Long post incoming.
Intro
It all starts when I started playing yogstation and learning to play the game. Once I learned it, I migrated to Hippie, where men were born. I would then cycle over to CM back and forth with SS13 and League of Legends. This was 2018ish. Ofcourse, I rolled into Charlie my first time and it stuck. Eventually I found the nicknaming forum and described when I C4d requisitions and screamed unga dunga attachies (normal behavior at the time), which led to everyone getting slept after we gunned down or punched the RO until his bones broke. I don’t remember his name, but he gave me the nickname Encino Man, and it stuck henceforth.
Flash forward and I got banned from Citadel because I’d play a lamia captain whipping everyone with the chain of command repeatedly telling them to get back to work. I ofcourse got job banned, to this day, because they assumed I was underage. Which I wasn’t, I was like… 20-22. But, last I checked, the ban is still in place.
Now, as to how I ended up on Citadel, it was because I got banned from CM for a while because of drama and shenanigans. Usually related to Whitelisters, moderation, and so on and so on. Hippie also began dying at the time, so really it was all going down. I went to get unbanned from CM.
Rise and Fall of TGCM and the Birth of TGMC
Boom, TGCM was born. I was excited, the old putrid rotting corpse of CM’s development was finally revamping. I joined the efforts to try and make the game fun. It was amazing, They were CM but they were adding Xeno mounting, TG races as marines, all that and so on. They asked for a lore proposal, and here is my proposal. I made this 5 years ago. TG Lore Proposal - Google Docs
Anyways, that whole shit show imploded. They didn’t want to turn Lizards into Preds, they didn’t want to keep moth marines, nothing. They held “democracy votes” that were do or don’t no questions asked. And they just whittled away everything that didn’t win the votes. They were doing a political statement due to the elections at the time. Essentially the heads got really political and said “the electoral college is fucking stupid,” and they began removing features, like TG races, based on votes. And, the votes were something like this.
“Remove Moths?”
Yes -55%
No- 35%
Undecided- 10%
Now. You may think that’s a great way to decide things. Except here’s the issue. They did that for everything, and they went from having a competing player base to CM at it’s peak, to double digit slop shortly after these votes. It’s not hard to understand, I told, I think his name is, Rohesie about this every day until I just bounced from the discord. From 250 constant players, to… whatever’s left of TGMC slop. They achieved their goal, they had let the majority win every vote until the minority kept getting snubbed in every vote. The issue is, however, everyone is a minority one way or another. They didn’t care, and they slowly peeled away 20 players at a time, until they were left with…20 players who got the exact game they wanted. TGMC.
Watching how the 2020 Election Essentially Kickstarted all the Furry ERP Servers
Now, it’s important to bring up Politics, because they did have an effect on SS13, a very heavy effect that you witness now, if you don’t realize it even. I am going to explain to you, how it is 18+ Furry servers, which were a very small niche, became the dominant server type in SS13.
Here’s a small example. The idea to remove TG races from TGCM sprouted from this divide. Because the people who were more “humano centric” were also more “conservative” in their thoughts, and they despised anything non human. On the other end, “furry players” were on the opposite end of “liberal” ideology. After the election, people were mad, mad mad. I was permad from the TG discord because when asked about my political affiliation, I had said, “socially conservative, financially liberal, I guess” and the response was “you can’t be that, that’s r(word I’m not allowed to say in CM)” and boom, banned. In TGMC, I kept getting into arguments with this other med student because he kept saying “the vaccine is necessary and safe, all your takes are stupid.” My takes were “natural immunity is the best bet, and also you think the electoral college is stupid, so you ARE stupid.” I was right in the long run, but I got long covid, so I was punished in a sense.
Now, imagine these arguments with everyone, constantly. CM had to remove their Politics channel. Not that I was involved there because I was permabanned from cm for “Having a religious argument with a furry in the politics channel.”
It’s funny, but the reason there’s all these servers with porn and only a FEW non ERP servers is because all the furries and “liberal” thinking folk were the bulk of coders and devs, while all the “conservative” humanocentroc (chuds you can say) were the bulk of the administration. That’s why you have like 3 normal med-high pop SFW servers, and 15 ERP furry servers.
The political divide in American politics wasn’t just in public, it had happened to SS13.
And, honestly, it was for the worse, both sides need each other. The administrative orderly types keep the game sane and cohesive (CM) but they also stagnate the community and developments. That’s why CM has been so slow and a little rotten.
Meanwhile, the devs go wild on furry servers. They’re constantly brimming with ideas and development (most new features on TG were from Cita and so on, btw), but they’re absolutely deplorable socially, constant drama, Machiavellian leadership, grooming, and insane random gameplay with no cohesion and no sense (Ratwood has 15 races to make OC’s, with no lore in them whatsoever).
At one point in time, these people worked together to develop SS13 into it’s peak, but politics imploded it all. Servers in the middle, like Hippiestation and Civ, all imploded for this divide. These servers could only exist when both sides of the team were willing to work together to aim for something that was just… fun.
End
In retrospect, all of it was an amazing journey. Without CM, I had no Encino Man, without Hippie, I had no moth, without TGCM I had no Encino Moth. Now, I’m doing my part, I’m working on Crystal Keep, and I want to work on more, in the hopes that I can bring back the good times. Where everyone got along for fun, and forgetting politics and all of its radicalization. Despite all my flaws, despite my mistakes, I came back to the SS13 community, and appealed to CM for the hope of making something better for the community. I may fail. But it’s part of it.
