gais i'm leaved the mb community 😢

Stop!! Don't think any further! Before you get any more silly stupid ideas, take note that that typo in the title (the second one (well I guess both of them but the second one specifically kinda changes the meaning)) is very intentional. I'm not leaving by any means. This post is about the sort of hiatus I've been taking from the MB community over the last couple months, whether you've noticed it or not. (And, if you haven't, that's just more evidence that there's no point to those superfluous leaving posts that this is based on )

But yeah, speaking of which... I definitely didn't want to make an official "gais I'm leaving the MB community 😢" post because 1. There's been a million of those that have been nothing but attention-seeking, 2. There's been a million of those that just wound up being nothingburgers anyway (with some significant overlap with the first point), 3. I just didn't see a point to it anyway, 4. I didn't/don't know if that's what I really wanted, and is more of just kind of a matter of "I don't really feel like interacting with Marble Blast right now, and so I simply won't at the moment", same as coming away from any other interest, and 5. I didn't know if I even really did want to take a proper hiatus or anything, and I didn't want to feel like I was forcing myself into it because I made an official leaving statement and now I'd have to officially "come back" whenever I want to again. And... honestly, for anyone else that wants to make one of those leaving posts, all of those are probably pretty good points that apply to just about anyone too.

So... Well then, why am I making this post now? Well... Originally, I started talking about some of the reasons that I felt like I wanted to stray away from the MB community for a while... But, after I got started, I realized that I guess there's kind of a lot to say... A lot to go in-depth about. And it's a bit of a slightly heavier (and potentially more ✨drama-inducing✨) topic that kind of befits the forums more than it does the Discord general chat. That, and... NF jumped at the opportunity to get someone to make a forum post I wouldn't have really thought of this without him. But I actually think that was a good idea this time. So now I'm here.

Let me just start now by recapping what I had already said on Discord...
My absence pretty much just started as taking a short break after all the business of me pretty much being at the center of 2.11.0. Making sure to set up all of the new multiplayer maps to everyone's liking, and also making sure to get it all out before the 2025 Winter Warmup tournament. Around that time, however, some of my irl friends jumped into the MB server. I think it's just because one of them felt like playing Marble Blast again for some reason. But, after checking out the server for a little while, they very quickly came to a consensus about everyone there, and had some very select things to say. Some things that I had definitely seen in the rest of the community myself, but just kind of figured I was the odd one out about... But, then, after hearing what they said, and also after I had started shifting some more of my focus into some other communities... It showed me that it kind of really is the larger MB community that's all just the same flavor of... special, about certain things.

Normally, as the old saying goes, if you think everyone else is the problem, then it's probably you that's the real issue. Throughout the years, I never let what anyone in the MB community said harm my personality or my sense of humor. And that turned out to be the right answer all along (unsurprisingly). Because... there are lots of problems that the (modern) MB community has with things that I never see any other community really display themselves. The size of the community doesn't matter. The core topic that the community surrounds doesn't really matter. Not even the general nebulous political orientation that tends to coalesce around any and all online communities affects this. Small or large, active or inactive, niche or popular, and regardless of position on the political compass... The MB community stands alone with the specific attitude towards a lot of things that its members seem to harbor...

Now... What exactly is this attitude that I speak of? Well... It's a bit difficult to pin down. But that's a lot of the reason why I'm making this post. To note down all of my thoughts regarding this topic, including my general history with it, and to share it with the class. My irl friends said that the MB community seemed very "Reddit", but I wouldn't say that that's the case. It... seems to be vaguely analogous to the vibe that I'm picking up on?  But that's far from being the real truth in itself.

