Unpopular opinion / Hot take thread - get it off your chest!

[Sumez]

The "forums are dying" thing is a trash meme and has been brought up and discredited before. Forums don't serve the same function as instant messenger services like Discord. There's a huge benefit to the forum as a storage medium for finding information since game specific info is tied to individual, easily searchable and indexable threads. Instant messenger services are better just for more casually hanging out and chatting with folks. They're a nightmare to search when looking for actual info.

Eh, sure, I'd say the fact that stuff like Discord obsoletes forums is absolutely wrong.

But yeah, forums are dying. Take any internet forum you might have enjoyed frequenting 15 or so years ago, and, providing they still even exist, see how well they are doing now. Or whatever their equivalent might be. Forums that persist are very rare, and this is one of the really few that do, even if its activity still is less than it has been.
Like one of the self-proclaimed new users wrote on the previous page here, this forum is a treasure that needs to be preserved.
There are probably a lot of good reason the internet is seeing less forum activity in general nowadays, mostly related to changing habits regarding how people use the internet, but I agree 100% in what you say about their relevance. I hope we won't see them die out completely, and hopefully we will also see some kind of shift that will make them more prevalent again. I will always enjoy constructive long-term archived discussions over random on-the-fly bs'ing in real time. I like the latter too, but it's just a different thing.

[InFireX]

I've been approached by someone outside the farm who doesn't have an account and asked me to relay this following message:

"Timely topic, eh? If you're tired of being surrounded by people that care more about stuff that isn't shmups in shmup places, join Ultramania's STG Streams. Run by Gus, finally a public space where only shmup play talk is allowed (minimal meta talk), with higher standards for double checking facts to prevent the spread of bad information. It's been gaining traction lately, with close to 100 members now and daily activity. It boasts the best selection of automatic shmup stream notifications, with the most extensive list, plus a special channel dedicated to notifying people on the server. Anyone is welcome, even if you're a low level player you can get added to the bot, be notified to people on the server and get some feedback, be it either tips or just chat about the game. Even if you're just a spectator, you're welcome as long as you respect our aforementioned rules.

Here's the link: https://discord.gg/ShPvaGt"

[donluca]

Or just create "not-Shmups Forum" where to dump all the offtopic videogame topics.

Or, more easily and realistically, just make a new thread and discuss which of the billion existing videogame forums to invade all together.

[BIL]

I like to talk about video games about people who enjoy arcade style shooting games because I know we will share a lot of the same mentality when it comes to video games. And hell, that's not even when talking about similar genres like run'n'gun etc. but right down to RPGs and whatnot. It's really comforting, you know.

I know right

I've been approached by someone outside the farm who doesn't have an account and asked me to relay this following message:

"Timely topic, eh? If you're tired of being surrounded by people that care more about stuff that isn't shmups in shmup places, join Ultramania's STG Streams. Run by Gus, finally a public space where only shmup play talk is allowed (minimal meta talk), with higher standards for double checking facts to prevent the spread of bad information. It's been gaining traction lately, with close to 100 members now and daily activity. It boasts the best selection of automatic shmup stream notifications, with the most extensive list, plus a special channel dedicated to notifying people on the server. Anyone is welcome, even if you're a low level player you can get added to the bot, be notified to people on the server and get some feedback, be it either tips or just chat about the game. Even if you're just a spectator, you're welcome as long as you respect our aforementioned rules.

Here's the link: https://discord.gg/ShPvaGt"

This is exactly what I had in mind in my last post. Sounds good!

[Gus]

I've become a big subscriber to the idea that it's the people who are in charge of communities that ultimately set the tone for the type of posts that are made. When you have out-of-touch admins who are busy writing novels about the jarpigs they're playing and who think Inbachi is a boss in DFK then no shit you're gonna get a lot of posers who have no interest in shmups. Simply removing an off-topic board will do nothing to change that core issue.

For comparison, Cave-STG has an off-topic board but it's had none of this degeneration in its nearly 10 years of operation. I firmly that's because EOJ has made a conscious effort to lead by example by regularly making constructive posts about the genre and showing off the shmups that he's playing. Seriously, if you're itching for an actual shmups-focused forum and not a poser fest, why not post on Cave-STG today?

