Introductions Thread

[Mrstone]

h2643: i am happy too, and thank ya for these words! they made me cry.
BTW: And thank you a little bit, h2643, because you got me out of the garbage.

[superandrea_04]

I'm very sorry, guys... Please, sorry, it was my mistake.. i thinked i'm very powerfull so i can manage to do all, but not really. i am very sorry, Waddle Derp, for insulting your level. I am very sorry, Pivot40Channel, Enjl, RudeGuy... It was my fault, i was just very young.. I hope my main account will be unbanned, also - sorry Joey for spamming your channel with insults, just was very mad about ban. ;(
~Eric
Edit: Also sorry TinkerBell..
Edit 2: And sorry Trace42, for begin shit

Even if you didn't insult me, i forgive you. And i think the people you insulted will forgive you, too.

[Mrstone]

Wow, thank you. And yes, i hope too.

[superandrea_04]

No problem, dude!

[TLtimelord]

I'm very sorry, guys... Please, sorry, it was my mistake.. i thinked i'm very powerfull so i can manage to do all, but not really. i am very sorry, Waddle Derp, for insulting your level. I am very sorry, Pivot40Channel, Enjl, RudeGuy... It was my fault, i was just very young.. I hope my main account will be unbanned, also - sorry Joey for spamming your channel with insults, just was very mad about ban. ;(
~Eric
Edit: Also sorry TinkerBell..
Edit 2: And sorry Trace42, for begin shit

We forgive you.

Just don't let it happen again.

[Alagirez]

Woah im just realized that eric was here :/
ok

Hi eric
bye eric

[Kingslan]

Hello SMBX forums, my name is Kingslan.
I just wanted to put a short introduction on the forums as a first post. More of a formality than a substantial post.

Here's a short little history of the history of my level designing if you're interested; most of it is irrelevant to SMBX but I need to practice my writing skills.

Spoiler: show

Back in the glorious days of dial-up internet, marks the beginning of my career in level design. I started with the game Starcraft. I would make melee maps for that and eventually go on to create scripted games and even help to create a new editor (mostly debugging). Shortly after the release of counterstrike 1.6, I began using Hammer to pump out maps for the game. I came to be the co-founder of a clan with a private server where you could play all of my maps, as well as play competitively at the time. When source came out our clan disbanded and I started mapping on that engine, although I never released anything for it. A long time passes and I don't do any design aside from maybe the occasional RPGmaker. Then Starcraft2 comes out. This is when I get very much back into level design. I ended up doing so much work with the community that I joined a map making team and we had various maps in tournaments and even one that got included in the global ladder.

You will be seeing posts and levels from me in the close future!

[Alagirez]

Welcome to the forums!

[PixelPest]

Welcome! Look forward to playing and reviewing your levels after your solid intro. Just make sure that you read the rules regarding Levels forum posts to make sure that you start off on the right foot

[D-Bong]

Hello to everyone! I'm going to present myself.

I'm D-Bong. New in the forum but not in SMBX lol. I'm from Costa Rica and my first language is Spanish (with accent haha). I'm 16 years old and I'm studying. My favorite games are, of course, Mario, Zelda and recently, Pokémon (I love the anime and the 3 initials pokémon of the Kanto region). Also I do some exercise at the gym to make up for the time I'm with the computer in SMBX haha. Also I like to play dodgeball. I describe myself as a peaceful and relax person. It's not frequent to me to be stressed. Also I'm very obsessive, when I like something I burn it at the point I get bored with it haha

I met SMBX looking for a Mario level editor in Mr. Google. My childhood was mostly Super Mario Flash and making my own levels in a notebook lol so I wanted something better. And I found this wonderful game. I love to use SMBX in my free time and in my creative moments of the day. Even, I suggested SMBX in a previous Mario forum that already doesn't exist, sadly. This is my fifth forum and the second about Mario, so I think I have some experience about them (in my first forum I was a terrible flooder haha but unintentionally). I have already read the rules to avoid any kind of problem also. It's funny because I met the game almost two years ago, and until today I registered here. The reason was the language. As there wasn't a spanish forum of SMBX, I refused to be a member because my English was so bad and I was scared of write too bad. This doesn't mean that now I'm an expert in English, but I feel more confident with what I know now and I think that posting in English is a useful way to practice the language (for example, when I need a word that I don't know in English I learn with the translate). In conclusion, if you see an error in my posts is because I speak spanish