I'll come back to this idea in a second, but, before I do, I really want to point out the outliers here. By pointing out the people that I'm not talking about, this kind of turns this into a callout post about anyone who isn't here... But, uh, idk, get fucked I guess But for real, uh... There are quite a few very respectable people in the MB community all around. People like RandomityGuy, Doomblah, Keppy, Kalle, NF, thearst, ShadowVisions... All very sensible people who I feel really just have a genuine sense of objectiveness about them, and can really actually be relied on to make good decisions about things... And, also in this list of outliers, are... Exactly the sort of people that seem to draw the ire of the wider MB community. For no particular reason. People who seem to just naturally spark whatever trigger the MB community has for its insufferable migraines. Which is another one of those things I'd like to talk about here. People like Ultra, Jojo, or, perhaps most notably, SummerArmy, who, through the MB community's own incredible mind meld, seem to give off a passive aura of enragement and discontent simply by existing. (And... maybe this is a bit unfounded of me. And I have the pleasure of saying that I don't quite feel this so much anymore. But... for a long time, I really felt this same attitude about myself as well. I'll... come back to this later.) And, although this is long before my time, and certainly long before 2017 (I'll touch on why 2017 later), I can't help but wonder if this same sort of thing rang true for people like Luke Skywalker and TheSphere as well? TheSphere's supposed "incriminating evidence" is that he... really liked forum games, and tried starting games of hangman, or... the really shit Wall Destroyer game where the wall was actually just invincible lmao. But is that really that much of a crime? That TheSphere lives forever in infamy in this community simply for making a shitass forum game that no one had to pay any attention to? Does that make him a villain?
(uhhhhh this doesn't apply to people like mikesan or hailey or 3f or whatever they were causing actual genuine problems but please like actually think for a few minutes about what's a genuine issue like this and what's not)

There's also one more noteworthy outlier who still buzzes around the MB community on occasion to this day... One person who still outwardly holds the key to what originally made the MB community what it really is. What really made it special. What gave it its personality. But this is something I'll cover again later. (There's definitely a whole lot of this "I'll come back to that later" business going on here, but, goddamn, I just have so much I want to cover, so many feelings about the MB community from over the years that I'm finally feeling vindicated about, and I can only cover one topic relating to it at once if I don't want to be going all over the place constantly, and want to retain any semblance of continuity and legibility)

(Actually, after getting to the end of this post, I didn't really have anywhere great to put this. Last bastion of the 2016 community? Well, there were 3 people kinda at the core of what 2016 was for us, and noby's not really around anymore, so that leaves you with a 50/50 shot. And, if you guessed hPerks, then I have some rather unfortunate news for you. ...It's Kurt, I'm talking about Kurt. He's chill. I don't.. really actually have a lot to say about that, I thought I might have more. But I'll talk more about 2016 soon enough.)

Now, relating to both of the last two paragraphs before this previous one... I surmise, that this "Reddit"-ness... comes from the community's general lack of a sense of humor. How incredibly stuck-up the community as a whole really is about... all sorts of things. And, honestly, as I write this part, I realize that this "stuck-up"-ness actually kind of extends to quite a lot of things... More than just humor. Now, I won't fault anyone for not enjoying SummerArmy's antics. I won't fault anyone for being genuinely unpleasantly disgusted at Jojo calling forth his spectacular smegmatic supernova of pissy peepee jeefnuggies all over the chat. And I'm not asking anyone to be filled with glee at the prospect of having the privilege to endlessly develop new technology to have 0 damage done to the wall more efficiently than ever before. No one genuinely needs to dive into the deep conspiracy of what the number 710 has to do with why k-pop artists stuffed those children into animatronic suits in order to connect the player's SOUL to the DELTARUNE survey program or whatever the fuck. But... people here get almost violent at seeing people just... fucking around. Having fun. No one makes any jokes anymore. What's the last new community inside joke that you can remember (that wasn't just making fun of Enzone or toonsfan for getting really mad during anniversary events, or everyone rather ironically getting really mad at SummerArmy immediately after)? I get that the inner machinations of SummerArmy's mind don't really amount to much to anyone else, but there's no problem with that. The proper response is to notice that he's just fucking around and doing his own thing, and to just let him do whatever the fuck he's doing on his own. Not to send him to the shadow realm to maybe finally play Super Mario Bros. Wonder in peace. And certainly not to throw an actual Caillou-level babyrage at our brilliant Korean poster boy. Ralph. Everyone go point and laugh at Ralph. I get that the endless spew of slop from small children pollutes the "newest first" area of Marbleland. But this is a logistical problem that's going to plague any custom level browser. The proper response is to develop a way to highlight actual minimum-quality levels over those ones. Not to just sit around and complain about what everyone already knows, and to just hope that makes the children go away. And certainly not to make an entire custom level whose sole purpose is to passive-aggressively harp on the musings of little children through unavoidable help text and level title in an otherwise perfectly palatable little custom we could put on the leaderboards without it. Connie. Everyone go point and laugh at Connie.

