Dear Mugen community and Newagemugen members

Today, I end my 16 year love/hate relationship with this weird and wonderful engine.
I started playing Mugen in 2004 and it has been one hell of a ride.
I've met cool people and assholes. had good times and bad. overall the good outweighed the bad.

I joined almost every mugen website I can think of. maybe only 10% of them still exist.
I have seen amazing creators, amazing talent and some of the most creative individuals on the internet.
hell, I even had my fanboy moments over certain creators and get excited when new releases came out.
I will never forget the day I found evil ken and dragon claw by Reu (RIP). it changed my life.

I've seen the trials and tribulations of different Mugen users and forums.
I've watched them evolve and grow as teenagers to adults to old wise men and even die off.
I probably spent 1000s upon 1000s of hours on this frickin' engine.
Winmugen and mugen 1.0 and then 1.1. Hell, i even played around with Ikemen engine.
Im even old enough to remember shugendo and infinity cat and java mugen that never happened.

I even started to make my own pscreenpacks and character edits.
I never really mastered anything but I was ok at tinkering with most stuff.
I never really made a name for myself and I doubt anyone will ever remember me.

Anyway to the point.
My meaningless posts and comments scattered here and there on mostly dead mugen forums and youtube videos and discords are not my legacy.
Neither are my half baked creations.
My legacy to you all will be a warning on what i predict for this community and what to avoid.

By the time you see this, I would have deleted all my accounts on all Mugen forums I am a member of.
I would have also removed myself from every discord server.

so WHY I have done this?
In the last few years of my time in mugen, the community really..."changed". For the worst.
It started to happen slowly then really fast.
It probably started around 2016 to become really noticeable.
so what changed?

Discord.
Twitter.
Instagram
All that garbage. Hell even Youtube to a small extent.
But mostly Discord.

Discord has destroyed what was great about the mugen community.
Discord destroyed the forum culture that made mugen so golden to an extent.
Discord made me and my closest friends go from making and playing mugen to just being lazy shitposters.

Why actually post your hard work on a forum to archive forever when you can just post a lame pic on discord that gets buried in comments after a few hours?

Why spend time AT YOUR PC working hard, reading and learning new mugen skills when you can just waste hours on discord talking about nothing and only sharing with your friends via PMs?

We used to all work hard on our mugen stuff and share on a screenshot thread or release thread.
Now nobody posts anymore on the forums unless its drama or bitching (not talking about NAM though you guys are ok).

Everyone sits around on their phone on discord shitposting.
They dont even finish anything just post pictures of shit they will never get done.
They talk for hours and never actually put any work on the table and then make excuses about lol bored lol streaming.

There is no motivation and a 5 second attention span.
People just make shit videos and spam every server to get likes and views its so cringe.
It has become a low attention low motivation infinite state loop community of idiocrity.

People USED to actually put effort in without excuses and actually post progress reports on a dedicated topic thread.
Now its just people scanning discord servers for places to post their latest mugen selfie on what they work on.
Then it gets 3 likes and maybe reply or 2 then along comes someone else stealing the attention.

Now they just use forums like vultures to get what they can and go back to discord to only talk to a small group of people and not post their thoughts out in the open on the forums like the old days.

And because of that, I no longer want to be in a community full of mindless lazy people glued to chat groups and not the forum community aspect.

Mugen at some point stopped growing. Stopped evolving.
So my message to you guys is this.

If you want to avoid being a shitty unproductive mugen creator

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME ON DISCORD AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Get your ass off your phone and get on your laptop and start working hard.
stop the small talk.
Stop PMing your boys mugen stuff you are too scared to post on a forum.
get back to the source.
Learn from the past greats that didnt waste time and just got on with it.
Support your community and be part of something bigger than just yourself.
Stop chasing fake trophies online with likes and retweets.

If you waste all your time that you never get back and dont ever make anything worthwhile or worth remembering, you will regret it for the rest of your life. DOnt be like me.

Life is too short. And I have regrets on time wasted. I really could have done something great with the little bit of spare mugen time i had left the last 5 years and instead i wasted it on discord.

For that i am sorry guys.
Ireally wish i could have contributed here more and sooner.
But unfortunately my time has run out.
I hope some of you read this and heed my warning

goodbye Mugen