I'm not very good making levels, but I have improved very much since I started. Now I'm using custom graphics, trying to make the level visually atractive and making it not so long. When I see the works of the expert people I get inspiration and I try to be as good as they are. I wouldn't want to upload a boring and ugly episode.
My current project is "Super Mario Adventure". I know that the name isn't very original, but is my first project so I'm a little bit anxious to finish it (actually there was a previous project named "Super Mario World 3: The Return to Dinosaur Land" but I didn't like it). My episode will be very basic. There will be ten world in which the aim will be complete the level (SMB3 exit). When it someday will be finished I will share it with you. (It seems never, I'm just in world 2 yet haha)

I hope to get along with everyone here. If I need help with something I know I can count with you Thank you for read my long and boring presentation xD.

- D-Bong

[PixelPest]

Nice intro and welcome to the forums. When you said that you're a "pacific", did you mean pacifist? Not really important, but just wondering. You sound like a very interesting person and looking forward to seeing some progress on episode!

[D-Bong]

Nice intro and welcome to the forums. When you said that you're a "pacific", did you mean pacifist? Not really important, but just wondering. You sound like a very interesting person and looking forward to seeing some progress on episode!

Thank you my bro!! And also thanks for notify the "pacific" word haha. It seems like I am the Pacific ocean lol. The word is peaceful xD.
I hope you're right

[MECHDRAGON777]

Nice intro and welcome to the forums. When you said that you're a "pacific", did you mean pacifist? Not really important, but just wondering. You sound like a very interesting person and looking forward to seeing some progress on episode!

Thank you my bro!! And also thanks for notify the "pacific" word haha. It seems like I am the Pacific ocean lol. The word is peaceful xD.
I hope you're right

Welcome to the forums, have a nice time here.

[Radiance]

I didn't introduce myself yet, so here it goes!

I am Afraid of the Heights. And I am literally afraid of the heights, and dogs. I like to do levels, graphics (making and recoloring), and others. Beside SMBX, I also play Pokemon, Mario Hacks, Geometry Dash, Cytus, Rhythm Heaven, and other games that are related to platforming, RPG, rhythm, and strategy. I hate rushing, disturbing, and cleaning . And I have a little brother here in this forum, Tios Republic, which is always busy.

Before signing up in this forum, I planned to finish my episode before making a user account, but all my plans were messed up. So after I registered my account, it helped me so much and my first episode will be posted after June. (I hope this won't be messed up again )

And also I like trolling but I will be serious on making levels because all people here are serious. (I think so)

[Circle Guy]

not that many people here are serious tbh

[World Star 9]

NOTE: Yes I am new to SMBX Forums. (Don't hurt me I am very weird)

Hello! I am World Star 9. I am so excited that I can now be on the SMBX Forums .
I am really excited about this!

(Over abuse of Emoji's)

[Zeldamaster12]

Welcome to the community! I merged your post with the Introductions thread by the way.

[Cedur]

Hi everyone here! I'm Supershroom and some people here already might recognize me by my name. I'm from the runouw.com forums, but there was a lot of bad things going on there, and I was banned for fighting against staff there. Before this makes me look worse than I am in fact, I'll tell the story.

Also first off, I'm another addition to the German force here, greetings bossedit, Spinda, Marina etc. :3

Spoiler: show

I found SM63 (Super Mario 63) and its Level Designer about three or four years ago and I fell in love with it. I played lots of portal levels before registering and I wanted to make a big name of myself in level designing business. This was my first joining of a freeforum, and in retroperspective
I have to say that I didn't have enough humility for that. I wanted to take this universe by assault, and I had to learn a lot of how to communicate properly. Bad thing is, this got me early punishments (for backseat moderating and complaining about unfair LDC scores, for example) and this brought me a bad reputation that some people, especially staff, wouldn't ever let go off - while some other people started seeing my friendly side and my strengths, and they are still my friends these days.

