Okay, I'd like to take the opportunity to dive into what lead to recent events, especially the talk surrounding Mystic in particular. It has recently become clear to me that something was very wrong with the SRB2 community in the past, and it holds very much relevance to said events.
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Let's talk about bullying a moment.
"Bullying" is usually defined as something like seeking to harm, intimidate or coerce someone vulnerable, in a repeated way. For our purposes, we are mostly going to be talking about intimidation, or similar acts like repeatedly making fun of people. Since this is the internet of course, bullying here falls under the term "cyberbullying". It may have escaped some older users' notices, which is understandable in a way, but what I think has happened is that our community did a lot of this without realising this. For a long time, it was pretty normal for members of all ages to regularly make fun of unpopular members of the community, either because they did or said something stupid in public. Some of these unpopulars did not seem to be allowed to forget this.
For some of the older members, it may even have turned out that you were actively taking part in this bullying and you didn't realise it. This is shockingly easy to do. If the cool thing to do currently is to make fun of that kid with the stupid level pack or the awful recolor, why not join in? This does not mean that you are therefore cursed to be a bad person forever, but it would explain why some people have overlooked what has gone on in this community for so long. It's because they were unwittingly part of it too. I am not an exception to this, I must say.
Apart from this, there was also an epidemic of cynicism throughout the community for a long time. Mystic in particular regularly showed his contempt for the Sonic franchise (at least after Sonic Heroes, the last Sonic game he personally touched for a long time IIRC), and that affected how he managed development of SRB2 I believe. Likewise, for some time Mystic had equally been showing contempt for the stupid kids in the community (and then eventually the community itself), which likely affected how he managed the community itself. This cynicism from both areas unfortunately seems to have been rather contageous, as regularly members would be like "lol Sonic" or "lol SRB2" or "what is SRB2", "lol this person is stupid", and so on. This also seems to cross into apathy and nihilism in some way. I don't think any of this was healthy for either SRB2 itself or its community. For SRB2, it just seemed like it was being made to spite SEGA (despite that SEGA created the very franchise it is based on), while for the community, at times it seemed like they didn't care at all. If they don't care, why should I care? See, now I caught the cynicism bug!
I will note that, as far as I remember reading up, Sonic Robo Blast 1's origins, let alone 2's, were originally inspired by a 11 (12?) year old kid's desire to show his school mates how cool Sonic is, or something like that. NOT because they hated Sonic's official games so much that they had to show up SEGA or something, or show SEGA how to do it correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong here. =P
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Now, far from wanting to just use some nebulous "the community was bad" statement, I also want to make light of exactly *how* it was bad. This I want to do by listing a few examples of people who have been negatively affected by this. Call this the "Case studies" section if you like.
The most "why didn't anyone notice this sooner" example to me is what happened with Glaber. He was known back in the day, even way before my time, for making a lot of maps of the same sort of middling or low quality, particularly those he submitted to the Official Level Design Contest (abbreviated as OLDC). Eventually, I think Mystic decided that Glaber was unchangable, and even considered banning him from entering the OLDC so I recall. I believe Glaber even coined his own "syndrome" as a result of the negative view of his maps (please forgive me if I'm stepping on old sores Glaber, this was a long time ago). Similarly, there was what happened with Glaber's SRB2 Christmas and Halloween releases. Mystic got tired of them, so naturally he locked the thread for the Christmas one and told him not to continue (as Glaber has already said). Glaber was unfortunately regularly made fun of by a bunch of other members for this notoreity (and maybe for his own syndrome thing), so it was a surprise to many when slopes came around and Glaber was for once able to make maps people liked for the SUGOI series. I believe had Glaber been maybe encouraged in the right direction much earlier on rather than being told to stop, I don't think Glaber would have taken so long to succeed in mapping.
