So as you may have noticed, I recommended a Fandom Files episode for the Advance Wars communities. You'll have to get data from other sources and ultimately do your damndest to find an actually unbiased source--the user Sarumarine might be able to help, but you'd have to take with a grain of salt anything from zealous supporters of GipFace, such as XenesisXenon and lazernerd (the more "sane" ones, no less), for reasons I will explain--because multiple AW sites have shut down. I particularly point this out when I'm not so transgression-free, and I do have a habit of being glass half-empty which you might be able to guess from me being the one to YKTTW Savvy Guy Energetic Girl--yes, I know I sound like a broken record saying that at this point but you get where I'm going with that. I should point out that nevertheless I would want to make my own sort of Spiritual Successor to Battalion Wars as I outline here:
https://www.patreon.com/MasterKnightDH

Either way, how I work doesn't change how abhorrent the communities' behavior have managed to get.

Let's start strong with one of its most prominent members: GipFace, cited to be Advance Wars Days of Ruin's best player, because clearly that means a lot. The resulting ego of his has led him to mock the victim of a murder:
http://forums.warsworldnews.com/viewtopic.php?t=13109
Keep in mind that for all we knew, the victim's fiancee, who has already proven to be not a saint herself, could have been the real culprit with the motive of being a Black Widow. Maybe it's too unlikely, but even if we do take things at face value, we're not focusing on the behavior of the members of the crime, definitely not right now. No, we are focusing on GipFace seeing fit to blame the victim for being killed by--once again assuming face value--a guy who would had to clear freaking water to do the deed.

Where I got really infuriated when first viewing the topic (I have to admit) is GipFace's explanations for his reasons. He did it because he didn't want to adapt. The reason he even got linked is because his real name, David Lim (you can find proof of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvfUiQwLLfo ), happens to be the same first name as that of David Heiss? May I point out that my own real name is David Harlow and really I'm pointing out the stupidity involved in claiming the same first name results in the same freaking person. Equally infuriating is the railroad analogy. You want to know how I feel about a VERY mentally crippled person I had known IRL who I can point out about to compare notes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EdVoiHUVLE
Just for reference, with what had happened over the past year, I don't know the current status of that particular situation but I have told various higher-ups about the red flags. Unfortunately, complicating things was my crush on the Statuesque Stunner of a Genki Girl that was the worker in charge of handling the client, by the way regarding the client as her favorite person in the place. To this day, I still can't very well imagine mentioning to *ANYBODY* IRL about that little detail would go well, especially when those same higher-ups already proved themselves so seeped in their structure for its own sake that it becomes clear they won't try to hear me out anyway, a showcase of how big a problem the communication breakdown in my real life gets which is particularly grating in light of ANOTHER issue in my real life.

But enough digressing about RL issues, even though yes dear GOD do I want to scream out loud about them. The problem I have with GipFace there is, simply and as you can see, how he doesn't treat other people's lives with care. But surely he's just being a case of Teens Are Monsters and will become a better person who would feel bad that sort of thing, right? Ahaha, you wish. Let me provide some URLs to make my point:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/5fijwf/shattered_throne_released_on_steam/
Comments by Gippy (yes, he's the same person) show his continuous contempt for attempts at AW Spiritual Successors, not to mention the mere existence of navy units. He also pulled similar crap on the first thread about Shattered Throne on the AW subreddit, but unfortunately, his messages were deleted, not because of action by the moderator, but because he closed his first account which he was using to write the messages. The topic is here if you're still interested anyway:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/3rgasi/fantasy_advanced_wars/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/5wpah3/wargroove_looks_like_the_only_thing_closer_to_aw/decfpax/
Mindless bashing of Wargroove, much as I detest Chucklefish's own arrogance, ho boy will I get to that. If you read through the comment thread, he mindlessly bashes other attempts at AW Spiritual Successors too, such as Warbits, and also made the comment "I've been a superfan of AW since 9/11" that got mocked here for its insensitivity toward the 9/11 victims:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/5wyavr/the_king_of_advance_wars/
Oh, and by the way, the deleted comment was by another user, GoldenJoe24, and it was his tier list of obnoxious things in the AW community, having literally anything I say as the sole item in S Tier while GipFace's general material was only in A Tier.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/643nzf/pvp_a_tale_of_2_metagames/
There's an insult toward AWBW's map committee in the primary post. Also, a user named GeneralChanTzu suddenly appeared there and then acted like a parody of the AWBW members, while incidentally showing belief that m*a*cromanagement and tactics are the same thing. Interesting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/69qv0u/updates_to_the_radvance_wars_sidebar/dh8qlbu/
Bashing of Custom Wars Tactics for focusing on AW fancomics Totally Flaked and Totally Lashed. ctomni2 goes into detail why this proves stupid. Oh, and remember this quote by GipFace for later: "The fact is that you and others are unable to debate me when it comes to AW so you resort to personal attacks."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/861xm3/regarding_sea_units_and_sea_combat/dw6vdo9/
More navy bashing and it's recent. GipFace also mindlessly bashes on Battalion Wars--may I point out he has claimed before that Battalion Wars is just a cash cow, despite evidence to the contrary, though I don't know where to dig up a URL proving as much.