I both earned respect for becoming a good level designer and overall contributive member, but I also saw plenty examples of poor staffing and moderating policies. As time went on (with a few more conflicts and drama here and then), around August 2015 I also became active on the Runouw chat, and I wanted to become a staff member myself (level moderator, to be precise). There was a time when two level mods became inactive, and a replacement was called for, and I wanted that to happen. But I wasn't accepted. My past caught up with me.

This was the first time when serious arguings were stirred up, both around me not wanting to accept my hand, and talking about general grievances in terms of stagnancy of the site and poor maintenance by the staff, and it was them (mostly Raz, FrozenFire and Oranjui among a few others) reacting very toxically and aggressively. This tug-o-war was violently broken up by banning me for almost a month.

When I returned, I was welcomed back surprisingly friendly, and at first I wanted to let time pass before starting another attempt at a staff discussion, but just one week later, Star king retired, after he also made a significant influence on getting me banned by his behaviour. The same ordeal of me-vs-staff happened again, and before any further damage was done, I stepped back from the subject begrudgingly, this leaving a serious grudge against each other on both sides.

After two more months passed and after getting 3rd place in an LDC, winning a Runouw Votes Award for Best Level, and moving up to 14th place in the official SM63 Tier List, and the staff team being thinner than ever, I wanted to talk again. I approached the problems more directly, and after some extensive discussion of theirs, a compromise was found in February 2016, and I was hired on the lowest staff position, Site Representative (has the power to access staff forums and staff chat, and also can move and lock topics, but nothing more). But they set the tenor on this promotion being extraordinarily experimental. I aimed at it being more than that, though. I wanted to take my imaginations of good staffing into action.
I started efforts on better maintenance and pushed on various things, which seemed to become uncomfortable for the three I already named above, and also some others who didn't care about the site with as much passion as I have. My reputation as staff was also damaged when I've been played a godawful and villainous prank in the FoA (a lawless spamfest-subforum for veterans that I was only given access to because of becoming staff, never asked for it earlier and never will ask again), when I wanted to get official rehabilitation on the previous ban and I wanted to make them acknowledge the injustice.

Around early April, we had problems on getting an April Fools organized, and a permabanned member (PositronWildhawk) reregistered, wanted to be given a second chance. Because I already knew that there were crudities on his permaban (he's a sibling of another permabanned and very immature member (comparable to e.g. Bertie or suckhacker here) and mostly was banned because he failed to protect his account), and besides, it wasn't a malicious kind of rereg, he was asking for a way to send a former appeal via E-mail. I thought he should be given a second chance, despite he started posting in Forum Games with his new account. Others wanted him to stay banned, and I was lashed out both for my help for Pos and for my complaints about the way they treated him. These complaints eventually leveled up to general complains about their dishonorable and abrasive attitude in general, as well as their fault on being an egoistic clique and making the community stagnate, not caring about new members or even being wary towards them. I went so far that I asked to demote the two worst of them if they weren't willing to improve their behaviour.

You can guess the result. I was demoted myself. This didn't happen instantly, we kept discussing and vomiting words for a full five days. One more impartial moderator, nin10mode, was willing to give me another chance and allowed me to make an official statement. I did that and went on admitting flaws of mine as well. Yet many others - the three named above, as well as other clique friends of theirs - formed an overwelming majority that kept requesting my demotion. I was defended by Doram, an almost 40-year-old very wise and sophisticated but also sometimes rather blue-eyed and unpragmatic man, who had put big hopes in me, but he had to bow down to the pressure and carry out the demotion at the end.

The pain of this was a lot worse than the ban before. I thought I was finally on the right track and got over all of the bad days, and that everything would turn out well. But the bullish resistance of haughty, grumpy, irritable and hypocritical adolescents rendered everything void, and I also felt really sad for a couple of newer members who I became an idol for due to my passion for the community and due to my expert guidance for them.

Soon later, some veterans left the site, after they were only stickying around anyway because of their friends, not only because of games and events, and for some of them the continued drama around my person was the straw that broke the camel's back for them. Especially the resigning of nin10mode was saddening, and even more, I was blamed for it.

