Mystic removal discussion - The good and the bad

I initially assumed SRB2, being a legacy project and continuation of Sonikku and SSNTails work, was generally regarded as being community owned. I liked that quite a bit and was sort of surprised that it was more of the Mystic show when looking into it more (ie joining forums).

So you could look at it like Mystic's period of leading the project was good and necessary and obviously tremendously shaped the game, but also, it may also be good/necessary that it's come to an end, making room for a new group of creators to take the next step of ownership. There's been so much good content in the Releases/Mods/Levels/Characters.

Here's to the next 20 years of SRB2 development. v4.0 by 2040 or bust!
 
Right, I just want to reiterate that I fully trust in the remaining staff's choices here and I do not doubt for a second that any action was taken without absolute certainty it was the best choice to do so. It is absolutely not worth keeping toxic presences around, no matter what.
 
In the interests of professionality, I'll refrain from commenting on the events leading up to the team's internal restructuring in much detail. However, I'd strongly encourage any skeptics to consider that the team would not have followed through with this series of decisions if there wasn't a massive amount of precedent to do so.
On the flipside, the fact that several team members decided to leave as a direct result of this might suggest that things are not that cut and dry.

An impression is being created here that Mystic, Rob and Prime 2.0 were "toxic presences" in the dev team and therefore had to be removed. It's impossible to comment on that without going into internals that don't belong here, but let the record state that not everyone agrees.
 
Your sarcastic quotations on "toxic" speak volumes to me of how little you understand this community and the effect they've had on it for years. You just sound like an ostrich with your head in the sand to me.

Just like FuriousFox clowning around in the CS the other day and making a surprised pikachu face when he realized they would not really be all that missed!

Ew! Gaslighting!
 
On the flipside, the fact that several team members decided to leave as a direct result of this might suggest that things are not that cut and dry.

Is there a list of the other devs that decided to step down? If it's ok to be made public, of course.

Another big thing that came to me: what about all the content from Mystic Realm? A lot of it crossed into vanilla SRB2 over the years, will this still be a thing that can happen? Will ATZ and AGZ remain in the game in subsequent versions?

Additionally, I would highly oppose removing their names in the credits, as someone suggested. That seems a bit too in tune with the current toxic cancel culture, taking away credit from people who worked all their lives on something just because they hurt the feelings of certain groups. Totally unethical.
 
Additionally, I would highly oppose removing their names in the credits, as someone suggested. That seems a bit too in tune with the current toxic cancel culture, taking away credit from people who worked all their lives on something just because they hurt the feelings of certain groups. Totally unethical.
"Hurt the feelings" is a gross downplaying of the effect saying shitty things really has on other people. I can't take this paragraph in good faith if you believe that what leads people to cry out against bigotry and poor treatment of others is trivial emotions and not outside-induced self-loathing, continually validated fears, disenfranchisement, and permanent discomfort as a result of said treatment.

Phrasing it as "certain groups" also obfuscates that those groups are comprised of marginalized people who are trivialized for their identities constantly. What are you advocating for here? I don't even have a firm opinion on removing Mystic and Rob's names from the game, I just want to know why this is your justification for not doing so.
 
"Hurt the feelings" is a gross downplaying of the effect saying shitty things really has on other people. I can't take this paragraph in good faith if you believe that what leads people to cry out against bigotry and poor treatment of others is trivial emotions and not outside-induced self-loathing, continually validated fears, disenfranchisement, and permanent discomfort as a result of said treatment.

Phrasing it as "certain groups" also obfuscates that those groups are comprised of marginalized people who are trivialized for their identities constantly. What are you advocating for here? I don't even have a firm opinion on removing Mystic and Rob's names from the game, I just want to know why this is your justification for not doing so.

I agree, the way I worded it sounds like I'm saying some genuine issues are not important and people should just "man up". I'm sorry, that's not what I was implying. What I wanted to emphasize is that yes while it is disgraceful for someone to say certain things, if those things have no direct connection to a peoduct they worked on then there is no reason to take their credit away from it. It's got nothing to do with it. Even if you find an argument to say it does, it only leads to a downward spiral of removing/changing how the history of things went for more and more subjective matters. You can never draw the line of what's ok and what isn't, there's always going to be someone displeased, someone that goes "I have and issue with X thing, and to me it means as much as Y thing means to those other people, therefore it should be adjusted". And when it gets to that point, kinda like how it already did in some industries, it's just ridiculous.
 
Is there a list of the other devs that decided to step down? If it's ok to be made public, of course.

MascaraSnake, FuriousFox, and Digiku.

I'm not even sure how the credits thing came up. That's... not how credits work. At all. Otherwise, Microsoft would have removed Notch from the credits of Minecraft years ago...

(I mean, hypothetically you can remove someone from the credits if you also remove all their work. We even have recent precedent for that. The Eggpack character mod was reverted to an earlier version to remove all of Sapheros's contributions. That's not what the situation here is, obviously.)

