The medieval city builder's community fiercely protects its finest meme.
Everyone loves a hero—but a hero can be hard to find in a medieval city builder where randomly generated citizens mostly just perform menial tasks like chopping firewood and lugging corpses around all day. In Manor Lords, however, one character quickly managed to gain prominence and became something of a mascot, if not an outright legend.
You probably already know who I'm talking about: Cuntz.
He might be a farmer or a gravedigger or a blacksmith, but chances are somewhere in your village you've got a guy (or even an ox) named Cuntz, simply because it's one of the names randomly assigned in the city builder. Cuntz isn't just a joke, either: according to developer Grzegorz Styczeń, all Manor Lords' names are plucked from a 14th century census, so Cuntz is historically accurate. Players, not surprisingly, quickly and happily latched onto the meme and began posting about Cuntz on social media, the subreddit, and the official Discord. A lot. Like, tons.
But is too much Cuntz a bad thing? Some members of the community have already grown tired of the sheer amount of Cuntz references, since a poll posted to the official Discord by the developer asked if the name should be replaced with a less disruptive name like Konrad.
The anti-Cuntz movement was defeated, however, and quite soundly. With over 8,000 votes, 85% of players chose to keep Cuntz in the game, with only 15% wanting the name removed.
I'm happy with the result—my Cuntz is a gravedigger, and I'd hate to see him be metaphorically buried along with all the other corpses—though I do see where the 15% is coming from. Jokes have a relatively short shelf life and should be retired after a while, and gamers have the tendency to take something funny and beat it so deeply into the ground it reaches the Earth's core. Remember Portal's whole "the cake is a lie" thing, and how that was amusing for a while, but then gamers repeated it for so long that it just got tiresome and now if someone said it to you in earnest you would reflexively punch them in the teeth?
In other medieval news, a more recent poll in the Manor Lords Discord isn't quite as amusing as the Cuntz dispute but could prove useful. Players are voting on how to store crops like barley and flax, and prefer a new storage space (like a barn) as opposed to keeping it in an existing granary or generic storehouse. The new barn option is the most popular choice by far, so look for that in an upcoming patch. And if you need to assign someone to keep your flax in order, make it Cuntz.