While I'm here, I guess I'll comment on what else I was talking about before regarding the community being "stuck up" about a bunch of other things. This is mostly relating to custom levels I guess? Uh, every singleplayer level that isn't just a linear path with the same 5 cool marble tricks in different permutations gets downvoted to hell. Oh, and it has to cross over itself at some point and god forbid it uses any PQ features, no matter how well. And no moving parts other than just riding a moving platform where you have to dodge some things. And every multiplayer level is either Sprawl, or it gets gutted of everything it has and gets turned into Sprawl. At least be more fun about it, I mean, I look up "Sprawlification" on my favorite art browsing website and get 0 results. Get on it. Yeah that's kinda all I have to say about it, but it's kinda dumb that PQ has been out for 8 years and yet I can probably still count the number of genuine [non-Normal or Hunt gamemode here] customs on my hands. And that's not even talking about the decade+ run that Co-op's had. There is one dedicated Co-op custom level that isn't one of the two that come packaged with PQ on the leaderboards (shut up the Doors series isn't Co-op we just don't know what to do with it at this point without just taking it off of the leaderboards. Why it was put there to begin with is one of the many great mysteries of the original Platinum Team's decision making)

Uhhhh, so what next? Well... Let me begin this next section by talking about something that Kalle just brought up in Discord all on his own, after I mentioned the "Reddit" feel that my irl friends talked about in the Discord. To quote him directly... Ahehehehehehemm... "this community is thankfully nowhere near as bad as reddit. I'll be honest that a big problem imo is that the past staff team fostered a culture that I didn't like which is still kind of permeating everything. it went from early internet fun (ordered) anarchy to a forced le hecking wholesome 100 culture under higuy and derpking." Then there are some things about merging some other channels into #general (to be discussed further in a different forum thread than this one), ultimately culminating in "a more wild and free general[...]would be great. which might bring back the incredible atmosphere from the noby server"

All of this stuff that Kalle had to say here also echoes some sentiments that I could never properly bring into words myself. Especially since I only had about a year of context for what the community was like before HiGuy's PQ server since I joined in June 2016. But... well, that's exactly it. "The incredible atmosphere from the noby server"? "What the community was like before HiGuy's PQ server"? It... kind of goes without question as a unanimously recognized fact that this was a huge and abrupt turning point for the community at large. I don't need to be the one to introduce this to you. What Kalle mentioned as "early internet fun [of] (ordered) anarchy" is exactly what noby's server used to be. This is where all the community's greatest inside jokes came from, even to this day. The JoJ. u. The corner corner. The countless jokes that spawned from games of Cards Against Humanity. Everything from hPerks' Best of MB on Google Drive. Correct me if I'm wrong, (because honestly I might be, especially with the corner corner thing) but... this is where all of this fun community stuff happened. Where the lifeblood of the community itself was born. Where people actually stuck around because they wanted to, not just because it's the only place to talk about Marble Blast. People... had fun back in 2016. Everyone was just hanging around and having a great time together. Everyone, that is, except for Matan and the rest of the mods. Or something. I think. idk. Go read up on the original La HoHSiStance from 2016. Although 2021 is kinda similar too. 

The old Platinum Team, for whatever reason, hated all of this. Don't ask me why. They referred to all of it as "spam", making it all out to be completely meaningless, and, once PQ released, cast it all away when they made their own server with their own rules. And honestly, I'm willing to bet it's all simply because it didn't all innately have to do with MB. They didn't want people to be in the community just because they wanted to be. They wanted the MB community to just be about MB. Everything else, everyone just having fun for the sake of it... was just labelled as "spam", and wasn't allowed in their server. The new hub for everything Marble Blast. Oh, and by "everything Marble Blast", I mean literally just PQ. If there's anything that has changed since then, it's that we can all actually talk about other things like the Webport and OpenMBU now. I don't think it was entirely disallowed before? Though that could be wrong? But, at the very least, for whatever reason... it was all frowned upon. Don't ask why.

