Discord breaks up communities

Damnit, this topic was taking a turn for the hilariously better at the middle of page 2 starting with MegaPancakeStrategist 's post. Then ya'all had to be like






Jeez Louise! Overdramatic much?

I like how you pull this straight out from context. True progressive, liberal behavior.
Remember buddy, snitches get no bitches. They get stabbies in their liver.

Well, didn't want to comment on this thread since I don't really know the full context (I'm not on the discord so my only knowledge of this current drama is based on what's been said and past dramas on this forum). I'll probably regret it in the morning but since I was tagged in I guess I'll share my thoughts.

I think everyone's views of the DBPs, 40oz, and this forum are probably a bit shaped by when they came over here. The impression I get from a lot of the people who've come here after DBP37 is that they are/were here because they loved it and wanted to make prestige projects like it. Nothing wrong with that, it was a fun project to make and I'd love to do more ambitious projects like that myself. It's cool that there's so much help and suggestions on offer when a project shows a little promise like the past few 40oz led projects or DBP50 but I noticed this behavior wasn't exactly on offer when Kontra lead DBP48. Now, I don't like the way 40 handled DBP48, there was too much confusion at the start of it and I think he went too hard at Joe and just ended up making things worse. I don't think Kontra was set up for success and I don't like that this all lead to him to have a bad experience leading one of these. DBP48 is a big fucking black spot on our history and it's a shame he's left because I would've liked for us to have a chance to make things right. I don't care too much about it being a bad DBP, but I do care about it being a bad experience and it's fucked up that it lead to Kontra feeling unwelcome on his own forum. It was also a pretty stark reminder of how different the mindset of this community is now compared to that period leading up to AZ.

Back when I first came here, things were a bit similar to how they are right now. There was a lot of tension boiling under the surface, internal divisions were forming and there were similar issues regarding a discord server and accusations of cliquishness, all of which culminated in a mass deletion of accounts. There was a general feeling of gloom in the air as pretty early on all of the "big name" DBP mappers had left the forum and there was a lot of doomposting about how the DBPs were done and couldn't survive without them. When word broke about the split, I remember some guy on 4chan saying "The first post-split DBP is being led by Joe-ilya. RIP DBP." Nobody submitted maps to DBP36 for a while and it looked like it was going to flop but everything worked out in the end, 40oz ended up putting a bunch of effort into it (3 maps and the bubble effect) and even some of us guys who didn't map for it helped playtest it or cheerlead it. I'm not sure if it's cliquishness but it feels like we used to try building each other up a lot more back then. Even if I disagree with him on some things here and there, I don't like that 40oz feels alienated from his own mappers in the project that he started.

As far as the forum goes, yeah, it's sucked as of late. Too much talk of which members don't belong and who should be banned. Lots of Doomworld-style dog-piling too. I considered leaving around DBP46 because it was getting pretty bad. Things were better in that DBP33-37 era, maybe with some folks leaving there'll be a bit more peace in the air. It's a bit hard to be involved with both the DBP stuff and the "forum game" but I agree that it's up to us members to create the content we want to see so I'll try to do my part to make the forum more fun. I think both the DBK split and this current one make it clear there's some need for camaraderie that isn't happening here on the forums. The discord seems to, well, cause discord, but I'm not sure what exactly the answer to that is. I don't know why but it felt like we had more of it back then.

I'm seeing a lot of talk about Joe being banned but I've also seen him online recently so I'm not sure what's really going on. 40oz, is he banned? DBP33 was really the first DBP I enjoyed working on (32 felt too cliquish) and it was DBP27 that lead me here in the first place so I guess I owe a lot of my participation here to Joe, it'd be sad to see him go. I don't know what happened in the discord or if things are too serious for any sort of reconciliation but if there's anything I can do to help mediate things, I'd be happy to help.

Welp

Going by the BANNED FOREVER text I doubt that his exile will last for long. Also Body Count: 02.

EDIT: lol i forgot the most important part. Yes he is banned.

Sorry it's been taking me so long to respond to this. I had to review the timeline of events to make sure I'm speaking in facts and not feelings. Sorry it's a lot of words, but I think this covers everything.

As you know, Joe ilya had run a few DBPs because he politely offered, which did give me a nice break. But when someone runs the project I started, you do have an elevated personal responsibility. My project exists to help aspiring doomer boards mappers grow and learn how to make good maps, and I need anyone who leads a DBP to also adopt that principle. Doomer boards is, for sure, a weird place with weird people. But as Doom fans I do believe it's best for everyone to focus attention on things and not at each other.

