they all try the food and like it more than they expected.”
I’ve been assured the plot really develops at some point so maybe I just quit too early, but it just didn’t grab my attention at all.