First, responding to Doe's comment in a spoiler because it kind of gets away from the topic at hand, but since it was said here I want to respond:
And please don't try to insinuate malintent from anything I do. I used lots of slopes because it was fun, and I avoided disabling physics everywhere because consistency is good game design. In fact, if I have any negative things to say about slopes, it's that the dev team (and not particularly Mystic!) forced them to release in a patch before I could polish the physics, and that people are going too far with them at the expense of some of SRB2's identity. But that's not something for me to whine about in this topic.
With that out of the way, I want to talk a bit more about my opinions of Mystic, and of the whole admin team in fact. First, lemme say that the people who have been directly hurt by the guy have no need to read what I'm about to write; it'll probably be upsetting and won't apply to you anyway, because y'all have every right to be upset about the guy and talk about how he's mistreated folks. This is directed more toward the people who are coming in just to repeat the "he always rubbed me the wrong way" line of thinking, as well as the people coming in to argue against that group. I'll put this under another spoiler so that the first group can skip over it.
(And to be clear, this will be largely about his general community behavior. There's no defense for encouraging NSFW channels in this community and I will not make any attempt to defend that.)
I dunno, it's hard to reconcile my feelings on the matter. I'm still hurt over what happened to me, but I wrote all that out because I don't feel like just talking about one event is a fair representation of my perspective. I was friends with these folks, at least until that happened. That means I was shielded from some of their worst behavior, and that a lot of their less-egregious behavior was glorified to me. I've been having a hard time reconciling the guy I talked and played PTCG with all the time, and all of the terrible things he did to other people even before me. Shit's complicated.
Anyway, one other small remark I want to make:
The access to the subforum obviously complicates matters, but I think the bolded descriptor kind of buries the lede that srb2nsfw was never actually restricted from access to anyone, and was even mentioned in the main channel quite frequently. Which makes it way worse, actually (minors had unfettered access to it!!)
So to be fair on the slope takes, that post was 15 years old, and it wasn't entirely unreasonable to be short-tempered about slopes back then. Now that slopes do exist, it's easy to look at people insisting they wouldn't and take them out of context to sound unreasonable. But at the time, nobody had the knowledge or the motivation to make them happen, while people in the community were constantly demanding to add them. Back when SSN was the only coder and knew the bare basics, being stern and saying they wouldn't happen was the only approach to take. I don't hold those statements against Mystic at all. Context is important.I know back then slopes were an impossibility, and hindsight is 20/20, but I always felt that was an extremely caustic take, considering how modifiable the DOOM engine is. It would only be a matter of time before some madlad coder came in with a big idea for SRB2, and made the impossible possible.[...]
This also puts a lot into perspective, like how fickle's maps for SRB2Kart all feature extensive sloping, every single one of them with physics involved even if it wouldn't necessarily be super useful.
And please don't try to insinuate malintent from anything I do. I used lots of slopes because it was fun, and I avoided disabling physics everywhere because consistency is good game design. In fact, if I have any negative things to say about slopes, it's that the dev team (and not particularly Mystic!) forced them to release in a patch before I could polish the physics, and that people are going too far with them at the expense of some of SRB2's identity. But that's not something for me to whine about in this topic.
With that out of the way, I want to talk a bit more about my opinions of Mystic, and of the whole admin team in fact. First, lemme say that the people who have been directly hurt by the guy have no need to read what I'm about to write; it'll probably be upsetting and won't apply to you anyway, because y'all have every right to be upset about the guy and talk about how he's mistreated folks. This is directed more toward the people who are coming in just to repeat the "he always rubbed me the wrong way" line of thinking, as well as the people coming in to argue against that group. I'll put this under another spoiler so that the first group can skip over it.
(And to be clear, this will be largely about his general community behavior. There's no defense for encouraging NSFW channels in this community and I will not make any attempt to defend that.)
I can kind of see where the "cancel culture" claims are coming from, ill-informed as they are. I don't think Mystic is an inherently bad person. Instead, I think he acts as a cautionary tale of what power that goes unchecked for too long does to someone. Let me explain.
He had been the head of the community since at least 2003, possibly earlier. That would've pinned him at 18 at the time. I've been a moderator in other communities at that age, and even with other wiser people above me to keep me in check, I was still insufferable as a result. People in that age group typically just don't have the life experience needed to run a good community, and without anyone to fully keep him in check (since SSN wasn't active in the community), a lot of terrible habits from that period of life were reinforced instead of being corrected.
To make matters worse, the internet of the early-to-mid 2000s was a lot more toxic as a whole than the internet of today. Harassing people off of the internet because you didn't like them was practically encouraged by everyone who was active enough to do anything about it, and that ended up feeding into the horrible feedback loop that encouraged the kind of things Mystic did even harder. Ultimately, by the time the internet got better, he had already had enough reinforcement of his attitude that it couldn't be fixed while he was still in power.
