I used to moderate a really busy gaming forum back in the day. The GTA forums were always the worst.
The Civilization and other TBS type game forums were spotless as far as behavior goes.
One day they made a change on the forum and moderator names looked different from other users (it wasn't intentional but some old formatting that accidentally was leaked out). I was posting like usual on the Civilization forums and they noticed my username looked odd, folks were surprised to hear there even WERE moderators. There simply had been no moderator action on those forums that anyone could remember. The community simply policed itself and users corrected their behavior on their own in a way that could never happen in GTA forums.
That was also the place you saw "reasonable" criticism of the game and respect for it from everyone. It wasn't all positive all the time, but it was balanced in terms of understanding the ying and yang of game development decisions.... and an acceptance that maybe as a user they don't know everything.
We certainly don't frequent the same flight sim forums... The users, the devs, it's an entire scene I'd rather keep at arms length.
To give an example incident. Last year, a well known developer called Flight Sim Labs included malware in their $140 A320 addon. They stated this was DRM. It's purpose was to send a user's Chrome passwords to the developer if they believed the addon was pirated. It did this by checking the name the addon was registered with.
As a community populated by developers, I think people here would recognise this as a bad thing to do. No detection method is perfect, but the specific mode used is particularly crude, and also stealing people's passwords is a no go even if they did pirate your software.
There were users spamming forums to both condemn this behaviour, but also users portraying users who decided to no longer support FSLabs or ask for a refund as simply being cheapskates unwilling to support the flight sim scene (developers are few and far between, and in terms of "number/detail of simulated systems", the FSLabs A320 was the best addon to a consumer grade sim for A320. Obviously most users are not equipped to accurately assess the accuracy of the addon, but it was widely believed to be accurate).
Or vatsim. Vatsim is an online community for people to simulate pilots with actual ATC. Vatsim itself is meticulously organised with rules of conduct, appionted/elected officials etc. This comes into conflict often with the "It's just a hobby/relaxation" crowd. Also giving people power, even over flying pretend airplanes brings out a certain type of person.
o_O All the flight sim forums I've ever seen have been filled with angry children. Everyone always fights to see who can be the most pedantic while also bashing the devs for not being perfect in every way. That's just the average user, don't get me started on the rivet counters...
The Civilization and other TBS type game forums were spotless as far as behavior goes.
One day they made a change on the forum and moderator names looked different from other users (it wasn't intentional but some old formatting that accidentally was leaked out). I was posting like usual on the Civilization forums and they noticed my username looked odd, folks were surprised to hear there even WERE moderators. There simply had been no moderator action on those forums that anyone could remember. The community simply policed itself and users corrected their behavior on their own in a way that could never happen in GTA forums.
That was also the place you saw "reasonable" criticism of the game and respect for it from everyone. It wasn't all positive all the time, but it was balanced in terms of understanding the ying and yang of game development decisions.... and an acceptance that maybe as a user they don't know everything.