I didn't want to give up, I wouldn't have been happy with taking a step back. I kept fighting for a better future. For getting myself repromoted, and for getting the bad guys demoted. I was left alone. Doram had taken a week or two away from the site after the demotion, and when he returned, he was a different person. Relentless, merciless, hypocritical, cynical, blindfold, not ready to compromise. He tried trembling my voice, he didn't want to see my concerns and issues. He cast his lot with his "friends" Raz and everyone else who was responsible for my demotion, he called the demotion a "lesser of two evils", he called my goals a "horrible campaign", he didn't offer any kind of perspective for me. His worst sentence was "Another thing you have misunderstood about being staff is: It is not our job to make this place nice or happy or anything, just supporting it in the terms of general jobs of government", and "Stop trying to FORCE this world to be a better place". This attitude summed up the flaws, and what made the internal atmosphere so heated and unpleasant.

Around the same time, I heard that Raz was about to ban me out of pure spite, and only the intervention of Venexis, soon to be promoted to mod, saved my back. Ven is the light where there's only black, the one who stays calm and factual and productive even in the worst of situations. He's my biggest friend, he said that he didn't want to allow a ban if I wasn't heard out. After the demotion I kept PMing with Ven a lot, and that made people like Raz or OJ very upset, they wanted me to talk with them directly while they didn't show any willingness to discuss properly. In retroperspective it's not far to seek that they wanted a quick inducement for a ban. I was also told by them that "there would be zero chance for repromotion within a year".

Right after Doram's statement, I sent a final manifest, a final general accusation of flaws and shitty treatment, a final explanation of what was going wrong for all the time. Stating that there always was a massive split between new members and overpowering peers, stating that the staff had a very lacking attitude of taking care of the community, but almost only doing things in their common interest, as a closed clique. My message was "Get over your shadows, drop the hatred, make a peace agreement, I'm approachable. Make the injustice undone."

The worst thing is, I asked Doram for another talk, and he seemed willing for it. I sent him my words, and one hour later, the first thing I saw in the public chat was him pinging me a thousand times and eventually saying "well, this is a root point because I'm permabanning him. Shroom, for your constant spitting venom and negativity, and for lying to me and trying to manipulate me, I'm going to ban you for at least a year."

Venexis and a few others tried to step in, but they couldn't reach any more than reducing it to 3 months (until August 14th). I guess that I also was too naive to believe that I would be sufficiently protected by Ven in the worst of all cases, once everyone else was too deadset on it.

Did I have possibilities to act differently? Did I have the chance to not let this community be such a huge obsession of mine that I failed at in the end? In retroperspective this is always said so easily. Life hardly comes the way you imagine it. Many "mistakes" I've done wouldn't have been mistakes at all if there was just a slight bit of willing to listen and cooperate on the people I've mentioned - they're NOT utterly bad people, they're not just describable by what I listed, they could be good people in fact; the story I've told and written up within an hour doesn't nearly encompass everything that happened. You can easily say that if I could only turn back time, the situation would be completely different this day. Generally, the following holds: Both in real life or a "virtual" community, we sometimes see the most prudent and reasonable people go steps in everyday life that we'd have to shake the heads for.

Overall, the story ends like this: The reason that got me banned, is the same reason that made some people take me seriously and that made me an idol for some others.

Other than the previous ban on Runouw in late 2015, this repeated drama has also made me disillusioned, and I won't come back there like Phoenix out of the ashes. I'll just be there to keep talking about SM63 and level designing and participating at Forum Games or such, and as long as the staff there is the same and its attitude doesn't change, I can only wait for it to disappear or for everything to be closed down one day.

Yeah, that's my story. But now, why did I join here? Well, first off, the obvious reason, I've been playing various episodes of SMBX for over a year now. Next is, of course I've also seen a lot of drama and similar happenings here especially one year ago (excuse me if some of you staffers may feel adressed by flaws I listed; just take it as a simple chance to rethink accordingly), but, importantly, I guess that things are calmer since then and this place has improved, and SM63 and runouw.com are close to dying (especially the more so because I'm missed), while SMBX is super alive and the level of activity is here is appealing, right?

