/r/PCMasterRace

308,244 subscribers for 3 years!

Notice: This feature contains embarrassing praise, secret ducks, personal history, and horrible(ly good) jokes. If you prefer a feature that's satirical and crazy, check the comments. Yes, this may be SROTD's first ever alternate ending. Also: This is probably the longest feature in SROTD history. Make of that what you will. Now, onto the program.

PC truly is the master race. I sit here on my PC, made up of an i5 3470 and 7850 2GB, with my two monitors filled with content, music playing on my surround sound setup and the faint ping of TeamSpeak notifications in my peripheral view. Right now I could take a break from writing and do anything I want to. I could play any of the thousands of PC exclusive games, or the tens of thousands of emulated games in my library, or maybe watch something from my massive collection of movies and TV shows, or maybe listen to something from my equally massive music collection, or perhaps just read something from one of my tens of thousands of ebooks, comic books, graphic novels, and manga. I think I'll just lay back on the couch and route Skyrim to my TV and play there. I did just install that new 4K texture pack.

But first I have a feature to write. So, what is the PC Master Race? Simply, it's what you call people who recognize that PC is the superior gaming platform. You don't need to own a PC to be in the PC Master Race. You don't even need to be a gamer. You just have to acknowledge that PC is the best choice for gaming. You have to accept facts. Those in the PC Master Race, the ascended, refer to each other, with respect, as brother and sister. We're all gamers, and that means we're all part of a family. Some people have done great things for the platform and have earned honors above others in some way. They may be referred to as princes, or angels, or something of that description. I prefer elder sibling, personally. Examples include Linus Sebastian and John Bain. Beyond that, there is the father, referred to often as the God of the PC Master Race, Gabe Newell. GabeN is a founder and director of Valve, creators of the Half-Life series (among many others). They also made Steam, a platform that puts console game marketplaces to shame.

So let's talk a small bit about /r/PCMasterRace. Forgot about it, didn't you? Yes, in cases like these I make the mistake of talking far more on the subject rather than the community. Sorry. /r/PCMasterRace is the subreddit for the PCMR, frequented by everyone from Jesus Christ to Nukeclears. (I swear it's true, Nukeclears visits! I was too shy to ask for an autograph.) It contains, among other things, the greatest wiki on reddit. Also, some of the greatest mods on reddit as well. They keep the peace and do what needs doing. Done. Did. Dong. The rest of the community is pretty friendly, although some of them are rich as heck and have sick rigs that make me jealous deep in my bones. Anyway, they're a nice bunch of folk that are knowledgeable and helpful, friendly as can be, and with excellent taste in games. Some can be a bit overzealous, but deep down they're all good people. Deep down we're all good people.

So let's move onto gaming, and why PC gaming means a lot to me. I could fill a thousand volumes on what it means to be a gamer, but instead I'll say this: I'm thirty years old and have been gaming since I was very young. Some of my first games were on the PC. Nethack consumed my time like /r/trees consumes snacks. There was always a great sense of community there; a collection of people that were brought together by an undying love of video games. The gaming community. We were connected through PC like no console could ever do, talking late into the night on IRC rooms and on BBS forums. In all these years, these decades, I've met incredible people, seen incredible things, and have forged friendships that have stretched across continents. Gaming has been the chief thing that I can owe myself to. I like to think I'm a good person, or at least I try my best to be, and I have all these years of gaming to thank for that. The gamers, the community, and of course the games. That's what the PC Master Race is, and that's what gaming is all about. It's about a love of games, and the friendships between the people that play them.

Enough about me, it's time to hear from the moderators. Here we have the /r/PCMasterRace moderators, and their responses to some questions I asked them. Also, they proceeded to edit their answers and re-answer over and over again, which resulted in the single longest post editing session in SROTD history. As of this time I've spent about 5 15 30 45 minutes putting their answers in and setting up our formatting. They'd better give me some special flair or something to make up for this. I also accept golden statuettes in my likeness.

