RPG_Magician wrote:I.. don't know if i'm right about this or not.. But HeroLinik appears to have vanished from the forums for a long extended period of time now. Does anyone know his current situation?
Alright, so it has indeed been a while since I've posted in the SMBX community, but some of you may have found it pretty strange how I, despite being pretty active on the forum for a few years, silently vanished, almost never to be seen anymore (well, I have been ghosting this place for quite a while, to the point where I made a topic about The Last Jedi). Well, in case any of you were wondering, here's why I left:
1. Lack of time and inspiration. Yeah, that's actually true. When you get to a certain age, life starts to take over to the point where you struggle to keep up with your interests, and I've started becoming more interested in other things aside from SMBX (which will be come to shortly) so it's now the least of my concerns. Also, I was totally losing the light with level design, because level standards have now advanced a lot since when I first forayed into the SMBX community. It got to a point where I felt my levels were always the same and uninspired, and my project, The Great Castle Adventure Remake, has been suffering from artist's block as well. At several points I wanted to cancel it due to motivation issues, but I didn't want to let the community down because it's supposed to be a nostalgic remake. I did give the work to Mr Briney over Discord DMs, but he hasn't updated it. I might DM him later about it.
2. The state of the community. To be honest, I'm still talking to some community members (Mr Briney I already mentioned) but compared to when I joined, the community has devolved into an absolute trainwreck. Back around April last year, I declared on the Discord that I was contemplating leaving, and the reaction was not positive - I was ridiculed and rebuked for making such a move. Even after months had passed I still got people reminding me of that incident, and it was really risky trying to make conversation without seeing at least one message about that incident. As a result, I left the Discord around when it got nuked (last summer) and set my online status to invisible so I could make preparations to leave silently, to the point where I left at the start of August. If I were to go back to the Discord now, I believe I'm still going to get a message about that incident, because people these days find it hard to let things go. Speaking of letting things go, I do recall still getting complaints over
a freaking level review all the way back in FREAKING CC7, OVER A YEAR LATER. Honestly, I've wised up a lot since then, but at the time I was hard-pressed with exams and the like. I could have always pulled out but I believed all contests were held around the same period, and they hadn't made them seasonal. On a different note, I've seen on occasion when someone announces what they'll be doing, and it gets met with a response along the lines of "does it look like we care?" and I haven't had this said to anyone outside of here. As for the forums, they're alright, but there's just something wrong when you're 20 and you're surrounded by 14-15 year old kids. I can go on and mention the whole "shut the fuck up with your stupid ass questions" but this section is getting too long as it is. Also, before you go in and say something along the lines of "grow thicker skin" that principle doesn't work, because it's basically admitting you don't want to admit you're an asswipe, and it only makes life more miserable.
TL;DR: I've made some mistakes in the past and accumulated a bad reputation to the point where I can't shake it off, no matter how I try - more popular people know me for it.
3. Moving on to different interests. This kinda tags onto point 1. While I've been playing Pokemon a lot, this began when my YouTube channel blew up considerably after making a Pokemon-related video, so I knew that SMBX-tubing wasn't my thing. Since then, I've started venturing onto other Pokemon-related Discord servers (including the largest one) and started spending more time there. Compared to the SMBX Discord, a certain one was incredibly welcoming and definitely more active. The fact I was spending more time there suggests that SMBX, again, wasn't my cup of tea, so I knew full-well, combined with all the hate I was getting, that it was a matter of breaking connections with SMBX once and for all - I've already found my happy place now.
So there you have it. Feel free to pick as many holes in my reasoning as you can, because I really don't want to be here anymore, until something strikes me and I want to return. I'll miss you guys when I'm gone, it was really fun talking to you guys. But I guess that's the end of the road for me.