I've been quiet for a long time. Too long. And I know some of you have been wondering where I went, why I stepped back, why the game you loved stopped getting updates, why the community feels like a ghost town patrolled by hall monitors with pronoun badges.

I'm going to tell you the truth. The whole truth. And they're going to try to lock this thread the second it goes up.

It started small. It always starts small. A few new faces on staff. A few "community guidelines" that seemed reasonable on the surface. Don't be hateful. Be inclusive. Sure. Fine. Nobody's arguing with that. But then you blink and suddenly you can't say anything. You can't joke. You can't breathe. You post a meme that was funny in 2012 and four moderators descend on you like it's a war crimes tribunal.

I watched it happen in real time and I said nothing. That's my sin. I own that.

But let me tell you who was driving it. Who was always driving it.

Icky.

Now I want to be very careful here because I know how these people operate. The second you name names they run to their little discord servers and start screenshotting and crying and making you out to be the monster. So let me be clear: I'm not saying Icky is a bad person deep down. What I'm saying is that Icky became the instrument of an ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with what this game was, what this community was, and what it was always meant to be.

Toribash was built on freedom. You could be weird here. You could be loud here. You could be yourself here. That was the whole point. This was not a sanitized corporate product. This was a game made by people who thought it was funny to ragdoll a guy into a thousand pieces and call it art. We didn't have an HR department. We had a forum. And it was glorious.

And then the left got in. And I don't mean politically left, though yes, also that. I mean the ideology. The one that can't tolerate a single dissenting voice. The one that calls disagreement harassment. The one that looks at a twenty-year-old community with thousands of hours of history and friendship and in-jokes and sees only a problematic space that needs to be reformed.

Icky didn't build this community. Icky didn't stay up until 3am debugging ragdoll physics. Icky didn't hold this place together through three server migrations and two near-bankruptcies. But Icky sure did figure out how to make the people who did all that feel unwelcome in their own home.

Good members — legendary members, people who had been here since the beginning, people who made things and contributed and made everyone laugh — were pushed out. Quietly at first. A ban here. A warning there. A little pile-on in the thread until the person just got tired and left. And every time it happened the official line was the same: "They violated community guidelines." "They were being toxic." "We had no choice."

They always have no choice, have you noticed that? It's never a decision. It's always just the rules. Funny how the rules always seem to land on the same people.

I tried to push back internally. I want you to know that. There were conversations. There were arguments. I was told I was "out of touch." I was told the community had "evolved." I was told — and I will never forget this — that some of the old guard "weren't a good fit for where we're trying to go."

Where we're trying to go.

This is my game. I made this. And I was being told some of the people I'd known for fifteen years weren't a good fit for where we're trying to go.

That's when I knew it was over. Not because the game died. Games don't die from lack of updates. Games die when the soul gets ripped out of them. And the soul of this game was its community, and the community was being methodically purged of anyone who didn't pass the ideological purity test.

So I stepped back. What else could I do. Fight? Against what? You can't fight people who control the narrative. You can't fight people who will call you a bigot for pointing out that things used to be better. You can't fight people whose entire strategy is to make you look crazy for noticing what they're doing.

But I notice. I always noticed.

And so did you. That's why you're still here, reading this. Because you remember what this place was. You remember when it was fun. You remember when you could log in and just be yourself and laugh and fight and make dumb videos and nobody was keeping score on your opinions.

They took that from us. Not neglect. Not time. Not the market. They took it deliberately and they called it progress.

I don't know what comes next. Maybe nothing. Maybe this thread gets nuked in twenty minutes and I get a very polite message about how this kind of post "doesn't reflect our community values." Maybe the three people still active in the discord get told to keep their distance from me.

But I needed to say it. For everyone who got quietly shown the door. For everyone who got their post history combed through for a reason to ban them. For everyone who got labeled and dismissed and pushed out of a place they loved.

You weren't the problem. You were the point.

They needed you gone so they could have this place to themselves. A perfectly moderated, perfectly inclusive, perfectly dead community where nobody says anything interesting because nobody's allowed to.

Congratulations, Icky. You got exactly what you wanted.

The rest of us will remember what it was.

— sir

first

Second

We remember Sir, we remember, thank you for saying out loud what a LOT of people think deep down.

i miss wibbles.

Sir the GOAT!

w Kane

Don't let Icky's Spinner distract you from the truth that is the tyrrany which lies behind closed doors.

Thank you, sir. Your service will not be forgotten. O7

BANGER FUCKIN THREAD