1. First off, tell me a bit about yourselves.

/u/Pedro19 I'm Pedro. I'm the founder of /r/PcMasterRace. I try to keep this community thriving with the invaluable help of the other moderators.

/u/TheAppleFreak I'm TheAppleFreak; I'm one of the senior mods on the sub, and the guy who fixes our various configs and CSS. By day I work as a front-line computer technician at drug/alcohol outpatient facility, and by night I try to learn how not to suck at web/game/user interface design. I'm a fan of energetic music, and I sometimes complain or gush to people about my tastes.

/u/Tizaki I am one of many mods. I specialize in the subreddit wiki (/r/pcmasterrace/wiki/guide), some CSS styling, servers, and lots of other cool/fun stuff that helps separate /r/PCMasterRace from all the other subreddits.

/u/Guck_Mal I'm the grand old man of the PCMR staff at 33, I've been a gamer all my life (boardgames, pen & paper, arcade games and home electronics), I played my first PC game at 6 and have been building my own PC's since '95.

/u/Alien_From_Europa To conclude, additional information about our moderation team can be found here: /r/pcmasterrace/wiki/moderators

/u/notwitty_username Hi, my name is Izzy and I help mod the sub /r/pcmasterrace! I'm also a huge flight simulator fan, my favorite sim right now is IL2: Battle of Stalingrad.

/u/Hauberk I'm 23 moderator of the /r/pcmasterrace sub and leader of a gaming community called Hostile Paradigm. As well as a PC gamer I'm also a big fan of comics (Judge Dredd, Red Hood, All-Star western etc.) and pen and paper games (Pathfinder, shadowrun, call of cthulhu).

/u/Bosses_Boss I am the resident Canadian on the PCMR Mod Team. I've been an avid PC Gamer for two years now after not being happy with the performance and quality of gaming on a PS3 so instead of getting a PS4 I built myself a $800 budget PC and the love of PC gaming grew from there.

/u/Melvar_10 Your average college student going through the motions to major in accounting and IT.

/u/zang227 I'm zang, I like reddit, The Yogscast and Achievement Hunter

2. What's inside your PC, and what are you currently playing on it?

/u/Pedro19 My lifestyle (work, space and constant moving around) doesn't allow me to go for a desktop as my main machine right now. Currently I'm using an i5 4210u, Radeon R7 M260 with 2GB and 8 GB of DDR3@ 1600Mhz laptop as my main machine.

I'm lucky when I have a couple hours a day for gaming (very lucky, indeed. It does not happen often), when I last did (last christmas) you could find me running away from cazadores on Fallout New Vegas, finishing the season 2 of the Walking Dead game, starting The Wolf Among us and trying to land with extreme crosswinds on Kai Tak in FSX with a Concorde or a 747.

/u/TheAppleFreak I'm currently rocking three gaming-capable PCs that I've acquired over the course of four years, each for different purchases. The first one is Kratos, originally built late 2010 with a number of common noob mistakes that have worked surprisingly well in my favor (the 950 is still a great CPU). Second was my gaming laptop for college, a Sager NP9150 with an i7 3610QM, an AMD Radeon 7970M, and a Crucial M4 128GB SSD. Nowadays, it sees a lot of use as a virtualization and development machine. The third is Endymion, originally a Xbox 360 HTPC, which now serves duty as my gaming HTPC.

In terms of what I play, the game I've put most of my time into nowadays is Planetside 2, though I have also put some time into becoming not terrible at Super Smash Brothers.

/u/Tizaki I currently run a graphically weak A10. It's behind a PS4 and XBox One, but I don't really need it to be fast because I only play a few demanding games right now and they all still hit 60FPS if I lower the settings enough (something consoles don't give you the freedom to do, PC MASTER RACE). Soon I'll either add a new card (~$200) from the GF900 or R9 300 series that will be even faster than the NEXT nextgen consoles (PC MASTER RACE AGAIN, BOOM).

