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

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Gus's brand of "do as I say, not as I do" inclusiveness.

I'm all for Gus creating his own clique or whatever if he promises to Pied Piper the people he's dredged up from 4chan/8chan the fuck away off into the sunset, for them to never return. Fuck the 4chan crowd.

I don't blame Gus for not "getting it" and failing to see why his attitude is seen as unacceptable and toxic. He's apparently said he legitimately has some degree of autism? If that's actually the case, his social "quirks" make sense given that context, not that it makes them tolerable.

I mean dude, if the forum annoys you that much, just leave and prove how much better your own Discord club is at getting those sweet, sweet scores. Make an unofficial competition out of it or something. Or pretend shmupsforum doesn't exist. Not only do you not need to go to the Off-Topic forum, if the forum infuriates you that much just don't read it at all. I mean, I don't want you have to become some kind of hermit or pariah and exile yourself, but on the other hand it's also not cool for people to use their "I can claim authority because I have high scores" position to take swipes constantly at the shmupsforum. The nonsense implying it's somehow responsible for a decline in skill in the genre as a whole is manufactured adversarial bullshit, no matter how often it gets repeated.

[CStarFlare]

Without getting too deep into the convo at hand, that’s an eight year old post. It’s a little old to be throwing in Gus’s face.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

It was also brought up in part as a response to:

"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."

It's certainly a fair point that most of us have been guilty of shitposting at some point or another, of course. We're not saints.

[Kiwi]

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.

lol

[Akagi]

Real talk, Ricardo is really not that bad at all. When I first joined the community, all I heard was how awful and toxic he was. Then I met him for myself and was shocked at how mild he was. People act like he is some terrible tyrant. The worst thing he does is call people jarpigs and can be a little aggressive, but it's not like he's doxxing people or DDoSing people etc. (Yes I know about the Chum thing, he apologized and they seem to have worked that out. That isn't doxxing btw.) Ricardo is a good player who knows a lot about games that not many other people do. He's also wiling to help newer players or people that aren't that good. He went out of his way to help me a lot when I was new. He has very little patience for secondaries, misinformation and people spamming garbage like seal emotes, but I think that's understandable. Most of the complaints about him are just that he's a bit abrasive, and to that I say: Stop being a baby, it's just some guy posting on the internet. It's insane that he's banned every where for just "muh tone" type stuff. His main thing is he just wants a place for shmup only discussion without off topic.

As for Gus, I don't think he's elitist. He is always willing to help people and answer questions, even if they're a new player. Gus is basically cool with you if you play games and don't bring off topic stuff to his channel. I think that's scummy that Bare Knuckle Roo dug up a post from 8 years ago.

I don't really have any thing to say about whether the off-topic section should stay on the farm or not, but I think it's a good thing Gus' discord exists and doesn't have an off-topic section. What Gus is doing with his server is good, it isn't all about him, it's for all the players. It has a channel specifically for people who are streaming on the server and people are encouraged to watch other people, even if they aren't good. As long as you are playing games you are fine. No one has been discriminated against based on being new or being bad, they have only been encouraged, people watched their streams and gave tips. There's a lot of good, constructive discussion and people helping each other. I've gotten a lot more help and learned a lot more from Gus' server than I ever did on the other ones. I'm not some high level player or any thing either and they helped me. The other servers it seemed like everyone was more concerned with circle jerking and spamming garbage than talking about the games. On one of the other servers, I tried to ask a question about Pink Sweets and was ignored so that two well known users could "epically troll" Gus about using a bunch of sketchy extra buttons. This is the big problem with the other servers, they're more focused on e-friends and being part of the in-group and knowing the inside jokes and epic memes than about discussing the games. It's fine to spread misinformation on purpose to troll people and spam emotes and memes, but wanting a server focused on game discussion, that's the real problem.

I don't have any thing against anyone in this community and am not trying to make enemies, I just appreciate these guys and the server Gus has made and think it has reasons to exist. I don't appreciate it being painted as some "elitist" place when it's not. It's just an alternative to the immense amount of spam on the big servers. There is a real smear campaign going on here where people keep attacking the idea of an "elitist, high scoring players only discord" when that isn't the truth at all.

[Juju Kenobi]

Real talk, 2 weeks ago, Ricardo tried to get several new members banned on discord servers using alt accounts and even going as far as asking moderators to ban them in their DMs.
You can add to that some light harassement in people DMs, calling them paranoid and other things.

