I used to play Toribash back in 2009-2010 when artists like Gabiel, Mrama, and Vermine were active in texturing and I gotta say.. Where has all the art and skill gone? Even besides these elite artists, there were TONS of people making their own textures too and a good amount of it looked good even if they weren't "Toribash famous". The art market was booming.

Now? I check the art/textures board and the first page still has the same topics on it that it had yesterday, some of them still without a reply. Artists like Advens (no offense, sorry, your work is good but not THAT good) get away with selling sets for a high price whereas back in the day his sets would probably go for a lot cheaper because it seemed standard that people made art as good as his work. Just an example.

I can't even think of many good set makers that exist right now. Zwift, 00Assassin00, Advens.. They're all good but it's like I can hardly think of other names. Who's considered the best? Flyingmonk is, yet I personally feel with the amount of c/p used his sets look like way too much detail to care.. meaning there's too many small things and lines, I can't even tell what's going on outside of the head. Sets back then didn't have to have explicit detail to be great. On a side note.. I personally think Ezeth makes the coolest sets currently. I've only seen three, but they're all fully jointed and there's just enough detail to be right without going overboard. Pretty cool.

Where has the art gone, guys? Is Toribash dying or some shit? We need to get the art back.

At it's peak? Like I said, there's a few new topics on the texture board a day; maybe a full page with some filler on a good day.. And even less actually good sets a day. I know you think Veoo is someone to watch out for, and he can make pretty good robot heads and I've only seen him improve but he's a friend of mine and he told me he hates making sets. He doesn't know how to map them properly and really doesn't have the interest. I feel this limits him.

Zwift is indeed a good artist and I can't say much negative about him, but if you think Veoo and Zwift contend against many of the artists Marci just posted, I'm sorry but I have to strongly disagree. Have you ever seem the work of Gabiel? Vitiek? Vermine? Mrama? Aveance? Pate5? Even artists that I don't like the work of I can still see they're amazing artists. For something to be at it's peak means it would have to be at it's best. What we're seeing now isn't the best; It's good, but it comes in small quantities at what I feel is long intervals and it's not "peak-worthy" I believe.

You can argue that sets back then were made with simple colors and contrast, but arguing with logic doesn't take away the fact that they just looked better anyway. :P

Disclaimer: no offense at all to Zwift or Veoo. Veoo is a friend of mine and makes good heads. I actually own a Zwift head and have expressed interest in owning a set made by him in the past.

But I also said that there were many artists that weren't big names and they still made quality art. There were artists back then that had the same quality art as Zwift and Advens that weren't big names; that's why the Art/Textures board was so great back then. Not only did you have the more famous artists putting out bitchin' sets, but you had many other artists who still had quality work that sold their sets much more frequently than people are selling today. Quantity=/=quality, but when you can have both, it trumps what we have today.

I'm posting here again because I want to show how bad the problem is. Check these two threads in the art board out.

http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=536583
http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=527188

Both of these users are looking for high quality art; both have gotten to page 3 and the best posted was an Aveance set that they didn't want because, ironically for the situation of there not being much good NEW, it's been passed around so much. The posts in these threads are slow going and nothing much is getting accomplished. Will they find good quality art? Maybe, there's a good possibility. But the rate at which they will is very slow and there's just.. nothing new going on.

I think that there should be events that encourage texture making to bring up new artists and allow them to realize their abilities / bring back old artists.

How do we get more new people to play, then? I've gone on chat sites / talked to people on skype and hardly any of them know about Toribash. Maybe.. 1/10 people I talk to know what it is. I'm not sure that making more forum events / competitions would bring people who don't know what Toribash is in. Would we truly have to do something stupid like advertise the game to somebody like PewDiePie? Would we want to do that? Does Hampa even have the budget to do any kind of big advertising on this game? Would Toribash 5.0 bring people in?

So.. This game is going to slowly die? I know all games do, but I feel like this one should be timeless. There's nothing else like it.

Maybe we, as a community, should gather and ask Hampa what he thinks, and ask him if there's anything he can do / will do to try to get more people to come to the game?

The art community died when everyone who is actually intelligent enough to do anything left the game. Now we just have 10 year olds pretending to put more than 5 minutes into a head texture and charging 20k for it. Sure, there are a few decent people, but I wouldn't post a request thread for a set at all. It'd probably take 2-3 weeks for someone to make me a set that I could've made in 2 hours if I put my time into it. I could just start selling my art and monopolize the community, but that's not fair to the minority of people who actually put lots of effort into their art.

tl;dr: fuck kids, go learn to make sets.my post is rude and I hate you.

tl;dr for Pimp: The community is dead so I'm going to pretend like this is a controversial concept in order to make my post look remotely useful.

Well, I try to make original looking sets, the only problem is I like to make generic robotic sets, and that is the problem with the current texture market xD