/u/Guck_Mal My current PC is a build that started in 2011: i5-2500k, 8GB RAM, 2x 250GB SSD's, 1x 2TB HDD and a GTX 970. It is due for a CPU & motherboard update.

I split my gaming time between FPS, RPG's and Grand Strategy games as my mood changes. Currently that means CS:GO and Europa Universalis IV.

/u/Alien_From_Europa I have a Lappy 486, a Lenovo Toaster that I turned into a HTPC, a Lenovo Y510p that I have visitation rights with twice a year, and my pride & joy, an IBM Thinkpad R50e 1842-PPU. I have 575 games in my library. All paid for 50-90% off retail.

/u/notwitty_username In my PC right now is an i5 2500k, MSI 4G GTX970, and a 840 Pro 512 to name the important stuff :P I'm currently playing someone else's Borderlands The Pre-Sequel save game, because I'm too lazy to grind! :)

/u/Hauberk i5 3570K MSI 770 gaming, Lots of ARMA III

/u/Bosses_Boss Now I have a pretty high end PC.

Quick notes on specs, more detailed in imgur album above

i7/MSI Z97 Gaming 7/780 Ti Classy/Triple VG248QEs/16GB RAM/2x500GB SSD/2TB HDD/RM750 PSU/All in a Corsair Air 540

I game on three VG248QE monitors for that 3D Surround experience or 144Hz Surround. I also have a fourth monitor for monitoring temps, chat, in game web browsing. I use a Thrustmaster T500RS with a 8 speed shifter for my sim racing that I mostly play. I play a lot of FPS and arcade racing games as well.

/u/Melvar_10 http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Ksv2YJ

/u/zang227 Oh heres where i get to show off: PCPartPicker part list

What am I playing on it? Reddit, Youtube, Gmod. Oh and the 64GB of ram is for aesthetics, it looks better when all the slots are occupied.

3. What's it like moderating r/PCMasterRace?

/u/Pedro19 It's a glorious experience. Being a part of this community while having witnessed its growth from day 1 is nothing short of amazing. I have exchanged experiences with some of the most interesting people I've ever me and I'm extremely lucky for it. Making sure the community lives up to the expectations of its users is very demanding, but we all work hard for it.

/u/TheAppleFreak It's been one hell of a ride so far. Sure, there's been a lot of stuff that none of us would like to deal with; Reddit at times can be very trying when it comes to your time and energy, and not all of us have all the time in the world to give to it (I certainly haven't in the past few weeks). That being said, I'm honored to be a part of this team; everyone here are really hard working people (and bots) that want the best for our community. I'm very glad to be a part of this entire operation.

As an aside, please read the rules and report posts that break them. This makes it so much easier for all of us.

/u/Tizaki In one word: fun. There's always the plain old moderation stuff (remove this, flair that, review the reports of something else), but a TON of it is the super fun community stuff. There's a lot of freedom in the "R&D lab" to research cool/fun things that the community would enjoy, and a lot of those things are able to see the light of day (and be enjoyed by the users) pretty quickly. Every team member has several specialties that, when added together, create the best mod team on reddit. Many other mod teams make the mistake of being almost "corporatized" and take things waaay too seriously. Almost as if they're afraid of being fired at the drop of a hat for being too fun. Being a PCMR mod is like what working at Apple was like in the 1970's and early 80's. In a way, we're actually building computers too(/r/pcmasterrace/wiki/builds), so that comparison makes even more sense.

/u/Guck_Mal The day to day "work" of playing modqueue wack-a-mole can be tedious, but well worth it for being part of the great things that we do as a community and the events the mod team sets up.

/u/Alien_From_Europa It's horrible! /u/Pedro19 is a slave driver. He has us ban hammering in the hot sun and removing poor submissions until our hands bleed. Somebody, please, please help us!

