Mystic removal discussion - The good and the bad

[toaster]

What new content did Mystic make for 2.2?

Mystic came up with the base concepts for the tutorial's implementation, the "directionchar" character angle feature, and the autobrake, although all of these required implementation work from other people to take them from ideas to reality.

That's not to say that I'm unhappy he's gone. Far from it; I actively celebrated when I heard the news. But it's important not to let minor issues like how much he contributed to get in the way of the facts of his odious approach to community management, bigotry, and controlling nature. You can be the most profilic developer of the lot, but being impossible to work with will catch up with you eventually.

 

[TehRealSalt]

What toaster said. Really doesn't matter what work they make -- you can have the most active participant be horrible to work with and it doesn't change the fact they were horrible to work with

 

[Monster Iestyn]

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!

I for one will always remember FuriousFox as the host of the OLDC (at least when I first joined this community). Even if he didn't really do much anymore by this point, I don't think it's fair to say nobody will miss him.

 

[PrismaticAngel]

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

What exactly do you mean by "bad art"? Stuff like Eggmanway5 that's universally ridiculed around here, or things made by the more newer members who won't be as proficient with creating levels/characters/etc.?

 

[softchassis]

- 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.

This is simply awful to hear and changes my perspective on Mystic a lot. I always perceived him as simply having a steadfast hold on his decisions and people agreeing with him for that reason alone--I had no idea the truth was that he was just an asshole and that he maintained his hold on things through coercive bullying. I'm sorry. I apologize for thinking as highly of him as I did and if my comments served to minimize anything anyone here has gone through, you included.

For what it's worth, I also think SUGOI represented a huge turning point in the SRB2 community. While new mod submissions didn't start rolling in right away, it absolutely fostered a new and more welcoming MB where mods were concerned. A lot more experimental levels and OCs and all sorts of new things eventually came in with a wealth of welcoming comments and it's continued to this day, I think that's something you absolutely should toot your own horn about.

 

[Goldenhog]

Having a hard time taking the criticism of Mystic and the others' "toxic" gossiping seriously with all of this thread's apparently hella non-toxic gossip about Mystic and the others. This shit is one of the reasons why I'll never touch the SRB2 Discord.

I won't pretend to know exactly what went down, but the loss of a good dev with a strong vision for the game is still the loss of a good dev with a strong vision for the game, regardless if he told another dev that they're a meanie poopoohead at one point in time. Note that I'm not for the things that the blog post says he did either (conspiracy fingerpointing is the sort of thing that snowballs fast and I'd have zero trouble if he had been removed for that alone), but y'all are making Mystic up to be some sort of Great Evil that was holding SRB2 back.

As for the game itself, I don't share the OP's concerns about its quality taking a dive in the future. We know for a fact that there are plenty of talented people in STJr still. Plus the game's moddability and open source nature makes it so that it can never be truly "ruined" - just mod in Chaos mode and Ice Hockey Zone if you miss them so much! With Mystic gone, the devs might decide to get rid of the thok after all - big whoop, it'd be trivial to recreate in Lua! With no Rob around, the devs might decide to replace the NiGHTS Special Stages - no problem, just let them do it since those are bad anyway! Things will be different to be sure but the game will make it out just fine, methinks.

 

[Unknownlight]

With no Rob around, the devs might decide to replace the NiGHTS Special Stages - no problem, just let them do it since those are bad anyway!

the nights stages are incredible what are you talking about

 

[VelocitOni]

I'll probably regret being this blunt about it, but as someone pretty prominent on Kart Krew which has been developed next to vanilla for TEN YEARS, with about 85% dev crossover between the two games, I've heard more than enough about those three for literally the past decade from pretty much all the contributing developers.

Mystic's an incredibly toxic individual not just on the outside to anyone who actually interacted with him, but inside too. Unlike Rob who at least gave us special stages (which I never enjoyed the mode for, myself), he doesn't contribute anything important besides legacy content that shows it's date in frustratingly bad design and literally stifles new work while crushing any motive to work. The ignorance of this thread itself is astounding, no one actually knows how pissed people were behind the scenes for so long and the idea that those three especially being finally nowhere near this game is a "bad" thing somehow is also astounding.

It couldn't be any further from the truth, finally people can have some actual creative freedom to produce content. There's a reason releases got longer and longer and longer to come out with bigger stretches of silence and no productivity. The other two's issue was being his primary yes-men and never holding him accountable in the moment, especially for that shit that happened in the Official Discord lately.

For as much rage as I've heard, even from genuinely fresh vanilla devs, the fact that this only happened now is astounding. I'm surprised it took this long to erupt, but no I'm sure the game is only going to get better. The biggest contributors to 2.2 either left or stopped contributing altogether because of that hot mess and got ridiculed for it behind their backs as being "dramatic".

 

[MascaraSnake]

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.

I put "toxic presences" in quotation marks because it was a verbatim quote from softchassis' post. It was not intended to be sarcastic.

Ew! Gaslighting!

Gaslighting means "manipulating people into questioning their own perception of reality". It's a really fucked up thing to do. Are you sure that's something you want to accuse FF and me of? I'm not out here trying to convince anyone that their interpretation of what happened is wrong. All I'm doing is stating that I disagree with some of the actions that were taken and the reasons for taking them.

 

[Trolo Bobo]

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.