Besides that, it's also been mentioned that there's numerous player-centered Discord servers, including my own. I'll add that it's actually really easy to just start your own, and I'd encouraging anyone on the fence about it to just do so. It takes just a few minutes and is way easier than trying to start up a forum. Really, people have nothing to lose by just by starting their own places rather than sticking around and continuing to support places run by/for clueless non-players/eceleb wannabes. I really feel like this decentralization is the future of the genre.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Rose: Everyone grows up being told the same thing.
Colonel: Be nice to other people.
Rose: But beat out the competition!
Colonel: "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed."
Rose: But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed...
Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
Rose: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
Rose: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."

[MathU]

Seriously, if you're itching for an actual shmups-focused forum and not a poser fest, why not post on Cave-STG today?

Because I'm not a CAVE fan and their fans generally comprise a lot of posers (there's your hot take ).

... Discord servers, including my own... I really feel like this decentralization is the future of the genre.

Friendly reminder that "your own Discord server" is a form of Newspeak fiction. In truth, you cannot setup your own Discord server: Discord runs all the servers and ultimately controls all your communities. All you're doing is renting a server from them with the price of user datamining. You cannot claim to care about decentralization and then try to push everyone on to Discord. Discord's explosion in usage is precisely one of the dangerous centralizations of the internet that has occurred in recent years. If you want real decentralization in instant messaging services, then that's what the IRC and Matrix protocols are all about--Discord is the complete opposite.

[CStarFlare]

For comparison, Cave-STG has an off-topic board but it's had none of this degeneration in its nearly 10 years of operation.

It's a great resource, but at something like five posting users a month it doesn't really count as a community.

Aside from MathU's (accurate) refutation of Discord's decentralization, I don't think decentralization of information is actually a good thing for shmups. Burying information discussion in ever-splintering niche chat servers makes it harder for someone to come across that information in the future.

[copy-paster]

A good example is how I used to call save-state practice cheating (because it is). People used to flip out all the time because I am an ass and it diminished their accomplishments.

I play shmups with save state practice and in-game stage select when it needs to. Man it feels so good to be cheater I am very proud.

But scoreboards didn't restict of no save state practice or stage select, and no universal rule of it so I don't give a fuck.

[Dawn111]

I play shmups with save state practice and in-game stage select when it needs to. Man it feels so good to be cheater I am very proud.

But scoreboards didn't restict of no save state practice or stage select, and no universal rule of it so I don't give a fuck.

Save states/stage select are actually really useful to practice on certain sections of the stage rather than having to start the game all over if the player makes a mistake, and yes, scoreboards don't punish players for using save states. Longplays use save states mainly to show the gameplay of the game rather than actually showing skills on a real console.

[Akagi]

Gus Discord has been going well without the off-topic section. It has been more focused on the games and the people streaming them rather than off-topic stuff and people promoting their youtube channels etc. Also, less seal spam and garbage like that. The other big servers seemed like they were more focused on being an e-friends circlejerk than about the games. Decentralization is good.

[Sengoku Strider]

Aside from MathU's (accurate) refutation of Discord's decentralization, I don't think decentralization of information is actually a good thing for shmups. Burying information discussion in ever-splintering niche chat servers makes it harder for someone to come across that information in the future.

Yeah, I found this forum just by googling 'top shmups' or something. Stuff in Discord's not showing up that way.

[Sumez]

I don't think decentralization of information is actually a good thing for shmups. Burying information discussion in ever-splintering niche chat servers makes it harder for someone to come across that information in the future.

It's crazy that anyone would think that kind of stuff is good for anything.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Eh, it's maybe not that crazy when you consider the possible context. Elite players who are aiming for top scores are probably often who are able to get obsessive with the game. And I mean focusing on it above all else to the point of being more than a wee bit eccentric. It's not unreasonable some of them would decide they value normal social interaction very, very low in the pursuit of scores above all else, despite how healthy that may or may not be.

It's basically a kind of well-intentioned but misguided attempt at altruism where they're arguing that the quickest, most efficient way to motivate people to get the best of the best scores (or perhaps the only way, in their mind) is to create zealous communities that discuss only the gameplay mechanics and literally socialize about nothing else. Or that the only way to keep the genre alive is by trying to cultivate a hardcore score focused community. It might even be an attempt to try and emulate the style of gaming culture they believe existed in Japanese arcades, but the reality is that it's not an all or nothing sort of situation, and plenty of hardcore, high-tier players can be cultivated by and exist in communities that cater to a wider audience (i.e. that are inclusive of a audience looking for more casual or non-shmup discussion).

