(Or how we became divisive elitist fucks: a writeup)
Over the past 2-3 years, hacking has changed immensely. new tech, new hacking methods, new tools, and of course, new members.
Now, the community is the most important part of hacking(or anything, really.). If there is no community, there is no hacking.
However, recently, the community has been pretty. divisive, to say the least. Drama, Elitism, all that jazz. We’ve become less of an actual community for simply making hacks, and more of a political debate house always complaining about everything.
I’m gonna try to go over recent events that “broke apart” the community, and list 3 of them.
1. Buildfiles, FEBuilder, and huge egos
Now, starting in around 2016, there needed to be change. the old hacking methods were far too buggy/impractical, and the tools were way too buggy.
The response to that was thought of originally by CrazyColorz, and was to use Event Assembler for everything. That method spawned some tools to make using it easier, and was quite appreciated.
A lot of people liked it, and grew attached to the method. However, some grew too attached to their self declared “Better Hacking Method”.
Fast Forward to end of 2017. During that time, one of the most impressive hacking tool in the community, FEBuilder, was released. It could do just about everything very easily, and even got support for fan engines such as the skill system later down the line. It was truly a lifesaver for those that were less experienced with hacking.
However, some buildfile people(no, I won’t give out names, but it should be easy to figure out who if you are in the FEU discord) Disliked the tool, with their argument mostly being “it’s worse than buildfiles”, and the only thing backing that up being “it’s easier to fix bugs and keep track of changes”.
Now, that would be fine, however, the attitude quickly changed to something akin to a witch hunt, where said buildfiles people where almost harassing FEBuilder users, saying that the tool was shit and you had to switch to buildfiles if you planned on doing an actual hack.
Nowadays, that kind of talk seems to have calmed down a bit, but there are still people complaining about others using Builder.
2. PMEs, the inferior type of hacks
Recently, there has been a surge in the type of hacks known as PMEs. PMEs, aka Pick My Edits, are hacks where the creator accepts character/class/misc edits from just about everyone. Usually, most of these edits are meme edits and are done for the hell of it, and for fun.
However, some people(Again, no name cause I don’t want any witch hunting from trying to stop it) disliked the idea of PMEs, and the sudden burst of them, as it was “cheap” and “not actual hacks”.
These people don’t seem to realize there is appeal in PMEs, however. I asked a few people on some places for their opinions and why they like/dislike PMEs, and I want to list them here.
“I like them because I like seeing how the creators will change the game and that they are a combination of peoples ideas”
“Basically what [Above] said, but i also dislike the oversaturation of pmes that are filled with uncreative ideas”
“I like the idea of multiple people (that wouldn’t be able to otherwise) put their ideas into a hack
Because a lot of people have interesting ideas but don’t know how to implement them themselves”
That was how most of the answers looked like. as you can see, there is an appeal for PMEs, people like the community side of the concept, and how it allows people that wouldn’t care about hacking otherwise to take interest in edits.
However, people still try to bring down PMEs because “They’re uncreative, useless, suck, yada yada yada”. I don’t like to put my opinion there, But I really have no substance for this part I do think doing that makes new hacker reject us, see us as elitists, that only care about our own custom chapter hacks that are better than anyone else, and I hate that that’s the image we bring to others.
I’d like to thank Fort Alpea, and Fort Mangs, for helping me to get some data, this is where I got the quotes from, by asking them why they liked/disliked PMEs.
3. Blitzes, Oh my Blitzes…
Blitzes is a form of hack making that was popularized by circles, who wanted to “raise the bar”, and thus did so by doing a full 31 chapters hack, along with the community to help him. it was very successful, and the final product became void’s blitzarre adventure.
now, i’d suggest you read another write-up, by darr, about blitzes, to catch up on them.
I just want to talk about the bad parts of it, and how the community started countless debates over one guy who wanted to raise the bar.
First off, I want to talk about the “blitz lore”. Blitz lore is something that was thought of around the time the VBA “”““Unofficial””“” Prequel, Resonance, and was made to expand upon MC’s writing of VBA. People wanted to expand upon the lore, however, there were countless argument about it, and people considered it non-canon, others thought it was stupid.
Recently, that debate restartedagain after people complained MC was given “Too much writing power” for the recently finished VBA 2. People were also complaining that people kept making the prequel, resonance, non-canon and unofficial. Now, my opinion on this is that we’re a fangame community, I don’t think we should really care about officiality, but that debate is already well over, so let’s not continue it.
What I do want to talk about is Resonance, because that’s one hell of a drama hole. But mostly because I have personal experience with it.
Resonance was a Prequel of VBA that was made around the beggining of 2018 by yours truly and fresh new members of the community for the most part. However, said members grew to hate Resonance, and shit on it at every occasion.
It soon became an easy target, one that you could rely on when you made something bad, just say “not as bad as reso”. The dev team is the one that critiqued it the most, saying it was a buggy mess, and unplayable. however, recently, people have replayed it, and most of those accusations are pretty incorrect, at least according to them.
Now what happened there? was it a rejection of another blitz, or maybe the original form of resonance staying as the most representative of it, or people just wanting something they can easily shit on? it can be interpreted many different ways, and I’d prefer not to comment on it, as I would be biased.
Conclusion
I’m gonna be honest, I think the community has gone to shit recently. We all consider ourselves superior to others that don’t do stuff like we do, and by such people are being scared of us because of that, because we’re acting like elitists, you could say.
I’d say we became worse than the community we consider “cancerous”, such as Ft. Mangs and Serenes.
I apologize for the small size of that write-up, I just don’t really have time to write something huge, so I skipped some stuff intentionally.
For now, I’ll go play some games with my cousin, so 