Here I already have important experience on being at a freeforum, experience that I have cruelly missed when I joined Runouw, and here I also don't have much to lose and no fixed ambitions like becoming staff desperately. I don't necessarily need to be around here and teach everyone good posting habits. Still, expect me to add my two cents and share my experience and being helpful. :>

In terms of the SMBX engine itself, I might make myself familiar with it and start a designing career, no promises though (especially this might be a cool alternative if SM63 really becomes history one day). Another reason for me to register is Runouw's second fangame called Last Legacy, which can be found on Newgrounds and where a sequel is in development by the Runouw team. This sequel shall reach a really professional level and will run on Java and be sold on Steam, and it will be maintained on http://www.lastlegacy.us/, this site was already founded in mid-2014 and it's very calm because LL and its designer don't reach a huge level of attention yet. But the new LL game (referenced as LL Chapter 3) is not only hoped to reach the attention of many new people via Steam, but it's also supposed to mark a re-start of the Runouw community, because the Runouw brothers (who have made SM63 and lead the LL project) have separated themselves away from runouw.com because of its development I've described.

Until then, I'm here to make myself familiar with a designer of a similar complexity level like LL's gonna be, and also to hear about how this community and SMBX emerged out of nowhere and reached today's activity level, and to see if this also gives tips for me and the LL team. Since I'm holding a staff position on lastlegacy.us since March 2016 (and I have a good rapport with the LL dev team in general, although I'm not a part of it because of lacking programming and drawing skills), this might also give useful info for the community that is supposed to emerge some time soon.

Looking forward to see you guys around!

Since I was active on the Runouw chat, I already looked into the IRC yesterday but it was quiet ... how active is it usually, and with respect to my timezone, are there certain rush hours or alike?

[World Star 9]

Welcome to the community! I merged your post with the Introductions thread by the way.

Thanks! I did not know how the forums worked. (Yet)

[Artemis008]

Hi everyone here! I'm Supershroom and some people here already might recognize me by my name. I'm from the runouw.com forums, but there was a lot of bad things going on there, and I was banned for fighting against staff there. Before this makes me look worse than I am in fact, I'll tell the story.

Also first off, I'm another addition to the German force here, greetings bossedit, Spinda, Marina etc. :3

Spoiler: show

I found SM63 (Super Mario 63) and its Level Designer about three or four years ago and I fell in love with it. I played lots of portal levels before registering and I wanted to make a big name of myself in level designing business. This was my first joining of a freeforum, and in retroperspective
I have to say that I didn't have enough humility for that. I wanted to take this universe by assault, and I had to learn a lot of how to communicate properly. Bad thing is, this got me early punishments (for backseat moderating and complaining about unfair LDC scores, for example) and this brought me a bad reputation that some people, especially staff, wouldn't ever let go off - while some other people started seeing my friendly side and my strengths, and they are still my friends these days.

I both earned respect for becoming a good level designer and overall contributive member, but I also saw plenty examples of poor staffing and moderating policies. As time went on (with a few more conflicts and drama here and then), around August 2015 I also became active on the Runouw chat, and I wanted to become a staff member myself (level moderator, to be precise). There was a time when two level mods became inactive, and a replacement was called for, and I wanted that to happen. But I wasn't accepted. My past caught up with me.

This was the first time when serious arguings were stirred up, both around me not wanting to accept my hand, and talking about general grievances in terms of stagnancy of the site and poor maintenance by the staff, and it was them (mostly Raz, FrozenFire and Oranjui among a few others) reacting very toxically and aggressively. This tug-o-war was violently broken up by banning me for almost a month.

When I returned, I was welcomed back surprisingly friendly, and at first I wanted to let time pass before starting another attempt at a staff discussion, but just one week later, Star king retired, after he also made a significant influence on getting me banned by his behaviour. The same ordeal of me-vs-staff happened again, and before any further damage was done, I stepped back from the subject begrudgingly, this leaving a serious grudge against each other on both sides.