Ash... I don't know what happened here. I first encountered the guy the same year I joined the community, only for him to disappear behind a permban some months later? But from Ash's recent posts I get the impression something very awful happened. But whatever it did seemed to invoke a lot of rage, and a lot of spam insulting Mystic in particular (that was you, right?). For a long time, I took this to mean Ash was a terrible terrible person who deserved the permban. This may actually be all wrong for all I know now. I can't even remember what he was permbanned for anymore anyway! I also had my personal gripes with Ash for some harsh criticism in my first year of being in the community, but at this point they disappear into dust because they are nothing compared to what he has endured probably. So yeah, please tell us your story when you can Ash, I am interested to hear.
A cat probably is still a user to make fun of even today, especially for his hate list and general vitriol towards the SRB2 community and especially Mystic and D00D64-X (who get a special place in said list). However, his story is probably not much different from some others here. He joined way back in 2009, made a few levels for the OLDC, then started work on his level pack called "Cape Cod". Only, he would not stop talking about it. This irritated some people no doubt, and eventually he got a ban (maybe not for that particular reason, I honestly don't remember anymore). Then another ban, then another, then a permban. This was back in 2011 or so. The next we in the community heard about him was from Sky Base, where it was learned he had finally released his level pack. However, the state of the release was a complete trainwreck! Multiple copies of srb2.srb and srb2win.exe stuffed inside? Stolen levels? Some kind of level with a bear pun? This was ripe for the picking for many members on IRC at the time. Not long after, we learned A cat had also made a wiki for his level pack. Then, someone had the bright idea of vandalising this wiki. From there, I'm not sure how this true this is, but I think A cat may have been triggered to vandalise the wiki and SRB2MB for years after that in a sort of revenge. This was when the hate list and everything else eventually developed. Did we create a feline monster? In a way now I feel sorry for A cat maybe for the way he was treated in his early years. Even if I did have to personally ban many of his ban evasion accounts and so on.
Then, there was me. Yes, I too was once picked on by some members of the community very early on, though specifically not by Mystic as far as I can remember. In my first year or so of being on IRC, I gained a reputation for being clueless and ignorant on many subjects, in a complete contrast to my current "living Wiki" persona of later years, and I was frequently called "slow" as a result by one particular user by the name of Spazzo. And good riddance, he was gone long before Mystic was. One particular incident also involved another user (Rob), and the phrase "break in your headphones", which I was completely unable to understand since I have never heard the phrase in real life (I still haven't heard it spoken to this day). It was commented by him at the time he wished there was an IRC Quotes thread, implying what I said was stupid enough to qualify for it. I personally held a minor grudge against him for years and years after this, and eventually about a decade later confronted Rob about what he did then. At least in this case, he apologised for what he did at the time, and acknowledged he should have taken action against other users antagonising me back then (including Spazzo). Unfortunately this has no bearing on what may have happened between him and other users, which I was not personally aware of until recently.
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Now, I must say very loud and clear, as a moderator and later as an admin, I shamefully did nothing at all to address this bullying issue. I have even up to recently been accused even of keeping the status quo, maybe rightfully so. For the longest time I wasn't even taking Mystic's actions to be awful, some of them actually happened right in front of my nose and I didn't even take them to be bad. Maybe it was the fact that, after being the unconfident newbie initially, I gained respect and confidence and joined in some of the poking fun myself? Without realising it, I had been taking part in some of this bullying almost certainly. All of the above users in the case studies section besides me I have probably poked fun at some point, among others for all I know. Furthermore, Mystic is 10 years older than me, so he always came across as a wiser and more serious person than I ever was. Oh, naiive young me.
Initially on drafting this "essay" of sorts, I had wondered whether to step down from all authority roles as atonement for my sins, as I have obviously failed those roles in some respects, but I am having second thoughts about that. Maybe I'll stick around for years yet, who knows! :)
Lastly, I hope Mystic got something out of retirement, as much as he is now hated by many people here. Being in charge of a community that you hate (and hates you back) must take a toll on you over the years. So maybe leaving was the best thing for not just the community but for Mystic himself. Not that it excuses his behavour of course.