But, now, since 2021, all of that's changed. The Marble Blast server is in the community's hands. PlatinumQuest is in the community's hands. We could bring it all back. Just have fun doing what we want to do, being our own community, being friends with each other instead of just people who play Marble Blast together... But no. This attitude's stuck around. And this is another part of what I think leads into that lack of humor that just keeps coming up again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. GOD does it keep coming up. And I am not just talking about this forum post. The old mods rewrote the old community, making everything just revolve around Marble Blast, and putting a poor taste in everyone's mouth at any modicum of intrinsic value for the community itself. This is where that old argument of putting #marbleblast above the general channels comes from. This is why #marbleblast even exists in the first place (although honestly it's not a horrible idea, some people really do just want to talk about Marble Blast and can't do that when other people are busy enforcing the 710+ age limit).

But... this doesn't need to be how the community is. This is a lot of the reason I think I wound up just... Yeah. Frankly, being sick of the community for a little while. Maybe not consciously. I didn't leave the community because I knew I was annoyed. But, once I had taken a bit of a break from developing PQ... once I had focused on other things and seen what other communities can be like... once I had heard what my irl friends had to say immediately upon interacting with our community without even needing to spend any time there... God was it vindicating. All of the repression of any attempt at joking and memeing around. All the repression of any creative ideas that weren't the one thing people had already played over and over again. All of the people refusing to just let the community be together, forcing the PQ server to be about nothing but PQ, and forcing any offshoot servers to just be a tiny group that doesn't welcome anyone who's not already a friend... Fuck, man. This just doesn't happen anywhere else. Communities about modding any other game, communities surrounding any sort of content creator regardless of their product, communities that exist just around people who like a certain topic, communities about helping people learn certain skills, even communities surrounding other pieces of old software that fell out of fashion years and years ago... 

This doesn't happen anywhere else. I don't know. I don't know, man. This is... I'm gonna be honest, this forum post right here is the result of me finally learning how to actually talk with people in recent years, finally getting to a point in the MB community where I can actually have a real voice and be heard... and releasing 8-9 years of frustration and absolute shit with what happened to this community out onto the page. And I think NF for encouraging me to put this somewhere that I can write extra long-form, and get each and every one of my thoughts out before hitting send... 

Honestly, looking at everything all at once now, I was never this vehemently opposed to what the old mods had done. Which is not to say that I didn't think it was bad. But, looking at all the facts and all the feelings and all the history from over the last decade... It's unmistakable now. The old mods poisoned the community, and it still has yet to fully heal. It's been good since 2021. It's been serviceable. The new moderation team has done a perfect job of keeping everything civil, making sure nothing else goes wrong, making sure that everything keeps running, and all that good stuff. In no way am I accusing anyone of inaction (malicious or otherwise) when it comes to bringing the community back to its roots. Well... I guess its roots would be GarageGames, and then ProBoards, but... Its first roots from when Marble Blast was truly its own self-sustaining thing, driven by its own community, even just for a brief moment in 2016.

But now...

I guess... This is a call to action to everyone. I was originally going to leave this on a more inspirational note? Sometime during that one paragraph 3 paragraphs ago before I stopped discussing my observations and just started straight up venting. Like Among Us, guys, it's funny. But... After all this buildup, all this explanation, all this... finally getting everything out into one place, on one page... 

This isn't here just to leave a vague feeling of "Hey, we can do something! Cool! ^w^" No. Let's get our community back. Let's cultivate a place where we can just fuck around and have fun. Let's all, everyone, individually be better about, just... Hanging out with each other! Being in the Marble Blast Community Discord Server together, as friends. As, well, a community! There's no reason to keep all of our fun hangouts to separate spaces anymore. We have our own space. A community-owned server with a community-developed game where active community members lead the charge. Having fun isn't spam anymore. Making jokes isn't bad anymore. We can fuck around and be casual and enjoy each others' presence as a goddamn community however damn well we please.

So... uh...
(Man, this turned into a little bit more than I originally meant it to be, but boy am I glad...)

Yeah. Uh. 
hey guys i'm back from my break maybe

Thanks for making this post. You've got some valuable insights that I had technically thought of but just never really paid much attention to because of my distaste for certain aspects of nobody's server.

I agree that certain people overreact to SummerArmy, and I think the mod team has been extremely fair to him throughout the years. As for TheSphere, I don't think he was a villain, he was just really annoying with the threads he made. He made many game threads and spammy threads (most notably "Count to ∞!" ), not to mention putting annoying spam in other threads as well. But maybe that's just my anti-spam personality.