After two more months passed and after getting 3rd place in an LDC, winning a Runouw Votes Award for Best Level, and moving up to 14th place in the official SM63 Tier List, and the staff team being thinner than ever, I wanted to talk again. I approached the problems more directly, and after some extensive discussion of theirs, a compromise was found in February 2016, and I was hired on the lowest staff position, Site Representative (has the power to access staff forums and staff chat, and also can move and lock topics, but nothing more). But they set the tenor on this promotion being extraordinarily experimental. I aimed at it being more than that, though. I wanted to take my imaginations of good staffing into action.
I started efforts on better maintenance and pushed on various things, which seemed to become uncomfortable for the three I already named above, and also some others who didn't care about the site with as much passion as I have. My reputation as staff was also damaged when I've been played a godawful and villainous prank in the FoA (a lawless spamfest-subforum for veterans that I was only given access to because of becoming staff, never asked for it earlier and never will ask again), when I wanted to get official rehabilitation on the previous ban and I wanted to make them acknowledge the injustice.

Around early April, we had problems on getting an April Fools organized, and a permabanned member (PositronWildhawk) reregistered, wanted to be given a second chance. Because I already knew that there were crudities on his permaban (he's a sibling of another permabanned and very immature member (comparable to e.g. Bertie or suckhacker here) and mostly was banned because he failed to protect his account). I thought he should be given a second chance. Others didn't, and I was lashed out both for my help for Pos and for my complaints about the way they treated him. These complaints eventually leveled up to general complains about their dishonorable and abrasive attitude in general, as well as their fault on being an egoistic clique and making the community stagnate, not caring about new members or even being wary towards them. I went so far that I asked to demote the two worst of them if they weren't willing to improve their behaviour.

You can guess the result. I was demoted myself. This didn't happen instantly, we kept discussing and vomiting words for a full five days. One more impartial moderator, nin10mode, was willing to give me another chance and making an official statement. I did that and went on admitting flaws of mine as well. Yet many others - the three named above, as well as other clique friends of theirs - formed an overwelming majority that kept requesting my demotion. I was defended by Doram, an almost 40-year-old very wise and sophisticated but also sometimes rather blue-eyed and unpragmatic man, who had put big hopes in me, but he had to bow down to the pressure and carry out the demotion at the end.

The pain of this was a lot worse than the ban before. I thought I was finally on the right track and got over all of the bad days, and that everything would turn out well. But the bullish resistance of haughty, grumpy, irritable and hypocritical adolescents rendered everything void, and I also felt really sad for a couple of newer members who I became an idol for due to my passion for the community and due to my expert guidance for them.

Soon later, some veterans left the site, after they were only stickying around anyway because of their friends, not only because of games and events, and for some of them the continued drama around my person was the straw that broke the camel's back for them. Especially the resigning of nin10mode was saddening, and even more, I was blamed for it.

I didn't want to give up, I wouldn't have been happy with taking a step back. I kept fighting for a better future. For getting myself repromoted, and for getting the bad guys demoted. I was left alone. Doram had taken a week or two away from the site after the demotion, and when he returned, he was a different person. Relentless, merciless, hypocritical, cynical, blindfold, not ready to compromise. He tried trembling my voice, he didn't want to see my concerns and issues. He cast his lot with his "friends" Raz and everyone else who was responsible for my demotion, he called the demotion a "lesser of two evils", he called my goals a "horrible campaign", he didn't offer any kind of perspective for me. His worst sentence was "Another thing you have misunderstood about being staff is: It is not our job to make this place nice or happy or anything, just supporting it in the terms of general jobs of government", and "Stop trying to FORCE this world to be a better place". This attitude summed up the flaws, and what made the internal atmosphere so heated and unpleasant.

Around the same time, I heard that Raz was about to ban me out of pure spite, and only the intervention of Venexis, soon to be promoted to mod, saved my back. Ven is the light where there's only black, the one who stays calm and factual and productive even in the worst of situations. He's my biggest friend, he said that he didn't want to allow a ban if I wasn't heard out. After the demotion I kept PMing with Ven a lot, and that made people like Raz or OJ very upset, they wanted me to talk with them directly while they didn't show any willingness to discuss properly. In retroperspective it's not far to seek that they wanted a quick inducement for a ban. I was also told by them that "there would be zero chance for repromotion within a year".

Right after Doram's statement, I sent a final manifest, a final general accusation of flaws and shitty treatment, a final explanation of what was going wrong for all the time. Stating that there always was a massive split between new members and overpowering peers, stating that the staff had a very lacking attitude of taking care of the community, but almost only doing things in their common interest, as a closed clique. My message was "Get over your shadows, drop the hatred, make a peace agreement, I'm approachable. Make the injustice undone."

