I'm sure you lads have gotten your fill of veegee griefing but I think it's worth saying anyways, as someone who has done most of their playing on that server (as well as some code and asset contributions), upwards of a thousand, I never counted. I've felt the tug of SS13 at the back of my mind, yet even veegee is a place I'm sick of, I won't even start on the rest of the servers, fuck that noise.
Discord absolutely ruins communities, this I agree with wholeheartedly. However, a community cannot hope to organize or further build on imageboards alone, whether it be by building the codebase, discussing bans or features, or just shooting the shit and discussing the game. SS13 is in an extremely unique position both in how it is hosted, how it is moderated, and how it is developed, and when I see
>0 players online
I can't help but feel this entire game is collapsing under the esoteric development process and the hordes of teegeeveegee trannies that treat it as their personal Girl Pretender Club. Long gone are the days you had to worry about someone who was too good at the game, now it's people who ultimately loiter in the space and really don't provide anything interesting or fun, certainly not because there's a lack of things to do with the game either. Trannies will sit around pretending to be a rat woman with a horse penis or something and get mad when you say it's not really your thing.
I HATE how the HRT menace has come to dominate any argument on the internet. There's no such thing as a tranny free space and every disagreement boils down not to any actual argument, but to how transphobic someone may have been. A literal religion that revolves around sycophancy and narcissism.
I was friends with a few of those veegee trannies. Oh, they're on 4chan, they like the same game as me, they can't be that bad, I said to myself. I genuinely started considering them pretty alright, even if they rarely ever actually wanted to play the game or discuss anything to do with improving it. Then the backstabbing and emotional dumping started. Me me me, I I I, muh dysphoria, muh validation, muh euphoria, I was astounded how selfish they became once they felt comfortable enough to drop the facade of friendliness. They are genuinely some of the worst people you'll ever meet and they are a social poison. I can't play online games or use social media because their constant victimhood and gaslighting makes me fucking ill and I can't swallow my feelings in the interest of 'keeping the peace', the fact that they want to cut off their dicks is completely nonissue at this point, it could be literally anything but it's the way they choose to conduct themselves and smother conversations and communities that makes them insufferable.
And yet, even then, maimed and tired and cornered as we are, we cannot sequester ourselves in the hopes that this new religion will eventually go away, somehow—I don't have 20 years to spare to wait until they all die of heart failure. There are people outside of image boards who like this game, but not what it's become, though perhaps might be scared off by the mention of 4chan or a few no-no words. While I cannot provide immediate and concrete solutions, and while I understand the reflexive revulsion towards the erosion of anonymity in the pursuit of making all spaces Safe and Valid™, a platform like a forum or an IM platform like Telegram or something should not be discounted outright either. There should always be a space to shout NIGGER and generally be disagreeable, but at what point have we created an echo chamber of our own, once we've scared everyone else away? Hell, even if you went ahead and used Discord, and inevitably some faggot with a picrew avatar and a pedo flag shows up, do you start pelting him with insults and giving him reason to try to ruin our fun? Fuck no, you silently ban/mute/shadowban that kike, erase any of his semitic bullshit he brought with him, and ban anyone who complains with him. We can be The Cooler /vg/, but perhaps it may be best to find ways to hide our power levels in the interest of finding new friends, while at the same time filtering out the people who've ruined this game and the internet as a whole.
I'm unsure if I'll contribute or play at all, but I still think this was worth saying, and to people who might be able to appreciate my rambling and get something of value out of it.