Survival game Conan Exiles is gritty. On one level, that means butt-naked menhacking 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 YouTuberâs beloved Conan Exiles base.
It started when the YouTuber Faceless, whoâd been playing Conan Exilesâ beta, raided H20Delirious, who has 8.6 million subscribers. In his video, âRAIDING H20Delirious…and everyone else,â Faceless tears down the baseâs wood doors and loots the place. Itâs a feature of the game that everyone expects on some level, and by raiding H20Deliriousâs 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 animpressive base, with huge chests, furnaces and a skylight. Some commenters called it the âMTV Cribsâ of Conan bases. The YouTubers had never seen another person the server.
Thatâs 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agRWLXh6kuQ
Faceless and Maxmoefoe were devastated. To find out who did it, the two went to Battlemetris.com and searched for the private severâs login history. H20Deliriousâs name popped up. Heâd been logging on after they logged off to dismantle the base.
https://twitter.com/embed/status/837773130512936960
Retaliation is par for the course in Conan Exiles, even in beta. Bases are going to get destroyed. But Facelessâs subscribers were fiercely defensive, even though Faceless himself didnât ask for their defense. Facelessâs 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. âDELIRIOUS HAS CONQUERED ALL! KNEEL BEFORE THE!,â his video description reads. âOr cry about a game.â
Since the base was the focal point of Faceless and Maxmoefoeâs Conan YouTube series, their fans were upset. Galvanizing them was the belief that the content creator server was private, so the rules were different. H20Deliriousâs âarmy,â as he calls them, defends his right to play by the gameâs unspoken rules wherever he wanted.
Conan Exiles wonât be released in-full until early 2018. But the gameâs proven to be wildly popular among professional YouTubers and streamers, a sort of whose-dick-is-bigger contest for egos, and also, well, dicks.