As I've told Josh and Nick S, yeah, I realize leaving such a post furthered such drama and made things worse. The thing is, I don't know what the correct thing do was, and leaving seemed to be the lesser of evils. Perhaps that was a poor choice on my part, but I felt that if nothing was done, eventually it would have built up to that anyway because of some of the things I'd been hearing.
I'll address Alex MW first.
Okay yeah, I was pissed off. And yeah, a lot of it was directed at you. Likely enough I was too confrontational with my reactions about it, and I apologize, especially for that 'get your head out of your ass' bit. But really, I entirely disagree with your views on competitive arguments. Is it part of the sport? Yeah, of course it is. But that doesn't mean it won't stir up tension between people. And from what I see, it's not the good 'just bugging you man' tension that wears off after a day or two. It's like a build-up of malice that completely destroys respect for other people over time.
An example, sadly, is Nick S and Josh (which is happily corrected now, though I wish it hadn't come to this). Nick S told me that he thought Josh was the most biased writer when it comes to ARC, and then there was the whole debacle about Parasite during Ruination: The Beginning. That was not 'friendly banter', there was real malice there. It just kind of snowballed, and then Nick S had to speak up about his bias. Perhaps you disagree with my views as well. Fine. People aren't going to agree with each other, so whatever. I respect that.
I will totally agree with you about my win record though, haha. Yeah, my win record has been absolutely ridiculous over the past few tournaments, and it is my honest opinion that my machines are the most boring, bland, utter cowpiles you'll find on the site. I'm just as surprised as any of you that ANY of them won anything. I don't even think SZF deserved to get his second title, but that was because of ToC. :P It might be because of the writers, sure, but no one thought of a real solution to it until now. I like your guys' idea of cycling through writers. I also very much like your idea of submitting your team to a non-competitor to post up at the deadline, which is a very clever idea and (again) can't believe no one voiced about it until now.
As for regrets, well... one of the biggest things I regret is the entire LoRE 1 debacle. Not only tidying up for Badnik (no offense) but the play-offs thing. That was a bad move on our part. We had like no judges at all besides Lian, Badnik was absent, and we couldn't contact any of you guys. Should we have waited? Postponed it for a bit? Yeah probably. But then again, most of the forum wanted the damn thing over with already, and so we hearkened to that.
Bias is something else I wanted to discuss. Are we inherently biased? I can't say. But I can tell you without a doubt that I don't give a shit if one of the bots I'm writing results for is a close friend of mine, like you or Josh or Lian, and the other guy is like playzooki or Mystic or even Minion33088, who I haven't been on close terms with at all really. I still write the results by the RPs. By the design. By the stats. It's really fucking stupid to assume that I'd favour someone over somebody else because I know them IRL. I think this is one of the reasons I left during ARC: Aftermath. People I think assumed I favoured Mobile Failure over S.W.A.T. because Tracy was my friend IRL, and that pissed me off big time. Then I saw the rewrite thread and decided that was it. LoRE1... I tried. Even if it was my own bot, I looked at it pretty much like any other bot. Yeah, it seemed shady, but again, we were in a tight spot.
The last thing I wanted to bring up... cloning bots? lmao... I really couldn't give two fucks. Yeah, I'll straight up admit I pretty much copied Square Wave and Hephaestus (though for the latter it was pretty much the axe :P), but that's okay. People are going to copy other bots and that's fine, because like Martijn said time ago, 99.9% of the bots out there are copies in same way. If an original concept comes along, and does well, it's going to get copied.
I'll just close this message to you out by saying you're still a cool guy and you're better than me regarding this stuff.
If you really feel I have such a high opinion of myself that I needed to say the things I did, you have another thing coming. I've always had low self-esteem, and a lot of people can vouch for me there, so that's that done.----
Lian, man...
I know you're not going to like hearing this. But I pretty much stand by everything, and I mean everything I've said to you regarding Crazy Bots.
The thing that bothered me was when you blatantly called me out on 'betraying you' or something crap like that. Where the flip does that come into anything? I had told you, over and over again, throughout the tournament, that you were really not doing a good job of running it. Now admittedly I might have went overboard, but this nonsense about betrayal really ticked me off. I did not once personally attack you. I called you out on being lazy and complacent regarding the tournament. How I feel about your tournament-running capacity means dick about how I feel about you as a person. You're one of my closest friends and I've known you now for over 5 years, maybe even 6. All the fault I can find in you is that your hosting skills aren't up to scratch. How is that a personal attack? Come on...
And I didn't leave because of the game. I left because several people were taking this too seriously and it wasn't fun anymore. Whatever, I'm back now I guess. I'll take the FF losses, but let me tell you that I don't like how the situation was handled before that.
This is quite literally a terrible way to close out. Alex V at first refused to meet with you on a Saturday because you wrote him a loss. That riled me up. That's so fucking retarded, no one should go into such a blind rage over a game that they feel the need to break away from being friends with someone. That is atrocious. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Don't do this. It's not worth it. It's really not. I do apologize if I've offended you in anyway, but really, this is a mistake.
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Josh, Nick S...
Yeah I'm sorry but both you guys got me irritated as well. And yeah, these things go back since Ruination 1, to the things I've already mentioned. They just kind of snowballed. My impression is that Nick S was so biased against Josh that he refused to take a single loss Josh gave him lightly, and that Josh was incredibly passive-aggressive against him in return. That's what I interpreted up to 2 or 3 days ago. Then the post regarding Josh's bias against him sprung him. I'll admit, that was a huge part of my leaving.
Let me just take some time to say that I pretty much trust every writer that I've taken on (maybe with the exception of Lian, but I will admit he's gotten a hell of a lot better than he was at first) to an almost pristine level. That's why I took both Josh and Nick S, along with Alex MW, under my wing as Ruination 3 writers, because I trust them implicitly. Were there a few matches of theirs I wasn't happy about? Of course! Nobody likes losing, but you fucking get over it and move on. So what Nick S did to Josh was almost an accusation that I had questionable taste in taking on writers, which I felt was a big insult.
I went to you about this, Nick, and it seemed to die down, we had a good discussion about it. That cheered me up a fair amount. And then the next day I get wind of you talking about this in the RB chat, where neither me or Josh can speak our pieces. That was pretty much it. Whatever your intentions were, I didn't feel they were very good, so I gave up with trying to make peace between people and just left. There. That's why I left. Because stupid crap like that was going on, or so I thought it was. Obviously now I know I got the wrong impression, since you and Josh totally straightened things out.
So basically I'd just like to offer some big apologies to both you guys, since leaving probably wasn't the most mature thing to do. But again, it seemed the lesser of evils and I believed it would have drawn to that eventually anyway.
I'd also like to apologize to everyone else for this huge fuss. Especially Badnik since he's been on the brink of having a nervous breakdown. I didn't mean to put you through that all, Badnik.
----
One more thing I'd like to mention is that I kind of feel I've blown my responsibilities as an admin, so if you guys feel I've trashed that then I'll step down, even from being a mod. I feel I have, but eh.
