Hold up... I didn't know there was a Taco'n'Banana connection with all of this, that's interesting. A bunch of those are not of The Isle Discord, but the Taco'n'Banana one.
There's shitloads of drama in the years of that community alone.
It's weird how for a fucking Gmod roleplay community there seem to be "expats" of it all over the Internet, it's almost as if the internet is a small world really.
To explain, as someone who's been on TnB for a good bit and was around when this whole Spartan/paradymshift thing exploded.
From what I've gathered, they(someone/s from TnB) found out he(Spartan5150, the dev) went under the name paradymshift and worked on The Isle. They began to talk to people in the community and notify them about his past actions with photos of such. This caused a huge explosion in The Isle community, destroying their subreddit and other shit in the process. Devs tried to claim it was photoshopped when it was merely a picture taken of another phone's screen lol. They showed photos of his dm's with minors of the TnB community, and explained how he was a huge pedophile with an incredibly small penis.
But yeah, all of this is linked to TnB and his actions with others while he was there around 2015 before being perma banned for - y'know - being a fucking pedophile.
TnB never rests. And believe me when I say if you do some heinous shit there they'll ensure it follows you. Doesn't matter how old. Fuckers don't forget anything.
Jesus fucking Christ why is it so goddamn impossible to find a decently made drama-free dinosaur game in the 21st century.
You would think that people would have enough goodwill and imagination to create a quality game about the most incredible animals that ever existed on planet Earth without shitting up their development process with pedoshit and petty community drama.
You would think of all the subjects a video game could focus on, dinosaurs would be one of the easiest and most fun concepts to build a game around. Everyone loves dinosaurs.
But no. I can count on one hand the number of truly great dino-centric games I have played in the past. And I've obviously played a lot of dinosaur games.
I think it's the autism. Genuinely I do. Autism and children. There are a lot of literal fucking autists within dinosaur communities in general, and I understand why. For one thing dinosaurs are like trains in that there are very many of them that can be easily sorted and placed into categories which is something that autists love for whatever reason. I have found that within communities for dinosaur games with ongoing development, like early-access titles and titles with a base game that have ongoing DLC projects, there is ironically too much focus on the dinosaurs and not enough focus on actual gameplay and fun, because of people like this.
For example, in dinosaur park simulators like Jurassic World: Evolution (which I personally do enjoy), and to a different extent games like The Isle, you get these guys who will bog down development discussion with lists hundreds of species long displaying creatures that they want to see in your game, many of which are simply slight variants of other species. Think Tyrannosaurus rex vs. Tarbosaurus, or Deinonychus vs. Utahraptor. Screeds like that, instead of focusing on a solid, set list of diverse and unique species maybe 25 to 40 creatures long. So it happens that developers will choose to focus on simply bloating their game with slightly different species of new dinosaurs instead of adding more truly expansive things and fixing bugs.
Also, since there is a lot of mystery surrounding what dinosaurs looked like, that means that there is some amount of freedom as to how one can imagine they appeared, and so you can do things like give dinosaurs bright, vibrant colors if you so choose. Bright colors like blue are another thing that autists are entranced by.
However at the same time in a seemingly contradictory manner you can have snobby purists who believe that you can only have dinosaurs appear a certain way at all times, at least in terms of things like body composition and behavior, in line with current popular scientific knowledge and discoveries. Many autists love to adhere to certain strict guidelines in terms of how they do things and I hate the influence of these kinds of people the most.
For example because dinosaurs have been found with feathers, that must mean that all dinosaurs had feathers, including the relatively slow-moving 20-ton Apatosaurus which lived in a semi-arid environment, and the 7-ton T. rex even though virtually all evidence of skin found from large tyrannosaurs suggests they were scaled. You must adhere to pop-science and use it to make vastly overreaching claims for all dinosaur interpretations even though new things are discovered every month and the perception of dinosaurs has changed and will continue to change all throughout history as time goes on and I will stubbornly and blindly insist that you adhere to the new standards when they present themselves tomorrow.
With this kind of autist you can't just be creative, go your own way about things, and have fun.
So with these things you get the weirdos in dinosaur communities. Which is one thing on its own. But things like scams and pedoshit occur often when you cross a demographic with potential for strange asocial behavior with another more well-known demographic which dinosaurs attract, that being children.
Everyone loves dinosaurs but children love dinosaurs the most. Children have an imagination and sense of awe about things that adults cannot even begin to grasp, and naturally these senses will often manifest themselves greatly through topics like the mystery of dinosaurs. Unfortunately evil people love to exploit a child's innocent love for their favorite things. So you can get scammers who will deceive children with broken promises with games featuring these creatures that might look flashy and cool on the outside but are a hollow mess on the inside, with games like Mesozoica and The Stomping Land being examples of this phenomenon.
And of course, you will get pedophiles, who also love to exploit children. In a terribly different way.
I think these things summarily are why dinosaur games tend to suck in spite of dinosaurs themselves being such a ripe, fun subject to explore. And because of things like this I have stayed away from online dinosaur communities for almost ten years. I found out quite early on in my personal internet journey that these communities are festering with autism and drama that I have no desire to be a part of. So I usually keep my distance and my love for prehistoric animals close to myself.
From what exposure I did have to The Isle's community I always suspected Dondi was at least an asshole. He seemed to me like he had all the makings of your average insecure, abusive internet community dictator. The pedo-defender add-on doesn't really surprise me. Fuck this guy.
I heard somewhere that he once urged his "loyal fanbase" to shit-talk and neg-rate another dinosaur simulator on Steam similar to his called Beasts of Burmuda. I might just transition over to that game now that I am aware of this shit. If anybody in this thread has played it I would be happy to hear your opinion on it before I make a decision to buy.
It sucks. I feel a lot like that SweetSweetGaben guy in the OP. "I just wanted a dinosaur game, man."
To explain, as someone who's been on TnB for a good bit and was around when this whole Spartan/paradymshift thing exploded.
From what I've gathered, they(someone/s from TnB) found out he(Spartan5150, the dev) went under the name paradymshift and worked on The Isle. They began to talk to people in the community and notify them about his past actions with photos of such. This caused a huge explosion in The Isle community, destroying their subreddit and other shit in the process. Devs tried to claim it was photoshopped when it was merely a picture taken of another phone's screen lol. They showed photos of his dm's with minors of the TnB community, and explained how he was a huge pedophile with an incredibly small penis.
But yeah, all of this is linked to TnB and his actions with others while he was there around 2015 before being perma banned for - y'know - being a fucking pedophile.
TnB never rests. And believe me when I say if you do some heinous shit there they'll ensure it follows you. Doesn't matter how old. Fuckers don't forget anything.
Interesting, I was on and off there for years purely for the roleplay... I still remember when the Ventrilo was a thing, I guess it got replaced by that Discord now. I never got too inmersed into the "community" aspect because to me there was this circlejerky veil that I never bothered with.
But then again that can apply to any community running for that long and so much history behind it.
Interesting, I was on and off there for years purely for the roleplay... I still remember when the Ventrilo was a thing, I guess it got replaced by that Discord now. I never got too inmersed into the "community" aspect because to me there was this circlejerky veil that I never bothered with.
But then again that can apply to any community running for that long and so much history behind it.
It absolutely is elitist and circle jerky, though less so than past years. You can usually mingle just fine as long as you don't actively piss anyone off (which isn't hard to do since a ton of people there are egomaniacs) and just vibe. Only reason the community is still alive is because of a few dozen oldfags that live there.