Ricardo is like that guy saying the forest will burn, and when the forest is not burning, he tries to set the fire himself to prove a point.
But yeah, Ric is a very nice person lol.

Tbh, I would be very happy if he would just stay in his corner of the internet and we stay in our. We never tried to hunt him down or anything.
If you don't like a place, you just leave and don't look back.
But for some reason, he keeps coming back.

[Akagi]

Real talk, 2 weeks ago, Ricardo tried to get several new members banned on discord servers using alt accounts and even going as far as asking moderators to ban them in their DMs.
You can add to that some light harassement in people DMs, calling them paranoid and other things.

Ricardo is like that guy saying the forest will burn, and when the forest is not burning, he tries to set the fire himself to prove a point.
But yeah, Ric is a very nice person lol.

Tbh, I would be very happy if he would just stay in his corner of the internet and we stay in our. We never tried to hunt him down or anything.
If you don't like a place, you just leave and don't look back.
But for some reason, he keeps coming back.

Well, idk any thing about that but whatever, I'm not the guys attorney. I'm just saying my experiences with him have been fine, good even. You guys really make him out to be worse than he is imo. Sorry I don't agree with the narrative you guys are trying to force.

[Vanguard]

Why are you people so obsessed with this place? Why do you care about what games other people play, and how they play them? Why do you care whether other people can so much as talk about certain types of games on a forum you already consider inferior to an alternative?

[Akagi]

Why are you people so obsessed with this place? Why do you care about what games other people play, and how they play them? Why do you care whether other people can so much as talk about certain types of games on a forum you already consider inferior to an alternative?

Did you not read what I wrote? "I don't really have any thing to say about whether the off-topic section should stay on the farm or not, but I think it's a good thing Gus' discord exists and doesn't have an off-topic section." It's right there. Try reading what people are actually saying instead of responding to strawmen, it makes communicating a lot easier. It's impossible to have a discussion if you guys keep responding in bad faith to stuff that wasn't actually said. You can keep your off-topic section, I don't give a damn. Just stating why I like the other place that people were making out to be some "elitist, top tier players only" place.

[Vanguard]

Indeed you did not post that on this page. I took a took a look at the discord link you posted. The "you people" was intended to communicate that the post was addressed to you, gus, and ricardo collectively. You people have a bizarre obsession with what games other people play and how they play them. You (again, you collectively) have even coined your own term for people who play the wrong genres. That's pretty weird. It's also pretty weird to screencap shmup farm posts in your discord so that you can complain that non shmup discussion is allowed here. Doesn't seem like that affects you at all. But I still wouldn't mind if you didn't drag your shit in here, which you've before and now clearly intend to do again.

[Akagi]

Indeed you did not post that on this page. I took a took a look at the discord link you posted. The "you people" was intended to communicate that the post was addressed to you, gus, and ricardo collectively. You people have a bizarre obsession with what games other people play and how they play them. You (again, you collectively) have even coined your own term for people who play the wrong genres. That's pretty weird. It's also pretty weird to screencap shmup farm posts in your discord so that you can complain that non shmup discussion is allowed here. Doesn't seem like that affects you at all. But I still wouldn't mind if you didn't drag your shit in here, which you've before and now clearly intend to do again.

I'm not responsible for anyone but myself. You can roll around in your jarpig slophouse until the end of time for all I care. All I'm doing is outlining the merits of an off topic shithole free environment.

[Sumez]

Oh wow right, you sure do come across as an objective, unbiased person who doesn't have any problems with the forum or opinions on its off-topic section. That was all a strawman.

[Akagi]

Oh wow right, you sure do come across as an objective, unbiased person who doesn't have any problems with the forum or opinions on its off-topic section. That was all a strawman.

You're a well known jarpig who spends most of his time posting in off topic and doesn't care about shmups so it doesn't surprise me you feel threatened by Plasmo's suggestion.

[Sumez]

Yeah, it sounds like you know me well.

[Marc]

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.

Have to interject here man. Nobody back in the day had an issue with what you were saying. It was the incredibly rude and abrasive way in which you said it, and that every thread you popped up in seemed to devolve into the same old shit.
To suggest you were 'black-balled' is a bit dramatic.

Also, I'm old and this is the only forum I do. What's 'jarpig'?

[floralcateyes]

Warm take: I enjoy dealing with enemies that enter from the bottom of the screen, even in games where a collision with an enemy sprite means death. Probably kill you once or twice, but you'll remember after a few encounters anyway. Related, though even less warm: I like dodging things that come from all directions. Even simple patterns are fun when it's throwing things at you not just from the top but from all other angles as well.