The shmups community as a whole has tried hard to project a good public image and avoid being seen as insular, unwelcoming, and elitist. It doesn't help when suddenly a high ranking player comes along frothing at the mouth about posers because casual players dare to discuss non-shmup things or aren't score attacking enough for their liking. If Gus ends up wondering why the mass exodus he dreams of hasn't happened, he needs only perhaps to reflect introspectively on his statement about how "the people who are in charge of communities ultimately set the tone for the type of posts that are made".

[Akagi]

Eh, it's maybe not that crazy when you consider the possible context. Elite players who are aiming for top scores are probably often who are able to get obsessive with the game. And I mean focusing on it above all else to the point of being more than a wee bit eccentric. It's not unreasonable some of them would decide they value normal social interaction very low in the pursuit of scores above all else or that sort of thing.

It's basically a kind of well-intentioned but misguided attempt at altruism where they're arguing that the quickest, most efficient way to motivate people to get the best of the best scores (or perhaps the only way, in their mind) is to create zealous communities that discuss only the gameplay mechanics and literally socialize about nothing else. Or that the only way to keep the genre alive is by trying to cultivate a hardcore score focused community. It might even be an attempt to try and emulate the style of gaming culture they believe existed in Japanese arcades, but the reality is that it's not an all or nothing sort of situation, and plenty of hardcore, high-tier players can be cultivated by and exist in communities that cater to a wider audience (i.e. that are inclusive of a audience looking for more casual or non-shmup discussion).

But it's not focused only on elite players, it's focused on any one who plays, it's even specifically mentioned that new players and spectators are welcomed. The only "elitism" is that off topic is discouraged. There are a million places to discuss other stuff, what's wrong with having a shmups only place?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

what's wrong with having a shmups only place?

Don't recall ever having said there was.

The problem is claiming that such a place is a necessity because one also claims that having a place such as this forum that discusses shmups while allowing other casual, unrelated discussions is somehow harmful to playing shmups/the genre as a whole. I'd love to see more people push to submit scores in games and see more community records too, but I disagree with the premise of what's the best way to promote that and achieve that goal. Specifically, I don't think that the existence of this forum inherently harms that effort or see why it should be seen as an affront to people who also want to focus on more score specific discussions on a separate platform. You can't force people into score attacking if they don't want to; you can certainly encourage it, but it's something that has to happen more naturally/organically (for lack of a better term) and you have to accept that some people just won't get into the games to that extent, and that's OK.

The real question is why can't there be a shmups forum that also has a more casual community discussion section? And why does it frequently get shit on about how awful it supposedly is whenever someone wants to promote their own special corner of the internet instead of being able to exist alongside it? It's far from the first time this exact thing has happened.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Why not close Off Topic altogether and focus fully on shmups again? There are many other places where you can discuss "retro gaming".

While this one remark triggered the very longest derailnment in the history of thread (remember when it was about shmups rather than internet forums?), rather than raging on these days & age, I'll sooner hint at the very length of said dealirement.

[chempop]

Even though shmups aren't entirely dead (just mostly), many of us old fogies still like to shoot the shit with familiar internet faces in the comfort of a forum we've had a long history with. Ending Off Topic is insane. Those who want things shmup related spread out over countless discords, facebook groups, reddits, YT and Twitch channels, have at it.. we're past the point of no return with the standard forum sorta falling out of the spotlight -- sorta unfortunate imho, but that's just how the internet works and evolves.

[To Far Away Times]

I imagine most of us are old fogies since we're here playing shmups after all, a genre that fell out of popularity in the early 90's.

I look at something like TikTok and it makes zero sense to me why someone would use that. Just a bunch of Zoomers screaming and being annoying.

Forums are my comfort zone, and about as high tech as I get with the internet. Social media isn't my speed either, due to the slight depression that comes from being bombarded with only the best, most curated version of everyone else's life and also the complete invasion of privacy with advertising.

Here I can be somewhat annonymous while being a recurring member and we can talk about these cool, niche games.

[Pearl]

hahaha this conversation fucking christ

truly, TRULY, classic.

[system11]

As I've said in the other thread, I don't see why it'd be a bad thing for run 'n guns, or rail shooters/3d shmups to get a subforum here as there is enough genre overlap and interest round here that it wouldn't go unappreciated. There's also not, as far as I know, a forum elsewhere dedicated to run 'n guns or rail shooters/3D shmups specifically, so the forum owner might well be open to subforums to give them a home here. Still wouldn't make them 2D shmups, though.

