Kiwi Farms

Volound has only been mentioned a few times here, and that honestly isn’t surprising. On the surface, he isn’t really that exceptional. He used to make multi-part let’s plays of Shogun 2 and various other TW titles. Within the last year, he started doing long-form videos on his problems with modern TW titles. He actually is a decent player, so his opinions aren’t entirely uninformed. Aside from the videos being long, and occasionally nitpicky at times, they aren’t really bad. He is generally soft spoken, and backs his claims with actual gameplay footage.

This is where the story should end.
However, Volound suffers from a massively inflated ego. He is completely incapable of taking any kind of criticism, however minor it may be, and frequently spergs out at his audience.

I think his channel’s description puts this into perspective pretty well:

I'm a trailblazing gameplay purist that's not happy unless I'm breaking new ground - deep-diving untapped possibility spaces. I did perfect full runs (longplays) of games and built my reputation for being uniquely hardcore with those. I then began focusing entirely on making emergence-discovering skillshows with Dishonored and largely spawned the immersive sim skiller movement. I'm currently back to mastering complex strategy games like Total War and pushing their systems to the limit. I like facing the greatest possible challenges, head-on. I'm outcome-oriented and I play to get results. I'm obsessed with efficiency. I'm a minmaxing perfectionist. I'm a high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary; A street-wise smart bomb; A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties; I tell power lies; I take power naps and I run victory laps. Oh, and subscribe to my second channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/VoloundExpounds --- FAQ: http://bit.ly/1cCKO4P

Click to expand...

That link at the end is an FAQ page that he made, it’s lengthy: https://archive.md/Dq6O7



To get an idea of how he generally handles criticism, here are a few choice examples:
He also blocks people:
He is incapable of just ignoring people. The comment chains can get long…

The Reddit Drama​

His behavior online has been pretty consistent over the years, and has resulted in real world consequences. In September of 2020, CA officially severed ties with him, removing him from their content creator program, citing “Harassment” as their reason. As explained in this video here:
Naturally, Volound blames this on CA wanting to “censor him”, and also on the TW fanbase for “harassing him”. He claims that it’s impossible to “not get confrontational with an angry fanbase”. He also implies that LegendOfTotalWar, a much more popular TW YouTuber, is a racist and a nazi. The two apparently later made up, and Volound retracted his racism accusation.

Archives to the original reddit posts about him:
https://archive.md/8faLQ
https://archive.md/ESpbH


His pinned comment:


Volound also made another, much longer video 4 months later talking about the same stuff:
Again, he blames the trolls and “angry Warhammer fanboys” for a lot of his problems.
He also seems to think that his tiny, unknown subreddit (r/volound) had some kind of influence over the decisions made by the mods on the larger r/totalwar. Truth is, since that original 10k post, the mods pretty much lock/delete anything and everything about him, including posts that “smear” him. He also believes that the mods have it out for him, which is odd given that they removed the so-called “smear post”.

For context, this is a response from an r/totalwar mod:

He also goes after a few other TW YouTubers in this video.
At 3:37, there is a clip of Legend talking about Volound on stream. This is what provoked Volound's racism accusation.

The Remaster Spergfest​

The Reddit drama was pretty much over about 4 months ago, and is old news at this point. Volound went mostly quiet as far as TW drama is concerned. He went back to making long form videos and lets plays after this. Of course, his behavior toward his own community did not change even slightly.

This has culminated recently in his reaction to the ‘new’ total war game, Total War: Rome Remastered. Volound played it for about 2 hours, and decided it was a “complete trainwreck”. Granted, the game actually did release with bugs, in true CA fashion. The UI changes were also generally panned. These were not his main problems with the game though, his major gripe was that he couldn’t change some of the controls. He apparently refunded the game because of this. He released a community post not too long after, which was ratio’d pretty hard:
Notice how the voting options are “Yes, Yes, and Yes”.
His community seemed to generally disagree with that it was an unplayable wreck, as per a third poll that he did:


His response to criticism from his community is predictable. These are from the first poll. They are long and autistic:

After this, he made a follow up poll. Again, he didn’t give an option for people who liked the game.

Much like the last one, he makes an ass of himself:

After that, he made the aforementioned third poll, and two other community posts.
One going after MELKOR, another TW YouTuber:

Surprisingly enough, MELKOR actually responded, and Volound was only slightly pissy with him:

Volound released his final community post about Remaster about a week ago. He didn't really sperg at his audience, but it was still generally smug:

I have no doubt we will see more sperging from his YouTube channel in the months to come. He will respond to pretty much anyone, and takes criticism and trolling as "coordinated attacks" against him.

Twitter​

Aside from his YouTube, he also has a Twitter. He posts pretty frequently and gets next to no responses on anything. Most of it is just him ruminating about random things, it’s pretty boring, but there are a few examples of him being him:

As mentioned in the title, Volound is a vegan, https://archive.md/CGObm
He doesn’t like the US very much, https://archive.md/jjrQa
He’s also not a fan of vegetarians, https://archive.md/cr1Di
His Ancestry.com results, https://archive.md/MvX9A
More veganism, https://archive.md/VBcbt
His opinion on “content creators” and “influencers”, https://archive.md/4d4T5

That last image is obscenely long:

Volound also has a Facebook. Here he posts even longer walls of text. There honestly isn’t anything particularly interesting. There are a handful of posts about veganism, but not much beyond that. Like his twitter, he gets next to no responses on any of his posts.

Discord​

Volound’s Discord is about what you would expect. Here, he circlejerks with his “cultists” (his words, not mine). His personality on Discord is exactly the same as his personality on YouTube. I apologize in advance for screencapping my phone for these. Also, the ones without proper timestamps were taken early in May:

Misc​

As shown above, Volound is a vegan. Or as he puts it, “waging war on carnism”. Below is an extremely long and extremely autistic “debate” that he had with another YouTuber. I’m not kidding, it is fucking long; so long that Firefox couldn’t take a proper screenshot. Read at your own risk:
This one is significantly shorter if you (understandably) don't want to read the long one:


Volound is also an amateur slinger. He doesn’t look half bad at it either. He apparently practices pretty consistently with a variety of different slings.

The Dox​

Finally, here are the dox:

Name: Conor Sweeney
Age: 29-30 (born 1991)
Location: Somewhere around Glasgow

Here is a picture of him:
And his DNA results:


Links:
Volound https://www.youtube.com/user/volound
VoloundExpounds https://www.youtube.com/user/VoloundExpounds
VoloundShorts https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzd6QVt5a_wiArryRFsI9rQ
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Volound
Twitter https://twitter.com/Volound
Linktree https://linktr.ee/Volound
Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AHQ6AOXKVFYSBHORQS3VJY5DKG5Q?ref=exp_prof_v
Discord https://discord.gg/cjWJfgM
Google Docs FAQ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rwFvGdP3mCx4xPaud1u94wLx1A6X9MoKBOtok-wl7Sc/edit