Warm take: It can obviously be done horrendously, but I like games that "force" you to use your resources. Parts in a game that feel like the dev saying "use your bombs here." And preferably being cheeky about it. Brings some resource management and routing even to low-level runs, prevents you from bomb-spamming the final boss, occasionally motivates you to actually learn earlier sections. Doesn't have to come in the form of bullet walls and difficulty spikes, either: bombing background objects in Yagawa games is fun. To bring Batrider up again, that game's Normal Course was my second arcade clear, and I had a lot of fun routing and rerouting my bomb uses, slowly learning to actually dodge difficult sections so that I could uncover more and more medals. Good times.

Warm take: I think there's still room for more games like Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo where a first-try 0-rank 1cc is trivial even for a beginner, but pushing for score/speed makes things progressively nastier, to frankly ridiculous degrees. As if the game were acknowledging your slow increase in skill and rewarding you for overcoming adversity with even more adversity. MR:SR's option to choose starting rank also kinda helps avoid that weird issue where a newcomer to the genre just refuses to play on easy/novice/etc., then complains that the game is unfair or impossible (does that still/actually happen??).

Hot take: Someone needs to make The Schmups Forum: a place for hardcore Euroshmup enthusiasts uninterested in Japanese STG. "That's not input lag; that's inertia. Are you saying inertia is bad?" "Of course the controls and mechanics are completely different from stage 26 to stage 43-F. You're in space! Physics works differently there." "What kind of engineer designs a ship that explodes when taking a single bullet to the center? It just seems illogical to me."

[Stevens]

Warm take: I enjoy dealing with enemies that enter from the bottom of the screen, even in games where a collision with an enemy sprite means death. Probably kill you once or twice, but you'll remember after a few encounters anyway. Related, though even less warm: I like dodging things that come from all directions. Even simple patterns are fun when it's throwing things at you not just from the top but from all other angles as well.

Warm take: It can obviously be done horrendously, but I like games that "force" you to use your resources. Parts in a game that feel like the dev saying "use your bombs here." And preferably being cheeky about it. Brings some resource management and routing even to low-level runs, prevents you from bomb-spamming the final boss, occasionally motivates you to actually learn earlier sections. Doesn't have to come in the form of bullet walls and difficulty spikes, either: bombing background objects in Yagawa games is fun. To bring Batrider up again, that game's Normal Course was my second arcade clear, and I had a lot of fun routing and rerouting my bomb uses, slowly learning to actually dodge difficult sections so that I could uncover more and more medals. Good times.

Warm take: I think there's still room for more games like Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo where a first-try 0-rank 1cc is trivial even for a beginner, but pushing for score/speed makes things progressively nastier, to frankly ridiculous degrees. As if the game were acknowledging your slow increase in skill and rewarding you for overcoming adversity with even more adversity. MR:SR's option to choose starting rank also kinda helps avoid that weird issue where a newcomer to the genre just refuses to play on easy/novice/etc., then complains that the game is unfair or impossible (does that still/actually happen??).

Hot take: Someone needs to make The Schmups Forum: a place for hardcore Euroshmup enthusiasts uninterested in Japanese STG. "That's not input lag; that's inertia. Are you saying inertia is bad?" "Of course the controls and mechanics are completely different from stage 26 to stage 43-F. You're in space! Physics works differently there." "What kind of engineer designs a ship that explodes when taking a single bullet to the center? It just seems illogical to me."

Seriously - FUCK enemies appearing at the bottom or from behind. Although if you get a warning it isn't that bad.

More games accessible to new players is a great thing. As far as Euro shooters go I don't love them, but every once in a while one comes along that grabs me.

[z0mbie90]

How dare people have off topic discussions in the Off Topic section off the forum.

This discussion is just silly. Just ignore the sections you dislike and write in the threads that interests you, easy as that.
Dislike the forums? Use the discords, don't like the discords? Use whatever else there is. Complaining what other people use is just once again, silly!

[Akagi]

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.

Have to interject here man. Nobody back in the day had an issue with what you were saying. It was the incredibly rude and abrasive way in which you said it, and that every thread you popped up in seemed to devolve into the same old shit.
To suggest you were 'black-balled' is a bit dramatic.

Also, I'm old and this is the only forum I do. What's 'jarpig'?