Just so you know I did see your PM, I've been pondering what to do, it's a good idea. One possible solution was to split off topic into off topic gaming, and 'everything else'. I'm not too much of a fan of creating lots and lots and lots of subforums for reasons similar to stuff covered below, but a gaming focused off topic section I could see being attractive to people.

For the people who don't like off topic at all, well - I'm terriby sorry for forcing you to read it at gunpoint. That was bad and I apologise.

On the subject of setting up discords. So Discord initially seemed quite interesting despite it being a fancy IRC service owned by a company. Functionally IRC is what it's replacing, IRC is useless for retention of information or long form discussions - and Discord is the same. You may have opinions on whether that's good or bad - I'm not a huge fan myself for reasons involving who owns the service, privacy and so on. It is what it is though, it's chomping up IRC style use because the client is friendly and it integrates with things like Twitch. Unfortunately what happened is with the exception of a few notably large channels (the shmups one for example), in reality it turns into 50 people within the same community all setting up their own vanity Discord server. Then they invite the same subsets of people to them, and it becomes impossible to keep track of anything to the point where I simply don't bother using it anymore except for 2.5 channels. It's an example of decentralisation making a complete mess of something.

Forums are are no different in this respect although the bar for splitting is higher, some of you will remember the days where there was a forum for everything, and then subsets of that everything, or duplicated because small group A wanted their own place for reasons. Often those reasons were based in animosity or resentment of some kind and it set the tone from day 1. And they're nearly all dead. That's what happens when you fragment a community, it falls apart in little drips and drabs.

As an aside when I see people saying "jarpig" and posting messages along the lines of "dump the forum come here instead" I know exactly who they've been speaking to, and that kind of person will just drag you down with them which is why we banned them, twice - quite an achievement for a place with more relaxed moderation.

Edit: I forgot to say something about the elitism part. Player A knows everything about game X, they obsess about it, have memorised every aspect of the game required to achieve a perfect play. This is great, but they look down on player B who doesn't know about the score mechanics and just wanted to enjoy the game their own way. Here's the thing - player B might have in depth knowledge of games player A has never even heard of and therefore never played. You learn nothing from discarding that person in your mind as someone with nothing to offer.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

One possible solution was to split off topic into off topic gaming, and 'everything else'. I'm not too much of a fan of creating lots and lots and lots of subforums for reasons similar to stuff covered below, but a gaming focused off topic section I could see being attractive to people.

This is a solution that would work well I think, one that's also been suggested in this thread and multiple people have posted support for. Off-Topic Gaming for all gaming discussions, and leave the non-gaming stuff in the other Off-Topic thread. An index similar to how the high-score/strategy thread is laid out per game could also perhaps work to sort discussions per game or so. The downside is it'd require some time from the mods sorting and moving current threads around.

[Sengoku Strider]

Splitting up forums never works the way people think it will, especially on low traffic sites. Rather than giving two subject areas room to breathe and attracting more discussion, it invariably reduces the number of people seeing & responding to both.

NeoGAF & its successor site Resetera managed to remain the largest gaming forums on the web for years in no small part due to firm resistance to fragmentation. All they have is gaming & off topic, and then one 'hangout' forum for each to avoid high traffic threads (NFL, WoW) from permanently monopolizing the top of the parent forum. This approach guarantees that people in gaming who are just there to talk about their Xbox see the latest Playstation outrage or Youtuber drama and join in, something that wouldn't happen if those two topics were in their own siloed subfora. And nothing generates traffic like people seeing traffic. Static fora get forgotten about because thety can't maintain engagement throughout a day.

Even Reddit, the most fragmented site in the universe, only works because its aggregative home & all feeds cross-pollinate its fora. Take that away and most of them would wither away on the vine. If anything I think this place needs fewer subfora. I rarely feel motivated to click on the hardware or development fora, but if those topics were in front of me each time I opened the site I'd surely get sucked into some of those conversations.

[Elixir]

For comparison, Cave-STG has an off-topic board but it's had none of this degeneration in its nearly 10 years of operation. I firmly that's because EOJ has made a conscious effort to lead by example by regularly making constructive posts about the genre and showing off the shmups that he's playing. Seriously, if you're itching for an actual shmups-focused forum and not a poser fest, why not post on Cave-STG today?

The website was offline for 6 1/2 years, from 2012 to 2018, "due to a lack of time, interest, and money to keep it running". It was never "in its 10 years of operation". EOJ would also routinely ban people he disliked from this forum on his forum, including banning anyone who was registered on icycalm's forums (not my image). I guess it doesn't matter as long as you fit his narrative. There's 700 members, most of which are either inactive, didn't come back, or aren't aware that the website is back again. The off-topic section isn't curated, it's dead.