/u/notwitty_username Moderating the sub is a really awesome experience, it's really incredible to see a good idea implemented and the users reaction and feedback to it.

/u/Hauberk It’s a lot of fun. Working with this team has been a great experience and having to opportunity to work on outside projects such as redditmade, steam curation etc is something that not a lot of other subreddit get the chance to do and I enjoying helping the PCMR community.

/u/Bosses_Boss It's been fun for the ~6 months I've been a moderator of PCMR.

/u/Melvar_10 It's been wild. Everyday it seems to just get crazier and crazier.

/u/zang227 Well it's actually not that bad. The biggest downside is everytime someone makes an idea sub like pcmasteracevideos or something you get added as a mod there. I am a mod on like 15 PCMR related subs. The biggest upside is being able to do something about the garbage that pops up. We are all pretty autonomous when it comes to modding so we are able to manage our own little pet projects, like /u/hauberk who lead the Twitch project, or /u/Tizaki with the wiki.

4. In your own words, what is the PC Master Race? What's it all about?

/u/Pedro19 The PC Master Race is a group of PC enthusiasts whose goal is to share their love for PC while contributing to the fight against the industries half-truths that prevent technological advancement and end up hurting us all, PC users or not. We're here to level up the playing field and to provide everyone with factual information on just why the PC is the superior device. Oh, and we also like to joke around a bit occasionally. That doesn't define us, it's simply an asset. Humor is extremely powerful in getting ideas across. We're both serious and not serious, like life.

/u/TheAppleFreak In my eyes, the PC Master Race is about flexibility, and the openness and freedom inherent in that. Sure, we tend to have better performance than the consoles at a competitive price, but we're free to upgrade and downgrade aspects of our user experience to attain what we want. What's there to stop us from lowering all of our settings in games to their absolute lowest, so we can get the best performance possible? What's stopping us from raising them to their maximum settings, even if performance drops down to seconds per frame or if the game crashes? (well, I guess a crash would be a good reason to stop) What the openness of the PC enables us to do is have that choice, to enable us to craft that aspect of our experience.

What's to stop us from changing part of a game that doesn't play as well as you'd like? What's to stop us from adding new content to the game? Why can't we make freely available toolsets and resources and make our own game? Why can't we sell this on our own website, or on Steam or GOG or Humble? What's stopping us from changing the way we think? Why can't we create something that enhances the quality of our lives? What's stopping us from reaching farther? What's stopping us from changing the world?

The PC, for me, is the only system that gives everyone this flexibility. Even if you don't use it, it's there for you, and you have the option to do what you want. It's an unbelievably powerful platform for creation, for bringing people together, and for making change in our world. Being a part of the PC Master Race, to me, is recognizing this, and striving to protect this openness and innovation so all may benefit from it.

/u/Tizaki The PC Master Race is a global movement of loving PC gamers with the goal of enlightening every console peasant across the land. The PC is objectively superior to consoles, offers infinite freedom, offers the cheapest prices, and offers freedom from the evil console monopoly (see /r/pcmasterrace/wiki/guide to learn more about their war crimes against the gaming industry). In other words, not only is the PC great(far in the positive from 0), but consoles are actually pretty evil (not just sitting at 0, but in the far negative). A modern console is literally a PC with features and power removed, some of which are modified and sold back to you at a high price. If it weren't for bribed exclusivity, consoles would cease to exist. Anything a console can do, a PC can do better (for less money, higher framerate, lower cost, higher detail, higher resolution, upgradable). Save the industry and buy a PC like everyone else. We're making progress, but we could never turn our back on more progress.

/u/Guck_Mal What started out as a small community of pc enthusiants who also enjoyed making tongue in cheek jabs at themselves and our overzealous brothers has quickly blossomed under Pedro's leadership to become something truly great for the PC gamer community.

