Red Dead Online players are expressing their frustrations with Rockstar Games’ lack of updates by dressing up as clowns in a protest that might take some explaining to make sense. While Rockstar Games has continued to make small tweaks like new challenges to the game, the last major content update came back in December 2019 with Moonshiners.
Red Dead Online has been a popular destination for virtual cowpokes since launch, but it’s been plagued with problems the whole time, too. Players criticized its lack of substantial in-game rewards, and just as soon as Rockstar fixed the game’s economy, reports of widespread griefing emerged, with some players taking a step further with overtly racist behavior like players roleplaying as slave catchers and hurling racial slurs at black characters. While Rockstar has taken steps to curb players’ more disturbing behavior and offer better in-game rewards, it hasn’t addressed the issue of there just not being frequent enough updates to keep fans happy, in contrast to Grand Theft Auto Online, which gets far more attention from the developer despite being older.
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Players are now taking their grievances to Rockstar through the medium of Red Dead Online itself, dressing up as clowns and other circus performers in protest. According to Polygon, the idea came from a Red Dead Online Discord group, where one administrator said the idea of clowns has a double meaning. Players sometimes refer to Rockstar as clowns when criticizing the lack of updates, and at the same time players themselves are often called clowns for continuing to play even as they complain about the game. Thus the idea of the protest was born, and clowns began filling Red Dead Online’s servers and causing even more chaos than players usually expect, as seen in a video posted by Discord member OnlyPVPCat.
Though it started as an expression of anger, Red Dead Online’s clown invasion has turned into something else. Players expanded on the idea of clowns to include any type of circus performer, and now members of the Red Dead Fashion subreddit are holding a circus-themed fashion competition. It may not help get the message out to Rockstar that players are dissatisfied, but it’s giving players a fun new activity in the game that they once said was getting stale, helping to solve the problem in a roundabout way.
Rockstar Games’ hands-off approach to Red Dead Online can be frustrating, but both that game and GTA Online have always been places where players go to make their own fun to some degree. Red Dead Online’s clown protest has grown into a community event, not unlike GTA Online’s alien invasion, showing that while more content updates would be nice, it’s ultimately the community that makes any online game worth playing.
Red Dead Online is available in Red Dead Redemption 2 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Source: OnlyPVPCat/YouTube