From my experience with the guy, he seemed to get better at running the community, in some small ways, up through the late srb2fun days. (There were absolutely problems that were never addressed, but in particular he tried to cut down on some of the forum peanut-gallery behavior every now and then.)
I think what happened was the official Discord opening exposed the entire IRC crowd to a bunch of people who had already been hurt by his past actions beyond forgiveness, and at that point... I dunno, he probably just stopped caring about running the community? I can kind of see why, at least; no point trying to make things better for people who are gonna hate you anyway. His last mistake at that point was continuing to stick around and voice his disapproval, instead of just leaving and moving on to other things. Which I guess is explained by him having nothing going in his life aside from bullying kids.
I don't want to excuse what he did, by any means. Having shitty behaviors reinforced by shitty circumstances doesn't absolve anyone from having to address their problems and deal with the consequences. My point is just that I think he's capable of changing. (Around places far away from here.) And considering anywhere he goes, he'll have no authority or power, I can see a lot of his behaviors changing quickly.
Why talk this much about him, then? Because I think it's important to take away some lessons about accountability from the whole situation. Don't put absolute power in the hands of one person, or even in a single group of close friends. That's how we get into these kinds of problems with communities.
To be honest, one of the reasons I'm still staying away from this community is because people seem to act like all of the problems are solved now that Mystic is gone. The new leadership still needs to focus on accountability, not just from themselves, but from the community as a whole. I'm concerned that, considering how all of the new leadership comes from the same groups of friends, they might end up only listening to each other on problems, and the community won't solve the biggest problem it used to have, where getting on the admins' good side shielded you from consequences while getting on their bad side earned you poor treatment.
He had been the head of the community since at least 2003, possibly earlier. That would've pinned him at 18 at the time. I've been a moderator in other communities at that age, and even with other wiser people above me to keep me in check, I was still insufferable as a result. People in that age group typically just don't have the life experience needed to run a good community, and without anyone to fully keep him in check (since SSN wasn't active in the community), a lot of terrible habits from that period of life were reinforced instead of being corrected.
To make matters worse, the internet of the early-to-mid 2000s was a lot more toxic as a whole than the internet of today. Harassing people off of the internet because you didn't like them was practically encouraged by everyone who was active enough to do anything about it, and that ended up feeding into the horrible feedback loop that encouraged the kind of things Mystic did even harder. Ultimately, by the time the internet got better, he had already had enough reinforcement of his attitude that it couldn't be fixed while he was still in power.
From my experience with the guy, he seemed to get better at running the community, in some small ways, up through the late srb2fun days. (There were absolutely problems that were never addressed, but in particular he tried to cut down on some of the forum peanut-gallery behavior every now and then.)
I think what happened was the official Discord opening exposed the entire IRC crowd to a bunch of people who had already been hurt by his past actions beyond forgiveness, and at that point... I dunno, he probably just stopped caring about running the community? I can kind of see why, at least; no point trying to make things better for people who are gonna hate you anyway. His last mistake at that point was continuing to stick around and voice his disapproval, instead of just leaving and moving on to other things. Which I guess is explained by him having nothing going in his life aside from bullying kids.
I don't want to excuse what he did, by any means. Having shitty behaviors reinforced by shitty circumstances doesn't absolve anyone from having to address their problems and deal with the consequences. My point is just that I think he's capable of changing. (Around places far away from here.) And considering anywhere he goes, he'll have no authority or power, I can see a lot of his behaviors changing quickly.
Why talk this much about him, then? Because I think it's important to take away some lessons about accountability from the whole situation. Don't put absolute power in the hands of one person, or even in a single group of close friends. That's how we get into these kinds of problems with communities.
To be honest, one of the reasons I'm still staying away from this community is because people seem to act like all of the problems are solved now that Mystic is gone. The new leadership still needs to focus on accountability, not just from themselves, but from the community as a whole. I'm concerned that, considering how all of the new leadership comes from the same groups of friends, they might end up only listening to each other on problems, and the community won't solve the biggest problem it used to have, where getting on the admins' good side shielded you from consequences while getting on their bad side earned you poor treatment.
I dunno, it's hard to reconcile my feelings on the matter. I'm still hurt over what happened to me, but I wrote all that out because I don't feel like just talking about one event is a fair representation of my perspective. I was friends with these folks, at least until that happened. That means I was shielded from some of their worst behavior, and that a lot of their less-egregious behavior was glorified to me. I've been having a hard time reconciling the guy I talked and played PTCG with all the time, and all of the terrible things he did to other people even before me. Shit's complicated.
Anyway, one other small remark I want to make:
(emphasis mine)Yes, he did. I was a minor at the time and had access to both that subforum and the hidden NSFW IRC channel.
The access to the subforum obviously complicates matters, but I think the bolded descriptor kind of buries the lede that srb2nsfw was never actually restricted from access to anyone, and was even mentioned in the main channel quite frequently. Which makes it way worse, actually (minors had unfettered access to it!!)
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