Survival game Conan Exiles is gritty. On one level, that means butt-naked men hacking each other up with axes. On another, that means you can spend a month lovingly constructing a base, only for another player to destroy it. Over the weekend, a huge gaming YouTuber got a ton of hate after griefing a smaller YouTuber’s beloved Conan Exiles base.
It started when the YouTuber Faceless, who’d been playing Conan Exiles’ beta, raided H20Delirious, who has 8.6 million subscribers. In his video, “RAIDING H20Delirious...and everyone else,” Faceless tears down the base’s wood doors and loots the place. It’s a feature of the game that everyone expects on some level, and by raiding H20Delirious’s base, Faceless drew more thousands more viewers than average to his channel. (H20Delirious later said the base did not belong to him, which Faceless denies.)
Now, Faceless had been building his own base on an empty, private server meant for content creators. He and Maxmoefoe, another big gaming YouTuber, sunk dozens of hours into the thing. It was an impressive base, with huge chests, furnaces and a skylight. Some commenters called it the “MTV Cribs” of Conan bases. The YouTubers had never seen another person the server.
That’s why Faceless and Maxmoefoe were shocked when they logged on to find their base scraped from the earth. Everything except their slave wheels was in shambles.
Faceless and Maxmoefoe were devastated. To find out who did it, the two went to Battlemetris.com and searched for the private sever’s login history. H20Delirious’s name popped up. He’d been logging on after they logged off to dismantle the base.
Retaliation is par for the course in Conan Exiles, even in beta. Bases are going to get destroyed. But Faceless’s subscribers were fiercely defensive, even though Faceless himself didn’t ask for their defense. Faceless’s subs descended on H20's comments. H20 disabled them and his next Conan Exiles video received 42,000 dislikes and only 2,000 more likes. “DELIRIOUS HAS CONQUERED ALL! KNEEL BEFORE THE!,” his video description reads. “Or cry about a game.”
Since the base was the focal point of Faceless and Maxmoefoe’s Conan YouTube series, their fans were upset. Galvanizing them was the belief that the content creator server was private, so the rules were different. H20Delirious’s “army,” as he calls them, defends his right to play by the game’s unspoken rules wherever he wanted.
Conan Exiles won’t be released in-full until early 2018. But the game’s proven to be wildly popular among professional YouTubers and streamers, a sort of whose-dick-is-bigger contest for egos, and also, well, dicks.