Man. I don't want to reply to this especially since several others already have and I've gone on record saying that I very explicitly dislike putting myself in the middle of stuff like this nowadays. Maybe all that's a sign that I shouldn't be at all but there's a big, important part of this that I think people are missing the point of. It's 4 AM, I've had horrible sleep these past few days, and I'm not happy, so apologies if any of this is poorly-explained or lacks structure.
Let's go back to a few months ago when you repeatedly got into arguments that would consistently get very heated with the same few people. This all came off of the exact same idea that happened here - someone posted a hot take about Splatoon balancing, one person took something the other said personally and both of you decided to hurl around belittling comments and the like. It takes two people to get into an argument like this, you're already seemingly on thin ice with the staff here about this and you yourself have admitted to being prone to taking stuff like this personally.
Now I'm going to look at this situation from your lens. This guy comes in here and posts something you see as aggressive. Instead of choosing to talk to staff about the issue, ignore this post, or something else, you choose to do
the exact same thing that got you problems last time. If someone were to come into one of these threads spouting slurs and you were to get offended by it the response would not be to start throwing them out back at them to try and make them as angry as they made you. Even in the worst case that you're trying to explain to us, you are doing no better than they are.
Last time we were here, these threads came with such regularity that it dissuaded a lot of people from even making regular posts in them. People either felt like they were walking on eggshells to not offend someone by posting in them, they felt like any reasonable discussion would be drowned out by people angry at each other, or so on, and this was during a time where there was a huge uptick in new members.
I was on a voice call last night with a few Squidboards members and several of them have said they've been posting on this website less and have cited stuff exactly like this as big reasons why. If I'm one of those people and I read this thread, then my big takeaway is that you've now shown zero willingness to try and fix this and that I should expect to see more of this in the future. This is again not to mention exactly what will happen to the community if threads like this continue to pop up - the only people that will stay here are those that either tolerate or encourage this kind of behavior and it'll inevitably happen more and more as time passes.
I've wanted to avoid saying anything I already have in this post because I honestly don't like arguing with someone who already is "outnumbered" in a sense. This last post really pissed me off though.
I’m tired of being the only one on the hill. Every. Single. Time. Nobody here ever bothers to back me up, only ever wanting to either shut down my ideas or quash any conflict that arises from them. And then, of course, the people who want to stop the conflict invariably glare at me for whatever reason when I’ve only ever defended my interests. What makes my comments worse than theirs?! Nothing!
The next part of this post is going to get a bit ranty and go to a bit more personal of a note for me. Hope everyone's okay with that.
Last time all this stuff broke out I explicitly kept a vast majority the stuff I wanted to say to you on Discord for good reason. I specifically wanted to call out everyone for being in the wrong because I truly do believe everyone that I pinged there screwed up, but that wouldn't be a fair way to approach it. Everyone was saying why what you were doing was wrong already. I needed to make it as unambiguous as possible that I was talking mainly to the people who were opposing you. Had I put any more focus on you in that post then the people opposing you could've easily taken it as "yeeaahhhh I might've messed up, but Onepot also messed up and everyone disagrees with him so I have nothing to change."
The whole reason I made that post was because everyone else was handling themselves horribly as well and I cautiously, very specifically angled that post in your defense. I really wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt since as far as I was concerned, you were dealing with a lot of pressure and might have been more upset by that or whatever. I wanted to think that you may be the type of person who would very much not want to repeat this mistake if you were to take a step back, look at the situation from afar and come back with a different approach to stuff like this afterwards. Maybe it'd be easier if you weren't under the stress of the half dozen people or however many it was who now basically cannot respond to one of your posts now.
Most people completely ignored the dogpiling you were dealing with, structured it as an "everyone stop fighting," and went on with their day. What this kind of message implies to me is that this extra effort was unnoticed and functionally wasted because you only would've been satisfied had I explicitly lied and told everyone back there that "Onepot's innocent and you guys are jerks."
That feels like a MASSIVE slap to the face, to say the least. I really didn't want to write that big post calling everyone out, man. I was and still am really burned out from being a staff member on a website where I'd deal with the exact same bullshit that you're trying here regularly. Despite that, I skipped my lunch break to write it on a work day where I was incredibly hungry and tired. I felt it would be wrong to see you continue to get attacked and wanted to try my best to stop it and make people face accountability without any room for pushing the blame onto you.
Saying "Onepot's innocent and you guys are jerks" would have been a lie then and it would be a lie now even in this frame that you're trying to push onto us. Take it from the fact that you've repeatedly found yourself in this problem with several different people now and are now trying to tell everyone else that they're insane and you're not - this is a problem that you need to take steps to fix if you want to keep any kind of positive presence with this community.
For the record, no, Zonink did not aggress here as you yourself put it. He was a bit blunt but this much is not an excuse for you to basically say his argument sucked and show a much angrier and more personal tone than he ever did as early as your second post in this thread.
You may not have realized but I've been doing a lot of little things to try and make you feel more welcome in our Discord server and the like. I could have totally assumed that I had no subs for my second tournament and left you to not play, for example, since I really didn't care how many teams joined and it would've been nice to keep electronvolt as a sub in case another team needed one (which another team did and I had to scramble to find someone else there too).
I also would have preferred not to have been on a team with someone who complained literally the whole time, which I knew would be the case since you complain all the time about everything. I've literally left several communities last year because people would nonstop complain there all the time and it damaged my mentality to the point where I'm still trying to repair it to this day. I try my best to avoid sticking myself with people like this for hours on end since it's only going to cause problems for me, and yet I did both that and put more stress on myself for the other stuff with subs just for the sake of guaranteeing your ability to play and giving you as good a time as possible. Not to mention the simpler fact that I've tried staying out of this thread despite very much agreeing with Zonink here for the sake of not adding to the pressure once again.
So if you wanted one person to defend you, then you should've just stayed silent because that one person is gone now. I don't see myself getting over this soon. I say this much for your own sake - PLEASE be less stubborn, and PLEASE be more willing to learn from situations like this even when you think the world is out to get you. There's a reason that so many people here haven't ended up constantly arguing with others like you have. Thank you. My sleep schedule is now screwed up beyond repair but I needed to get all of this off my chest.
