This is a personal opinion post and may or may not reflect the sentiments of the entire MeleeItOnMe community
Wooh! What a weekend of events. There have been 100+ attendee tournaments over the past weekend. Who would have thought that we would have seen such marvelous growth and excitement for Smash; In fact, back in the days of 2008, there were 5 100+ entrant melee tournaments in the entire year!
There were also other announcements and happenings that, understandably, made people upset. Apex recently announced their official game list, which did not include fan-favorite Project M. As I look at the melee community I grew up with, I see many awesome characteristics exhibited in the other smash communities. There is a passion and excitement that I see in players when they have their fingers on the controller and eyes drawn to the screen. The crowds get excited and people put in timeless amounts of work to see their community grow. With that being said, I can see why it hurts to see the game you’ve put your heart into not be included in this year’s lineup.
To cut to the chase, I’ve seen several members of the Project M community take a higher ground in making sure emotions and words do not go out of hands. To those of you, I give my full kudos. However, there have fracturing comments posted on social media platforms such as r/smashbros and twitter, mudslinging each other’s prized smash game. PM players attacking Brawl. Brawl players attacking PM. Melee players making fun of everyone else. It’s not pretty, but that’s not even the core issue that I want to talk about. Here is the issue:
Rape and Death threats are NOT okay
Let me repeat
Rape and Death threats are NOT okay
Now several of you guys may be rolling your eyes at this post and tell me, “Well those are internet trolls. They don’t really represent the _______ community.” Rest assured, I know that 99% of you guys are smart enough to not tell a Brawl TO that you’re going to rape them repeatedly or tell another respected community member that you’re going to kill them because of some patch/character balances. However, the problem still exists and has plagued enough to the point that Apex may not happen beyond 2015.
Even if the original intent is a “joke” (albeit a terrible one), this puts enormous stress on a person’s well-being. Alex Strife now has the burden on the back of his mind if his own family and friends are actually going to be in danger at his event. In short, it’s not funny and it needs to stop. If you have never done it yourself, that’s fantastic. I also encourage you to go the extra mile to discourage others from doing the same.
I’ve said this before on other issues, and it seems equally valid here.
I live in an area where this sort of thing certainly wouldn’t happen, so I can’t say that I will ever be able to actually “Take a stand” against this sort of thing. Our community is small, and level headed. Our community doesn’t really have people with anger issues or anything like that.
I myself would never threaten either of those thing to another human being.
So, what can I do, as a PM player? Nothing. Keep doing what I’m doing I suppose?
Even if I wanted to make things better, it’s just like you said. It’s the 0.5% of our community that are trolls. I’ll never meet them.
Is it my duty to browse the PM reddit all day, ensuring I fight “The good fight” and waste time and energy arguing with trolls who aren’t going to change their minds anyway?
If someone wants to make a difference to our community, Alex Strife has the best opportunity to better our community better by calling the police, reporting the threats, and removing those freaks from our community.
Death threats should be handled properly, not just complained about on social media. They need to be treated with the respect and weight that any other real crime does.
If he has already done so, props to him.
People need to realize that threats mean something to people and you can’t just make them without consequence. Maybe if someone finally gets arrested for saying things like that, it will make people think twice about what they say.
#thistrulyismeleehell
As a quick followup, doing a small amount of looking around reveals that this is not the first year the event has “threatened” to be cancelled
http://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/1j0ftl/in_response_to_alex_strifes_i_went_through_hell/
The first comment in this thread does a good job bringing this to light
“Notice that Alex posts saying that due to thefts, after paying everything back, he might barely break even, and that is the reason why he cannot run Apex 2014.
This I don’t quite understand. It’s an event that makes him several thousand dollars worth of money. He has tons of sponsors to help him with equipment and venue costs, even if he couldn’t cover the initial costs by himself, it’s fairly unlikely he would be unable to procure the necessary funds over the course of half a year and then get his tournament up and running, a tournament which is year after year very profitable for him.
But instead, for the second year in a row, he makes a big show of saying that the next Apex is cancelled, only to change his mind in the middle of the year. It feels very dishonest, to me, and at the time, it felt like he was holding the tournament hostage to get sympathy.”
Note that I don’t bring this up to slander, or reignite old issues. But if anyone is worried about this tournament happening next year, hopefully this eases your mind a bit. Clearly, Emotional statements can be made, but I think everything will blow over.
The thefts happened Apex 2013, so that was before all the Evo and documentary hype had hit. The negative outlook to Apex 2014 was before all the new sponsors started flowing in iirc.