So you see from those URLs how I'm not the only one who suffers at GipFace's hands--far from it. Will the admins do anything about it? Not by a long shot. May I point to this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/3s4i2o/advance_wars_map_design/cwxtanu/
You can see how the responses by Mangs (Margull being his handle) is clear-cut trolling. By the way, people celebrate him on the Fire Emblem fanbase precisely because he's an unabashed lecherous asshole. I wish I was exaggerating, but there was also this user named SuperBus...ah, but that's a story for another day. Anyway, may I point to the deleted response to Mangs' second trolling pic, actually made by lazernerd and saying this:
"Someone reported your two image comments. As a note to anyone who reports comments, I'm not the type of moderator who will remove posts or comments for stupid reasons. Don't waste your time reporting something just because you're butthurt."
You can see how lazernerd enables and even feeds trolls like Mangs, and GipFace and rwbonesy by extension. And yep, I'm getting into the attacks on my character now when you can tell that The Life And Times Of David Harlow isn't the only story making it clear that this mess is an issue. Even though GipFace does his damndest to try to make people think I'd believe that, to the point that this exists:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/67dqsg/just_played_my_first_ever_pvp_game_of_famicom/
Just for reference, the remark about the stereotyping I made in one of the earlier URLs (the updates to sidebar one) was referring to a moment in the accomodating video. Yes, the "you just got Juigi'd" thing would be referring to me. Incidentally, there's a user in that URL's comments who likes the Game Boy Wars 3 FAQs by Juigi and hates the behavior displayed in that topic. I recommend getting testimony from him too because, especially considering how the likes of GipFace would prove willfully ignorant of the past games' mechanics, dated or not (I'm looking at the way resupplying is handled in Famicom Wars), the supporting user definitely agrees the general behavior of these people is abhorrent.

Unfortunately, morality doesn't change the subreddit being a rage-inducing dictatorship in the name of the drunks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/6h776e/ceo_of_chucklefish_here_developers_of_wargroove/diz3o4c/
I obviously got angry, but you can tell how GipFace, as well as AnemoneMeer who herself (yes, her) is a nasty piece of work who would later go on to harass me to defame me so arbitrarily where she could as indicated here:
https://postimg.org/image/v6b12j5dn/
Going back on topic, may I point to how you can tell I was being calm posting this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/6h776e/ceo_of_chucklefish_here_developers_of_wargroove/dj1glz6/
GipFace made a comment that none of my points were valid because somehow I'm still an amateur, despite clear evidence to the contrary. That in tandem with AnemoneMeer exploiting that my Karma was shot to hell because of all the arbitrary downvoting, led to this The Reason You Suck Speech to the Advance Wars subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advance_Wars/comments/6h776e/ceo_of_chucklefish_here_developers_of_wargroove/dj68i78/
https://pastebin.com/SxDi5xGY (just in case that URL doesn't show the stuff on that Pastebin)
That post is what got me banned from the Advance Wars subreddit, for "disrespecting other users" even though that's exactly what people like GipFace are doing. GipFace had not been punished for his own garbage as you can see from *HIS RECENT TROLLING*. I called lazernerd out and he didn't consider trying to give valid arguments. As a result, I got this up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoP1L8evwDc
And yes, Rivals AC is a case of That One Level. More than that, it's *INFAMOUS* for its general cheapness, so much so that it got an episode of whoisthisgit's Worst Levels Ever series to itself.

By the way, if you're wondering about this in case you decided to look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esiexCYcmyA
That video was in response to my mother getting hit with a stroke. I would go on to directly mention about that mess a month after because she ended up losing her life to the lung disease responsible.

