It's no secret that during these last few months, some really stupid stuff has been going happening on this website. I see the complaints all the time, almost on a daily basis: "Posting quality has taken a downturn," "This community has changed too much," whatever. I've heard it all. Well guess what? Communities are guarenteed to change with time. That's a given. People leave, people change. It happens. It's a fact of life and we all have to deal with it. But at the end of the day, this community still has some pretty awesome people in it. People I have tons of respect for. More on that later.
A lot of you guys have been around for a while. A few months or a year or two sure can seem like a long time, huh? Well guess what? If you came from the RA2 community that I come from, you guys wouldn't have lasted a week. If you think you all bash Sparkey or LRA2 hard, you haven't seen anything. We used to run people out of town for some of the stuff I've seen on this forum these past few weeks. There's a few among you that could vouch for that, you just need to know who to ask. And my time (2006) wasn't even that long ago in retrospect, considering the 10th anniversary of the first Robot Arena game is sometime this year.
But times are different now. We're alot more lenient than we used to be, and for good reason. A game that hasn't changed in 8 years is pretty tough to keep a whole community going around for an extended period of time. Why else do you think HX was so surprised to find us when he came back a week ago? Making people leave is no way to keep a group alive. Yes, that is why Sparkey is still here. And no, that isn't likely to change.
What does need to change is the way a lot of you act. In order for any of us to keep our sanity in the end, this rubbish that goes on needs to stop right now. I'm sure most of you can tell what that is, but for those of you who can't I will spell it out for you. I'll start with the biggest issue. Everything else pretty much ties into this:
Attention Seeking. I have seen enough of this in the past year to make my head spin. Yes, I understand it's human nature; but so aren't killing for food and reproduction, and you don't see me stabbing my brother every time I get hungry or having children with every woman who walks down the street. Here's the deal; You can add to your Wiki page* or change your name and gender all you want, but it is absolutely NOT going to win you any more respect. Respect is something that you earn through your actions.
(*Look at Clickbeetle or Firebeetle's wiki pages. You could very easily argue that they are two of the greatest influences on this game of all time, and their wiki pages are a couple short sentences long. Do you see them complaining? NO. )
Baww about it all you want. Make a few more "I'm leaving," "Thinking about leaving," "Should I stay here?" threads. People's opinions of you are not going to change until you change. If you keep posting trash like that all you are doing is digging yourself a bigger hole.
Likewise, spending all of your time on GTM in the Chatterbox or Playground is not helping any. Story time? I've literally never read a page of it, and I don't plan on changing that. If you don't think that you're respected enough or whatever, you're probably spending a bit too much time in there.
Not that building skill is the only thing that determines respect, I'm a prime example of that. But honestly, be a little bit constructive once in a while. Read a few showcases. Post a few replies, learn a little bit. The fact that Jonzu's awful thread got 20 pages in one day is absolutely sickening to me. If you can't see something wrong with that, you must be blind. This is a website about a game, not a low-budget television soap opera.
And age is absolutely no excuse, either. I was 12 when I signed up on this site back in '06. I think Sage was about 13 when he signed up. The BeetleBros weren't that old, either. If you know that what you are doing is enough of a problem to make up an excuse for it, you know well enough to make the effort to work on fixing that problem.
I decided over a year ago that the only reason I still hung around here was for the community. I don't build anymore, not that I was ever anything better than average. I ran out of ideas a long time ago, and I sure as
am not capable of catching back up with modern building. For some reason I have a hard time leaving places like this that meant so much to me behind. Doing it with my own forum hurt me enough, and it would hurt me a
of a lot more than that to come back here someday and find out that this place went downhill. Now instead of coming back to nothing I'm watching it slip away in front of me. DO NOT make me regret that decision.
To sum up, the leniency we have is a good thing for reasons I already explained. If you want us to become more strict, we can do that as well. Either you people start fixing the problem or we will. The ball is in your court.
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