So yeah, probably not the best example.

It's basically a kind of well-intentioned but misguided attempt at altruism where they're arguing that the quickest, most efficient way to motivate people to get the best of the best scores (or perhaps the only way, in their mind) is to create zealous communities that discuss only the gameplay mechanics and literally socialize about nothing else. Or that the only way to keep the genre alive is by trying to cultivate a hardcore score focused community. It might even be an attempt to try and emulate the style of gaming culture they believe existed in Japanese arcades, but the reality is that it's not an all or nothing sort of situation, and plenty of hardcore, high-tier players can be cultivated by and exist in communities that cater to a wider audience (i.e. that are inclusive of a audience looking for more casual or non-shmup discussion).

I fully agree with everything here. I don't even think skilled players consider themselves skilled nor take the time to seek "certain communities within certain communities", see this video documenting why skilled players underrate themselves deliberately and unskilled players have a tendency of lacking self-awareness and, in this video's words, falls under the Dunning-Kruger effect. Most of them just do their own thing. Just because someone's good at a game doesn't mean they're good at explaining or talking about it either.

The shmups community as a whole has tried hard to project a good public image and avoid being seen as insular, unwelcoming, and elitist.

I have to disagree with this, though. There's tons of metadrama in this derailment which nobody who doesn't use Discord will understand, with the narrative of "do your own thing but also join me!". This whole thread is unwelcoming - nobody really cares if you don't like bullet hell shmups or whatever, it's just an outlet to spread mindless negativity. The forum has had a reputation over the years of being unwelcoming, the registration process now requires manual approval (due to spambots, but outsiders don't know that), and a lot of information is simply outdated. This "how do we grow the genre?" discussion happens every 6 months and goes nowhere.

Social environments and the preservation of specific information made for wikis, websites, blogs, etc. are two entirely different things, so suddenly turning around and claiming Discord is useful for preservation in any capacity doesn't logically make any sense. "Decentralization" is just a front for "segregation". Complaining about community-tier environments is quite frankly irrelevant, as someone's newest anime club isn't going to revolutionize the industry in the grand scheme of things. It's just a smaller group of people, but that's fine, just find an environment you gel with and go with it. Means nothing to me, I work for the genre, not the community.

As for off-topic, if off-topic is removed the off-topic discussion will seep into on-topic subforums, and nobody would probably want this. Even though I don't really browse here any more, I haven't been able to see off-topic since 2011. I'm probably better off for it. I feel like the removal of off-topic might have helped 10 years ago but it's too late now.

Edit: Just to be 100% transparent, I wrote this before system11's reply.

[MathU]

"Decentralization" is just a front for "segregation".

They're not one in the same at all. You can decentralize while maintaining a distributed community. A few examples are PeerTube and GNU Social. Certain progressive web forums have also recently adopted things like "overboards" that catalog all the recently active topics across a website's forum subdivisions together at once and "webrings" that catalog all the forum subdivisions across multiple websites within the ring. There's even entirely distributed forums like NNTPChan that synchronize content across multiple independent servers.

[Pearl]

"Decentralization" is just a front for "segregation".

They're not one in the same at all. You can decentralize while maintaining a distributed community. A few examples are PeerTube and GNU Social.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Your shitpost would be slightly less than totally irrelevant if MathU has used the word "Linux" at any point in the thread.

I'm not sure why anyone would fund Icycalm's narcissistic personality cult, and I'm also not sure if the correct response is to be impressed he found 46 suckers to give him a total of $1,581 a month or to feel deep pity for those duped into it.

I rarely feel motivated to click on the hardware or development fora

The very technical, focused discussions and knowledge under the Hardware section, and the users who are attracted to that section specifically for those exact things would never, ever want to be merged with Off-Topic. There's a reason Hardware is split to a focused subsection, and merging it would immediately drive many people in that section away (along with their knowledge).

[Gus]

I understand why people might be sympathetic to the idea that shmups are already niche and that the community shouldn't be splintered further, but there's some pretty massive problems with centralization that haven't really been brought up.