I wish my troubles with the Advance Wars subreddit ended with that mess with Wargroove, but that was not to be. AnemoneMeer wasn't the only one to harass me after the banning issue. There was also Xenesis, who picked a fight with me on romhacking.net's Discord when I mentioned GipFace indirectly while talking about some user's lack of faith in the RHDN Patreon calling it a show of greed. To begin with, I was on RHDN's Discord server to try to learn about game programming, using a Game Boy Color as a base, to be able to learn to make my own game more efficiently. Unfortunately, Xenesis aggravated the mess and then accused *ME* of harassing *HIM*. The RHDN believed that crap and banned me. As a result, I retracted my pledge of $10 to RHDN's Patreon and shifted it to whoisthisgit, who by the way I was already pledging another $10 monthly. This video happened because of the pledge change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ocg1084FUI
Yep, I used my pledge to suggest a Worst Levels Ever episode. Thankfully, whoisthisgit agrees the level deserves to be called out, but since he already did *THREE* WLE episodes on the AW series, the AW subreddit's elitists think it's a joke anyway, that he'd need to "git gud" even though the problem with the level isn't that it's hard, it's that it's *ANNOYING* because of the damned mountain ranges.

There's probably even more scumbag behavior from the Advance Wars subreddit just waiting to be dug up, but needless to say that you see why those members are an issue. Of course, I spent so long tearing at the Advance Wars subreddit's garbage, which brings up the question: why not just go to another Advance Wars community? Unfortunately, there are problems with that, because the other AW communities are, yes, better, but that's unfortunately being relative. Advance Wars Net has shut down, before the Mangs episode in fact (it's the defunct community I was referring to there), Wars Central--even ignoring it too has shut down--has JoJo be unpleasant, and the Advance Wars By Web community has its atrocities too.
http://awbw.wikia.com/wiki/Net_Attack
That was deleted because it was "not needed." One look at my Contributions page and the responses provided by checking page histories should tell you the actual intent of the users and it was clearly anything but altruistic:
http://awbw.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Contributions/MasterKnight
Oh, and I put the Net Attack page up here:
http://advancewars.wikia.com/wiki/Net_Attack

I also need to point out how Advance Wars already has had a niche fanbase even in its heyday. And guess what? The bloodbath in this topic happened:
http://www.amarriner.com/awbw_forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11940
Why did it happen? Because *****GENERALLY, THE ADVANCE WARS COMMUNITIES, DESPITE THE FANBASE'S ALREADY SMALL SIZE, ARE FRACTURED AS SIN.***** I have to emphasize that as the root problem behind the Advance Wars communities, something I have called out repeatedly in the past to no effect, because among the few things they CAN agree upon is trying to have a scapegoat for the bloodbath, even though I had absolutely nothing to do with things like the topic I pointed to. Even if their claims that I'm a troll were true, the toxicity existed from the start, with or without me.

If anything, what I've been doing was provide talk about things like the series' history and the games' general balance. I've actually done a bit of game hacking toward GBW3 as well, in spite of the bullshit with romhacking.net's Discord:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VSYQgfjVE0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGWu74mdcUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww1MjgFORHU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZVvhD-b_6s

And of course, I helped to balance Shattered Throne, which can be bought here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/469710/Shattered_Throne/

I do not claim to be perfect with game balance--in fact, I do not doubt there are more game balance concepts to learn out there. Helping to balance games like Shattered Throne would be a definite reminder of such. However, I can say with utmost confidence that I have a firm basis to provide for helping with future game balance:
https://pastebin.com/j4DfY77j

Add to it that I am not without my own creativity, even if it's only moderate, and you see how the Advance Wars communities had been needlessly nasty toward somebody who wanted to sufficiently call out the metagame problems of Light Tank spam, infantry spam, and Artillery spam at the very least.

Of course, the Advance Wars series is pretty much dead, so why care? Well, it's as I mentioned: I'm wanting to make a Spiritual Successor of sorts to Battalion Wars. I would inevitably need proper support in order to accomplish that. Unfortunately, the Battalion Wars community is even smaller with only a subreddit and Discord to work with, and AnemoneMeer, in her nasty harassment, had invaded the Battalion Wars Discord to further discredit me, leaving the Discord a broken mess because some of the members on the Discord are already darwinistic trolls in their own right, trolls who simply flared up the minute AnemoneMeer invaded. Reporting these scumbags to higher-ups doesn't work because apparently they're not breaking any rules, even though it becomes increasingly obvious they are.

Needless to say, I have ideas, and they get shafted by a fanbase so toxic I'd probably be wishing I was dealing with the nonsense in the Sonic fandom. I can't turn to either big name companies or IRL people either, because both are so believing in structure for its own sake that I have to live a paranoid wreck.

I don't doubt if I ultimately have biases, but I do hope I have at least provided viable starting points. I would be VERY glad if you would do an episode of The Fandom Files on the Advance Wars communities. Good God they are awful.