Also, @devs/former devs: you guys should probably either be more transparent or say nothing at all. This sort of... vague sniping at each other in public forum posts without saying anything of substance is the worst of both worlds.
 
Otherwise, Microsoft would have removed Notch from the credits of Minecraft years ago...

They did though! At least to some degree, I remember there was news about it last year, that's one of the big examples I was thinking about.

Also, thanks for the list. I thought MascaraSnake was retired already, huh.
 
Mazmazz (formerly Digiku) left as a result of finishing the web port, not because of the subject at hand, to be clear.
 
I've been following srb2 since the first version of 2.0 and there's something that I noticed during these years. I don't know how to put this on words but there's alot of talented people on this community that can offer help and make a lot of stuff. The bans that happened are sad for sure... But from what I know is that even if it happens I don't think Srb2 will just.. how do I say this... Srb2 will survive this calamity and move on and grow and give a good impression to the fans
 
Reading the discussion at hand, I don't think any of us who have joined the community in more recent years can have a firm opinion over whether the removal of these team members are justified, that is unless the details and quotes were made public (but that would open up a major can of worms that I'm sure the team would like to keep private). All we have to go by really is that the decision was not something that was done lightly.

Let the team reorganize and get the missing zones into the game, and as I mentioned earlier I do think custom content is going to get better with what is being developed now.
 
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We might remove the "producer" role, but that's only because it doesn't make much sense, especially not in the context of our current team structure. Every other credits listing will remain so long as the person's work remains in the game.

On the flipside, the fact that several team members decided to leave as a direct result of this might suggest that things are not that cut and dry.

An impression is being created here that Mystic, Rob and Prime 2.0 were "toxic presences" in the dev team and therefore had to be removed. It's impossible to comment on that without going into internals that don't belong here, but let the record state that not everyone agrees.

My only point is that there were enough issues on the table that it lead the majority of the team to be in favor of removing them, even if it wasn't 100% unanimous. Agree to disagree on the specifics.
 
So I'm going to drop my hot take & perspective: without any context as to what happened in the dev team, this is still the best thing to happen to the community in years.


- I started off as a dumb kid on the forum who could've gotten banned if I was even just a tad bit more frequent.

- Came back much later, and I started getting on the train and perpetuating the toxic mindset that making fun of "bad art" is okay.

- Took a break shortly after, and realized that "No, just because this community acts like it's okay, doesn't mean it is."

- Made SUGOI as an attempt to change community mindsets. Not to toot my own horn, I'd say it worked. I remember being told in #srb2fun that it'd never work, that community projects are doomed to fail. After it came out, I noticed people being far more mindful of what they say, and I saw more people being told off if they were being toxic.

- Joined the dev team, left about half a year later. Didn't give a reason at the time, because I wasn't ready to argue it, as well as, even from my limited time there, there was a consistent trend of "if you leave dev, we will make fun of you for it amongst ourselves". But my experience with the lead positions on the team made me realize how it's not truly a few bad eggs in the community, but Mystic primarily who made this behavior OK. (In retrospect, that was flawed logic; if it was just a few bad eggs, it still would've been their fault as they had the power to remove influences like that.) I still hold the others accountable since they acted as his "yes men", there wasn't really any way to tell him his behavior was terrible when he had multiple people backing him up. I didn't want to fight it, so I simply left quietly.

- I lost all of my enthusiasm for the game, but I still loved the modding scene, so I wanted to make sure it could grow again, instead of them doing things like cancelling OLDCs or stupidly strict submissions. I wanted to help run community events, run a new recurring contest, make news posts to highlight cool addons, etc. I felt held back because after I would make plans, my posts for requests, confirmation, for even just opinions would get very little attention, even after multiple pokes at people for them to check it out. I wasn't willing to just do them without any go ahead and risk getting anger thrown my way for overstepping boundaries. So in the end I just lost the passion for that as well and gave up.



Even without grasping the full extent of what happened, I've still witnessed the damage they've caused over nearly a decade. So frankly hearing the announcement made me celebrate; I only welcome the staffing changes with open arms. I've lost a lot of my drive for this community and have since moved on, but I'm happy that the future is in better hands.
 
Mazmazz (formerly Digiku) left as a result of finishing the web port, not because of the subject at hand, to be clear.

Oh, my mistake, sorry.

They did though! At least to some degree, I remember there was news about it last year, that's one of the big examples I was thinking about.

They didn't, no. Microsoft has done everything they can to distance themselves from Notch—several lightyears-worth of distance—but he's still there in the credits, despite how much they clearly loathe him being there.

There's a popular tweet about "who created Minecraft". The dev team responded by adding it as one of the random messages on the title screen when you boot up the game. I love it.

44etCC0.png
 
I think the short of the matter is that developers should be... developing. If you're not creating content, then you're not living up to the description. Just being a decision maker without also working down in the trenches along side your companions makes it very difficult to build comraderie. It's not just a club where you can hang out. That's what board/discord/wiki mods/admins are for. People generally don't need blanket permissions.
 
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