Kurt, nobody, and hPerks certainly did define the 2016 community. And I think you've helped me realize that in my own thinking, I've been too harsh on nobody's server, only remembering the bad parts about it and not the good parts. The spam and constant referencing of the same stale jokes got on my nerves to no end, and the adult content was not good either, but when neither of those things were happening, it was actually a fun place to have casual discussions. nobody in particular was always so fun and easy to talk to, and Kurt was always a laugh, while having a lot of knowledge about the community and valuable opinions behind the bantz. I think that era fully died when the old staff decided to ban nobody just because he got on their nerves. That was certainly a turning point for me, and I enjoyed the community far less after that.

You did say "no one makes jokes anymore" immediately after making a joke about the current community, that was kind of funny

However, I do agree with your main point that the attitude of the old staff has lived on past their departure, and that it is completely up to us to change that if we want to. Kalle29 in particular does a great job of keeping casual discussion going in #general. But the continued prevalence of offshoot servers means that so much of the interesting discussion between people who are actually civilized adults who have fully-developed senses of humor goes on behind closed doors. I don't often feel like I'm missing out because I try not to think too much about that, but when I really stop and think, I imagine there's so much fun stuff that probably happens in other places closed to the public community. A huge part of what made 2016 so... memorable was that even though there was so much spam and other bad stuff, at least everyone was included (and also they still used the forums regularly as well as the Discord). I'd be totally open to people talking more and having fun more in the main server and forums, but I kind of feel like that's not going to easily happen as long as offshoot servers exist. Please feel free to prove me wrong though.

Another idea: a lot of the good jokes came from Cards Against Humanity. Maybe we could have community games like that as well. No one is stopping us from doing that, but to my knowledge it hasn't happened in many years. Games are a great way to connect with other people like that. (MB community cribbage tournament when?)

But yeah, thanks for this post. I really appreciate being prompted to think about things differently than I have in the past, if at all. Even as an introvert, I love casual interaction with friends, and I've grown up with the MB community and met some amazing people here. I'd love to interact with you people as friends do, and not just to be restricted to talking about the game.

I'm glad to hear more about TheSphere, because I genuinely don't really know exactly what happened.

As for more community games, I (and I think maybe some others) have absolutely tried to host games like this in the past. But it never works. I don't know what's up with that. There was one singular time where I got, like, 4 people including myself for a single game of CaH, and everyone involved said it was loads of fun.
Aside from CaH, I do think Gartic Phone or skribbl.io would be lots of fun as well.

i do remember playing gartic phone in vc once years ago, and it was a lot of fun, im pretty sure thats where the "SIGN HIIIIIIIIIT" got revived from

As pointed out by Yoshi, I have thought for a long time that the culture of the old mod team severely hurt the the atmosphere of the community. It killed off the humour, the memes, the memorable moments, and maybe worst of all - the sense of community. When the official server was made, several breakout servers were immediately made since the new corporate feeling of the new server was quite frankly not wanted. I also think that people kind of went along with it since it's basically how you're "supposed" to run a Discord server (in the eyes of the masses)

However, I will repeat some key points I have observed over the years:
1. Discord servers that are restrictive in what they allow are almost universally more boring than those that are more free.
2. Separating the chat into many separate channels rarely does the community any good. It fragments the conversations - not allowing them to flow naturally, and it also has a vague sense of strict and unfun order when you need to think of what channel to post stuff in. Servers are best if people just come in and post whatever they think about in #general. Because that makes it more active and more lively.
3. Some people might not like the changes towards a less restricted server, but it's a necessary step in order to make the community better.

My first and most important suggestion is to make the discord server far less restrictive, make a #general-3 channel and let it be basically like the old noby server that encouraged jokes, memes, and memorable moments.

I have more suggestions about the server, like how we can focus more on the general channels rather than separate threads that never actually start conversations. The only thread I post in is the football one, and it has a stronger case for being a channel than the Minecraft one we currently have.

And I also agree that people severely overreact to SummerArmy, if you find him annoying you can just block, it's literally that easy. And as far as hosting games goes, it's quite hard in any community server, people live in different time zones, people have different moods, etc. But generally, whenever it does happen properly, it tends to be a big success.

And my final point, having the server be only about the game is a bad idea. The game should serve as the glue that keeps us all together, but the main topic of discussion in the server can be anything. The servers that follow this premise are by far the most fun to be in. It gives everyone freedom to create a proper community culture while also having something in common with everyone else.