1. Centralization and fear of splintering leads to community leaders wielding a massive amount of power and otherwise good community members becoming complacent in the face of horrible injustice. Back in 2017, me and my mom got doxxed by one of the guys running one of the big servers, and the guy who did it just continued running it for 2 years, until he lost interest in genre. I tried bringing the issue up with one of the people helping run that server and he agreed it was horrible but that he "didn't want to make drama and "you don't have to like your co-workers," and he was even letting that guy upload one of his replays later on. Not trying to take a shit on anyone here (hence why I'm not naming names) but I think we're seriously off-track if we let something like this happen. It all goes back to people being scared of rocking the boat and being reluctant to leave when things go south.

2. When the community is centralized around a single forum and a couple big chat servers, it's incredibly easy for someone who gets on the bad side of those in power to essentially be black-balled from the community. This happened to me back in 2012 when people didn't like what I was saying about non-players shitting things up. Cave-STG was closed, I was banned from here, and I also got banned from the big chat servers, so I really had no choice but to just start my own IRC. A similar thing is happening right now to Ricardo, again for similar reasons as the non-players and people running these large communities feel threatened by his views and have no issues black-balling a serious player who's eager to share his strats.

3. People have brought up fears of information getting buried on obscure Discord servers and I agree that's a pretty bad thing. But I also think it should be pointed out that information being buried in old forum posts of questionable reliability is by no means a good situation and really only has marginal advantages over Discord. The solution to strive for would be to have information on clearly labelled Youtube strategy videos, Twitch VODs, and Wikis. When I say people should strive for decentralization, I mean actually using all these platforms available to the fullest extent possible and not just hiding away on Discord servers.

4. Despite claiming to be completely inclusive, I see a subtle but harmful form of elitism that's actually far worse than the strawmans of elitism being put forth. When a new player comes in, it's natural for them to try to follow the example of the other players they see in the community. When all they see is people talking about sickgrabs, shitposting, and maybe a few achievement posts from long-term members, they end up with an incredibly warped view of what actually goes into getting good at these games. The result is a negative feedback loop where players are scared about "exposing" themselves by asking questions about games or streaming themselves failing at games, but they're not scared about parroting misinformation or spamming memes. I've seen it tons of times. Ask a new player to stream and they say "Sorry I'm not good..." but ask them about jarpigs and they'll write a novel about it.

Putting aside the strawmans, my disagreement with people running these communities is not in the matter of whether we should serve spectators or lesser skilled players, but in whether or not we should serve people who neither play or spectate games at all. As an aside, I'm actually a pretty big proponent of trying to cultivate an audience of educated spectators and am a pretty avid spectator myself. It's such a massive time commitment getting good at a single game that I couldn't hope to learn every game I'm interested in in lifetime, so I've come to peace with watching games I'm interested in and supporting the players as a compromise. I'd be a huge hypocrite if I turned away spectators and demanded everyone be doing serious score attacking 24/7, as the strawmans are claiming.

Even as it relates to the question of whether or not we should bend over backwards for non-playing non-spectating secondaries, my answer to that isn't a black-and-white "no," but more "it depends." I think that people should have every right to a space that suits their needs and I don't want to talk that from them. If people want to talk jarpigs with their e-friends then they should have every right to do that. But I also think if people want a space to talk shmups with minimal noise that they should have the right to that as well. That's really all I'm saying. There are options besides simply sticking around a place that's full of secondary spam and that anyone has the power to make a space that fits their needs.

[system11]

Yeah but... if you want to get specific...

1) Ricardo was banned before for being continually unpleasant about other people. It was a widely popular move, forum posters were asking us to do something about him. He was re-banned after people realised it was him from the same unpleasant posting style and reported it to us (and because creating new accounts to bypass a ban, is a good way to get another ban). Think about this for a moment based on some things you've mentioned above: his finest moment was posting chat logs from elsewhere, here, for the purposes of mocking someone.

2) You don't have to view non-shmup areas of the forum. Like seriously, you don't have to click on that link.

[Queen Charlene]

3. People have brought up fears of information getting buried on obscure Discord servers and I agree that's a pretty bad thing. But I also think it should be pointed out that information being buried in old forum posts of questionable reliability is by no means a good situation and really only has marginal advantages over Discord. The solution to strive for would be to have information on clearly labelled Youtube strategy videos, Twitch VODs, and Wikis. When I say people should strive for decentralization, I mean actually using all these platforms available to the fullest extent possible and not just hiding away on Discord servers.

but aren't we already doing this...?

like, not to shill, but i literally run a shmup wiki, centered around gathering and sharing information about shmups and putting it in an easily-accessible location... which i started in May of this year. it's been five months. why not invite people to contribute to the wiki?