Here is the urban dictionary definition Ricardo submitted that was mysteriously removed shortly after it was approved:

"Jarpig

Used for JRPGs and their fans. Can also be used for fans of RPGs in general, even games with RPG elements or an appeal similar to such games.
In shmup community contexts it means someone that vastly prefers RPGs (or even any other type of video game, RPGs are just the one they like most commonly by far) over shmups when it comes to playing (or even watching). It's usually used when such a person is very opinionated or is trying to give advice despite their extreme lack of shmup knowledge and experience. Since they're the most numerous group in these spaces, they're defended by administrators and moderators in an effort to either keep the declining community alive and active at all costs or try to get their donations, and sometimes even they are jarpigs themselves.

A: I love R-Type! You guys should play and talk about this game more. It's better than some of the shmups you play.
B: Have you played it?
A: Only two or three credits these past few months, I have raid obligations.
B: STFU jarpig.
A: Mods?
C: Don't worry, B's already banned."

[floralcateyes]

Seriously - FUCK enemies appearing at the bottom or from behind. Although if you get a warning it isn't that bad.

I'm the kind of person who rages at the moment of failure, then laughs at himself a few seconds later. So I guess I find the sneaky backstabbers more funny than frustrating. They're a nice change of pace from the usual waves descending from above (or from the right), and a (mostly) gently reminder that I have to stop hugging the bottom of the screen like the noob that I am.

A similarly asshole-ish zako type I'm fond of are those that enter from the top, make a beeline for a spot near the bottom, then just continuously take aimed potshots at you from there. Again, it forces you to deal with shots fired from a direction other than up. But unlike the enemies that enter from behind, these don't usually move to the top of the screen. Really have to swoop in to shut them up. Pair them with a bigger enemy with denser patterns, and you have yourself a Nice Time.

[Akagi]

This isn't from the definition, but my own observations. Jarpigs love to embed themselves in communities that are not focused on them and demand to have a "slophouse" for themselves where they can wallow in the slop without feeling "pressured" into participating in the subject the place is dedicated to. They hang around and feign an interest in the subject to keep up appearances, but most of their contributions are spamming memes or spreading misinformation. Their real goal is to roll around in the slophouse with the other jarpigs and discuss the real topic as little as possible. For some reason, going to a JRPG forum is not good enough for them, they DEMAND to have a jarpig sanctuary when it has nothing at all to do with the point of the place. When someone brings up the fact that they spend more time in off-topic than they do discussing the forum at hand, they get extremely defensive and ask for the person to be banned. The admins feel pressured by these guys to make and keep the slophouse or pig pen because they only care about activity and eventually the jarpigs outnumber the people with a genuine interest in the niche hobby.

If anyone even SUGGESTS that you remove the off topic section, they get extremely irate and feel the need to defend their slophouse at any cost. Take a look at this post:

Why not simply open up a new forum and migrate this forum's Off Topic to the new forum's On Topic? I'm sure there's some worthwhile discussions to have on "retro gaming" (to trigger BIL once more I hate the term myself probably as much as you do~) but as long as it has no connection to shmups, why clutter the Shmups Forum with it?

It's hard for me to not take such snarky statements personally, as I've primarily been posting in off-topic for the last few years, simply due to a combination of really enjoying the off-topic video game chat here, and very rarely coming across on-topic shmup talk that I really have anything to say something about.
That's definitely not to say I don't want to talk about shmups, but there are a lot of subjects that have a tendency to go around and repeat themselves, and a lot of talk is stuff that relates abstractly to the games (releases, collecting, stuff about companies, etc.) while the more direct talk about specific games, strategy and gameplay etc. which is what I was originally here for, has mostly been desolate for a while now - something that, ironically, is going really well on the off-topic section for non-shmup games these days.

But I digress - your suggestion isn't bad, at least not in theory. I'd love to see all the quality off-topic video game talk from this forum bloom into a dedicated community with all the same members, and room to grown into more dedication and a growing user base with a shared interest. It would be fantastic, and definitely the ideal solution. So I really shouldn't take offense from it.

But it's hard to see it happening. If people had to move away from the shmups forum to partake in that stuff, you'd definitely lose a lot of people along the way, and it would fracture a community that as it is is already pretty unstable.
A lot of the best things on this forum have happened organically, and I don't really think you can force that kind of stuff. I don't think there is any need for an incredibly extraneous infrastructure to support stuff that is honestly already supported well, and 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 think if we're to give some merit to your idea that off-topic video game and hardware talk is actually damaging to the shmup forum and makes people less likely to partake in the on-topic discussions, but also want to maintain the existing quality off-topic talk (so yeah IMO that means all the politics subjects can go right to hell), I'd say the best thing you could do is maintain the existing community here, keep the same user accounts and central databases, but maintain two different branches of the same forum, but branded in different ways, and presented in a way that lets them interfer with eachother to a lesser degree.
Kinda like Reddit's subreddit structure except without sucking.

