there is nothing wrong in having cults around mods, if anything it will benefit everybody, including new players, since if mod have it's "cultists" new players (even tho will feel a bit alienated at first) will find players to look up to and some "best enemies" they want to be alike. good example will be muself as kicklifter brown belt after playing with 5th dan players who used suplexes on me and how much they did impressed me, so i was trying to get better and suplexing like obsessed. or guys like chlebicek, holo, lazors during their brown-black belt time after playing with fl0w in aikido become quite descent quite fast, or even better example,
there was a time when extremely hard approachable "cultist" mod aikido7.tbm was in rotation on public aikido server. ofc as always you had a shallow mass of scrubs, but there were gems too, like chris937 who i never played with, yet he is way better than me and he learned the mod without much of influence, as it is in the wild. that unaproachable cultist mod, without any assistance, just like HiPower and some more.

there will be always scrubs and there always be gems, no matter how high or low you will try to set average skill entry. the only difference is average skill in the end.

there are 2 types of players

first join server and get rekd, but instead of being butthurt, he look at these higher dan "cultists" he play with and learn from them rapidly. this type is the one that stays in toribash for long, like 10 dans +/-

another type is the one that joins server, get rekd and instead of learning from them he choose to switch mod to something fun, like twinsowrd or mushu, since it doesn't require much and it's fonny. this type of folk don't stay active for long, like black belt or so.

if anybody from staff who said that their intentions to make toribash more esport-ish is serious, then fighting against "cults" is counterproductive. since afterall these "cults" are making the very ground for competative play because consider mods and gameplay more serious and inspire more people to git gut and become "cultists" aswell. the only issue is when cultists may act like dicks, but it's easy avoidable from both sides, for cultists to understand that they were scrubs once and interact with more patience and for scrubs to be less ignorant and demonstrate "i'm so rebel" "i don't care" behavour or even worse, talk about rights and freedom, since none of these things exist.

tl;dr
having and creating cults based around mods is beneficial in establishing more serious additude towards game and preparing ground to make it more esport-ish.
giving players run for their money by creating sophisticated mods and using them for tourneys/events is a great way to give players incentive to get better. some people will always complain that it's too hard, but hey, there will be players like that always no matter how much you will try to lower the skill bar. want tc - make a run for it.


in any case, a question: when point based mods are going to be promoted by staff? there are endless possibilities of useage score points based system for competative play, yet we see none.