You're the person here that genuinely makes the most sense and you convinced me fully that what happened is for the better. Seriously. I was wondering at a point where you vanished, I always thought you're a strong content creator and I assumed you were a great dev too, couldn't see a reason for you leaving, same with toaster. But now I understand that the stubbornness and toxicity of these individuals is what probably caused such long times between versions, and why some people lost interest. I feel kinda dumb for even making this thread now, but maybe many others will be educated through it. Thank you for everything, you and everyone else who put up with it.

I hope this will lead to more varied and less constrained content, quicker releases, and a revival for interest in the game (though please don't remove the nights stages, ATZ or AGZ, plisss)

 

[sluggard]

I probably wouldn't have noticed their absence if it weren't for this thread, not to be mean or disrespectful to their contributions to the game, shame that things had to turn out the way they did but I don't think there's much to be gained from dwelling too much on it, here's hoping for even better future releases and even stronger community.

 

[Sryder]

I'm not worried about the future of the game. If I'm not wrong, the dev team still contains people who are brilliant at visual and gameplay-related level design, sprite art, textures, and coding (and probably other areas I forgot to mention too). I also fully trust that they can come together to make decisions that are good for the game overall, even if not everyone in the community agrees with them.

I'm hoping an environment based more on enthusiasm and creativity can be encouraged for the entire community now, instead of one of sticking to the status quo forever.

 

[Goldenhog]

The ignorance of this thread itself is astounding, no one actually knows how pissed people were behind the scenes for so long and the idea that those three especially being finally nowhere near this game is a "bad" thing somehow is also astounding.

It's scarcely the fault of the forumgoers that the devs are holding back the details of the situation. They're free to do so, obviously, since they're much closer to the topic than the vast majority of this community, but it is something to consider if you want to talk about people not knowing things.

the nights stages are incredible what are you talking about

Well, I don't like 'em. It's just a small joke, though, I highly doubt the devs are actually going to remove them. If you do enjoy them, more power to you! I too wish I didn't have to groan every time I pick up a token by accident.

 

[Unknownlight]

Well, I don't like 'em. It's just a small joke, though, I highly doubt the devs are actually going to remove them. If you do enjoy them, more power to you! I too wish I didn't have to groan every time I pick up a token by accident.

I'm joking around too. Assuming there's no crazy merge conflicts, I can see in the git feed that 2.2.5 will let you skip special stages by returning to the title screen and reloading your save file. So good news?

 

[Jonster]

I'm joking around too. Assuming there's no crazy merge conflicts, I can see in the git feed that 2.2.5 will let you skip special stages by returning to the title screen and reloading your save file. So good news?

Where and what is that "git feed" and how do you know it's true?

 

[Unknownlight]

Where and what is that "git feed" and how do you know it's true?

Patches are developed on the public git repo, so you can see what's up and/or contribute if you want to (and can understand what you're looking at). 2.3's development is obviously private. This is the specific change I was referring to.

 

[clairebun]

It's scarcely the fault of the forumgoers that the devs are holding back the details of the situation. They're free to do so, obviously, since they're much closer to the topic than the vast majority of this community, but it is something to consider if you want to talk about people not knowing things.

This stuff doesn't get talked about in public that often, usually for the simple reason that it's what one could consider "dirty laundry". In the case of the announcement, it was important for us to be transparent about the direction of the game and community while still respecting the privacy of everyone involved; unfortunately it's too easy for some of this stuff to get miscontextualized, hence the amount of detail it went into. Beyond that, we really don't want to encourage people to throw shade at Mystic or anyone else; we'd just as well move past all this so we can focus on the next major update.

 

[Jonster]

Patches are developed on the public git repo, so you can see what's up and/or contribute if you want to (and can understand what you're looking at). 2.3's development is obviously private. This is the specific change I was referring to.

Oh ok, thanks for the link.

 

[JEV3]

I won't pretend to know exactly what went down, but the loss of a good dev with a strong vision for the game is still the loss of a good dev with a strong vision for the game, regardless if he told another dev that they're a meanie poopoohead at one point in time. Note that I'm not for the things that the blog post says he did either (conspiracy fingerpointing is the sort of thing that snowballs fast and I'd have zero trouble if he had been removed for that alone), but y'all are making Mystic up to be some sort of Great Evil that was holding SRB2 back.

Agreed. This is a tragic chain of events and all this "good riddance" talk makes it even more sad.

I used to be a dev for SRB2 until about nine years ago when I stopped participating actively on the team to refocus on college work. I never had any personal problems with anyone on the team and respected everyone I worked with, even those who my personality may have conflicted with.

To be very clear, I won't excuse what Mystic and Rob did. But a month ago I thought they'd accepted responsibility for it and moved on, so why are we looking for more excuses to hate them? Someone called Mystic a bigot, did he actually do or say anything racist, sexist, or prejudiced? Mystic was hardheaded and tactless but he was not maliciously offensive in my experience... neither Mystic nor Rob were a toxic presence to the team when I was around. The fact that another older developer (again, who has never been offensive as long as I've known him) has now been kicked out a month later and the general tone in this thread really makes me wonder if this is still about Mystic and Rob's actions or if at this point it has more to do with the devs' longstanding personal problems against some among their own ranks.

I have fond memories of SRB2. I may not know some of the newer users as well, but this was one of the places where I grew up. So this is difficult for me to watch.

 

[S.T.F]

Kinda hurts me too that one of the original devs of this game left the team.