This is classic jarpig stuff to a T. I can't explain why they do this, it doesn't make sense, but if you pay attention, you'll see it for yourselves. I guarantee you there's a group of jarpigs and a slophouse in almost every community you're in. I thought it was just a meme at first, but I see it all the time.

[Squire Grooktook]

The Jarpig forced meme always felt like such a weird accusation considering jrpg's barely have any more presence than any other genre on off-topic in my estimation.

Like, let's look at one of the most enduring threads for arcade-y single credit side scrollers:



Wow, 330+ pages for hardcore 2d arcade gaming. Nice. Wonder how one of the similarly enduring turn based grind-a-thon's thread is doing in comparison?



10 times less? Seems like there's a clear victor in popularity here. The only other recurring RPG threads nearly as big that come to mind are Phantasy Star, Falcom, and Fromsoft. And the latter two devs make prominent action-focused titles.

Doesn't seem like there's much of an rpg obsession here tbh. More that off topic has wide variety of older gamers who've sampled a lot and have at least an appreciation for the best games in various genres, from arcade side scrollers and belt-scrollers, modern character action, survival-horror, and yes, rpg's.

Myself I don't really post in shmups chat that much, or play shmups as often as I used to when I started college, but that's mainly because I'm making one now. I lost all drive to chase 1cc's and scores once I got deep into developing my shmup, and nowerdays I only boot up the occasional credit of some of my favorite titles for the sake of studying their level design and patterns and getting inspiration/reference material as much as relaxing and having some fun.

[Sumez]

What did I ever do to you Akagi? I have no idea who you even are.

You quote my entire post but obviously didn't bother to read any of it it. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here other than piss off people. So far you've definitely not been talking about shmups.

The off-topic R2RKMF thread has higher quality consistent talk about genuine arcade action gameplay, criticism and strategies than the Shmups Chat forum has had for years, but assuming there's no room for pure shmup talk when other genres are covered in the same community is just ridiculous. Maybe completely unnecessary animosity between immature community members would be a better culprit if you really had to track one down.

[Akagi]

What did I ever do to you Akagi? I have no idea who you even are.

You quote my entire post but obviously didn't bother to read any of it it. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here other than piss off people. So far you've definitely not been talking about shmups.

I came here originally to post scores, then I looked at this thread and saw people shitting on gus' discord and making baseless accusations about it. As someone that posts there and has got a lot of use out of it, I thought I'd give my perspective. Again, I don't care about your slophouse, you can keep it. I don't check that forum, but it's good to have a place without that kind of stuff.

[Sumez]

Dude, I haven't said a thing about Gus' discord. Outside of my general issues with Discord as a platform, I think it's good that it exists.

[Akagi]

Dude, I haven't said a thing about Gus' discord. Outside of my general issues with Discord as a platform, I think it's good that it exists.

You act like I called you some kind of slur. You're just a good example of what i'm talking about and I'd heard a lot about how you only post in off topic. No need to get so upset. Embrace it.

[PAPER/ARTILLERY]

Here is the urban dictionary definition Ricardo submitted that was mysteriously removed shortly after it was approved:

This is legit one of the cringiest things I've ever read.

[Squire Grooktook]

You act like I called you some kind of slur.

Less of a slur, more like a massive strawman.

[Sumez]

You're just a good example of what i'm talking about and I'd heard a lot about how you only post in off topic.

Ah yes. That subject comes up all the time.

"Hey it's that Sumez guy. Did you hear? He only posts in off-topic."
"Nooo way, that can't be, can it?"
"Yeah, he's a super famous poser - he hangs out in shmup communities, but he never plays the genre!"
"What a jarpig. I bet he doesn't even have a 1CC!"
"Of course not! The only thing he has cleared is Tales of Xaelio Dreams Quest VII R"

My dreams are shattered.

[Eaglet]

Community member hygiene and social culture is way more important than steering discussion in a particular direction.
I've been more or less active in this community for a lot of years and what stands out the most to me as memorable experiences looking back are the other fantastic nerds I've managed to hang out with all over the world. The games themselves were only a small part of that.