Much like the awakening that 4chan members experienced during Project Chanology, I feel that a great many gamers that take part in our community have come to realize the great influence we as a community can have when we work together in large numbers.

/u/Alien_From_Europa My lengthy answer can be found here.

/u/notwitty_username I believe PC Master Race isn't only about PCs, but showing the gaming industry as a whole, that we don't want half-ass'd ports and butchered launches. It's a community that wants the best for gamers and can be vocal about it, but also one that loves PCs.

/u/Hauberk The PC Master Race encompasses the idea that because the PC platform is upgradable and far exceeds the performance of the current console generation, that it is the best platform for gaming. Some may go as far as to say that all consoles should be abolished because the consoles are defacto DRM boxes - and not the good kind. Personally I just think it's a disservice to gamers in general to deny them the best gaming experience by promoting consoles as equal or greater than PC.

/u/Bosses_Boss The love of PC Gaming. And to help those in need of ascending!

/u/Melvar_10 It's a sub where people who really enjoy PC gaming can come together and both joke about certain things, and talk about serious PC gaming stuff. It's a weird sub, and you can't quite say its ONE thing. We got a yin and yang type thing where its one thing, but also the opposite.

/u/zang227 It's about experiencing games as they are meant to be played, at the highest frame rates and resolutions. We believe in an open and free platform, free of console locked exclusives, capped framerates, and locked hardware. It's about the ability to choose to mod the crap out of your game until it crashes. It's about playing games how ever you want to play them.

5. Thanks a ton, everybody. is there anything else you'd like to say?

/u/Pedro19 If you're a member already, thanks for being part of our community. If you're not, come visit us. You might just be surprised about what and who you'll find yourself interacting with and end up realizing that most of what you've heard before about us is far from the truth.

Also, I just joined twitter: https://twitter.com/PedroPCMR

/u/TheAppleFreak Praise GabeN!

/u/Tizaki To everyone who's gonna follow the angry peasant bandwagon and downvote the post because "/r/PCMasterRace is a circlejerk", save yourself the negative karma and read this instead: /r/trendingsubreddits/comments/2r34x3/trending_subreddits_for_20150102_rpcmasterrace/cnc0x0c

/u/Alien_From_Europa Follow our Glorious Steam Curator! It's the only top curator that is reviewed by you, the real PC Gamer. This means that no one has been tainted by game publishers. You get an honest opinion from like-minded redditors who have actually played the game. More information about contributing to our curator can be found here: /r/pcmasterrace/comments/2sqyvj/steam_curator_recommendations_thread_1/

/u/notwitty_username I'd like to thank the community, as a whole for allowing us to reach this incredible feat of 300k subs! There is a lot more stuff to come, for sure! More awesome AMAs, giveaways and shirts! Thank you all for supporting /r/pcmasterrace.

/u/Hauberk Well we just hit 300,00 subs recently so I would like to say thank you to the community. The subreddit has become larger than we could ever imagine, and I'm glad we've had the opportunity to do some great things, AMA's, lots of money raised for charity and reddit, we got to design and sell a shirt, and of course all the giveaways we get to see daily.

/u/Bosses_Boss Check out the wiki! /r/pcmasterrace/wiki/index we've done some updating of recent for a more comprehensive guide. Check it out!

/u/Melvar_10 BOB DOLE!

/u/zang227 Praise Gabe Newell ;)

You're all awesome, especially this person in particular. I feature a lot of subreddits here on /r/SubredditOfTheDay, but y'know, it's rare for me to feature a subreddit that I actually subscribe to. I've been subbed to /r/PCMasterRace for several months and it's been a great experience. Even though my rig is underpowered comparatively and a source of shame upon my lineage, I still have a good time talking about new hardware and games, joking about Valve, and making fun of bad industry practices and lack of ethics. It's jolly, merry, and all those other words. Except "mondegreen". It's not applicable here.

This has been your brother, Xavier Mendel, signing off.