The worst thing is, I asked Doram for another talk, and he seemed willing for it. I sent him my words, and one hour later, the first thing I saw in the public chat was him pinging me a thousand times and eventually saying "well, this is a root point because I'm permabanning him. Shroom, for your constant spitting venom and negativity, and for lying to me and trying to manipulate me, I'm going to ban you for at least a year."

Venexis and a few others tried to step in, but they couldn't reach any more than reducing it to 3 months (until August 14th). I guess that I also was too naive to believe that I would be sufficiently protected by Ven in the worst of all cases.

Did I have possibilities to act differently? Did I have the chance to not let this community be such a huge obsession of mine that I failed at in the end? In retroperspective this is always said so easily. Life hardly comes the way you imagine it. Many "mistakes" I've done wouldn't have been mistakes at all if there was just a slight bit of willing to listen and cooperate on the people I've mentioned - they're NOT utterly bad people, they're not just describable by what I listed, they could be good people in fact; the story I've told and written up within an hour doesn't nearly encompass everything that happened. You can easily say that if I could only turn back time, the situation would be completely different this day. Generally, the following holds: Both in real life or a "virtual" community, we sometimes see the most prudent and reasonable people go steps in everyday life that we'd have to shake the heads for.

Overall, the story ends like this: The reason that got me banned, is the same reason that made some people take me seriously and that made me an idol for some others.

Other than the previous ban on Runouw in late 2015, this repeated drama has also made me disillusioned, and I won't come back there like Phoenix out of the ashes. I'll just be there to keep talking about SM63 and level designing and participating at Forum Games or such, and as long as the staff there is the same and its attitude doesn't change, I can only wait for it to disappear or for everything to be closed down one day.

Yeah, that's my story. But now, why did I join here? Well, first off, the obvious reason, I've been playing various episodes of SMBX for over a year now. Next is, of course I've also seen a lot of drama and similar happenings here especially one year ago (excuse me if some of you staffers may feel adressed by flaws I listed; just take it as a simple chance to rethink accordingly), but, importantly, I guess that things are calmer since then and this place has improved, and SM63 and runouw.com are close to dying (especially the more so because I'm missed), while SMBX is super alive and the level of activity is here is appealing, right?

Here I already have important experience on being at a freeforum, experience that I have cruelly missed when I joined Runouw, and here I also don't have much to lose and no fixed ambitions like becoming staff desperately. I don't necessarily need to be around here and teach everyone good posting habits. Still, expect me to add my two cents and share my experience and being helpful. :>

In terms of the SMBX engine itself, I might make myself familiar with it and start a designing career, no promises though (especially this might be a cool alternative if SM63 really becomes history one day). Another reason for me to register is Runouw's second fangame called Last Legacy, which can be found on Newgrounds and where a sequel is in development by the Runouw team. This sequel shall reach a really professional level and will run on Java and be sold on Steam, and it will be maintained on http://www.lastlegacy.us/, this site was already founded in mid-2014 and it's very calm because LL and its designer don't reach a huge level of attention yet. But the new LL game (referenced as LL Chapter 3) is not only hoped to reach the attention of many new people via Steam, but it's also supposed to mark a re-start of the Runouw community, because the Runouw brothers (who have made SM63 and lead the LL project) have separated themselves away from runouw.com because of its development I've described.

Until then, I'm here to make myself familiar with a designer of a similar complexity level like LL's gonna be, and also to hear about how this community and SMBX emerged out of nowhere and reached today's activity level, and to see if this also gives tips for me and the LL team. Since I'm holding a staff position on lastlegacy.us since March 2016 (and I have a good rapport with the LL dev team in general, although I'm not a part of it because of lacking programming and drawing skills), this might also give useful info for the community that is supposed to emerge some time soon.

Looking forward to see you guys around!

Since I was active on the Runouw chat, I already looked into the IRC yesterday but it was quiet ... how active is it usually, and with respect to my timezone, are there certain rush hours or alike?

Welcome to hell the SMBX forums. I've been hear about a year and have generally had a good experience.