During my breaks leading DBP, I would check in on joe ilya's DBP from time to time and for the most part it was ok. Other times, I find his testing feedback to be rather terse, and lacking optimism in people's work, which I think noticeably hurts people's motivation to participate. I was particularly disturbed about his testing feedback for Silverminer in DBP44 That I had to write both of them seperate messages about it privately.



I wrote to silverminer that the way joe responded to his map is completely off-brand for the project and I'll make sure it never happens again. Then told joe that you don't get to treat people like this for making maps for your project. If you're dissatisfied with the quality of the submitted work, that's on you because you're the one that's supposed to be supplying the mappers with the motivation, the direction, and the resources to do a quality job and develop their mapping skills. If you don't like that then you should not be telling me you want to lead DBP when you clearly don't.

Regardless, joe-ilya double downed on his feedback saying that he believes silverminer doesn't care about the project and that he still wouldn't accept silverminer's map even if he followed the theme. This really irked me, as I really want to set a standard of elevating mappers and not tearing them down for not being good enough. I know a lot of artists, myself included, already have an extremely harsh inner critic and we don't need more of that coming from external sources, especially when I've been trying to build a community where you can be safe from that.

Since then I've been nagged in private messages by joe three additional times to grant him permission to run another DBP, which culminated with him waywardly making his own DBP thread in opposition to the DBP48 I put Kontra Kommando in charge of.

About DBP48, I know Kontra Kommando to be a talented content creator. He has lots of ideas and made many sprites and textures and I have always wanted to share his skills to the doom community through an accessible doom project such as DBP. His previous Aliens TC actually is very well received and he and his party put a lot of cool original content in it. I placed my bet on him making something really cool for DBP with free reign to do what he wants. There was an enormous potential for good there, but I'm fairly sure the attitudes in discord were already so fired up that they truced on a defacto boycott of DBP48 to guarantee he would fail. When Mayhem was consistently being dogpiled over every thread he made, Kontra Kommando elevated him as a mapper for his project. This is actually very much in line with the kind of attitudes I want to see in a leader. Meanwhile, joeilya was writing disparaging posts in the same thread.


This is a long game. Joe writes consistently negative and condescending posts towards me and other members on doomer boards to delineate doomer boards from the doomer boards discord channel (and doomer boards members he wants on his channel). Over the course of years, the discord chat would invite pervasive guessing games about what I must be thinking and doing. Some years go by, it starts to become a welcome side conversation to escalate it to anti-40oz and anti-doomer-boards talk. Then eventually, it succeeded what you saw here, a bunch of mindfucked doomer boards creators believing that only DBP is good and I'm an irredeemable psychopath who's solely responsible for everything that they ever hated about the doom community. I'm fairly sure there's going to be a lot of infighting in their group in the future without me being their common enemy anymore.

I do listen to people here when they vent out frustrations that would likely get you treated like a nut case in other parts of the internet. There's a lot of that on the internet because Doom modding is a weird niche hobby. It's ok if you can't always listen to people, but shutting people down and making them feel like assholes for doing it is very much at odds for what the Doomer Boards community forum should strive to be.

Joe ilya was very heavily and unfairly disparaged on doomworld in his early enthusiasm for Doom mapping, example here:


I do believe he was very harshly criticized and treated like a community pariah for wanting to help with as many community projects as he did. I was happy to have his help with DBPs and help boost him as a mapper to undo the previous reputation that tarnsman and the dw cool kids club permeated for him. I've had to be patient with his attitude most of the time to do this, but he should be able to do his own stuff on his own and get a lot of good feedback for it. It really sucks that what I got out of it was for him to recreate the way he was treated by doomworld here towards this community.

Heh. I remember when that happened. It wasn't a logical stance, but then again - it's good to remember that the people pushing these ideas are usually insane, brainwashed or both at once. As such, their opinion about anything is of no value. They're just hypocrites.

This one goes out to all those who drank the Kool-Aid!

I understand you exactly. It sucks when people don't treat you like a person. You are not your own ideas. And certainly not a troll for defending your friend. Especially when you are a content creator, it's everyone's own right to choose not to view that content if it doesn't sit well with them. It does not make you a terrible person.

I do programming in my own job so I know a little bit about how the adverse effects that some systems have can be attributed to errors, or be totally intentional. Like you, I do think there is a pretty big conglomeration about what is and isn't favorable on the internet that we don't get to see as users. It makes no sense that such boring content is so viral while others are completely invisible.

I'm back... again.

I want to be a productive member of the forum.

I want to avoid drama as much as possible.

I would like to work with people who are talented, and share my talents.

Let's focus on creating something beautiful.

@kontrakommando

Are you sure you're not that brazilian aping various people, though?