To this day the friendliest, nicest game community I was ever in was the Football Manager Live community. For those who don't remember, this was the slightly more MMO-style online version of Football Manager. You'd expect it to be kind of awful given how a lot of sports communities are, but it was genuinely the nicest group of folks I ever played games with. The individual servers were fairly small which I think helped. Even as a woman playing the game, which is its own landmine in sports games, they were incredibly welcoming and friendly. I miss that game all the time.
I think my favorite game loop is the type that shows up in Monster Rancher, the sort of "breed-->raise-->fight-->raise-->fight-->...-->retire and start again". Building up lineages by combining your old monsters to create new baby monsters, slowly seeing your babies start out with better and better abilities. Weirdly enough this is what drew me to horse racing sims like Winning Post or Champion Jockey, because they essentially follow the same loop as Monster Rancher but replace monsters with horses and battles with racing. Seeing as how Winning Post and Monster Rancher are now both Koei Tecmo properties I'd love to see a new Monster Rancher with the ridiculous simulation depth of recent Winning Post games, but I doubt we'll ever see that.
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