About MossRanking Jokes

Just wanted to put this out there instead of leaving it internal -- I ended my stream just now briefly mentioning it, but just want to put a better pin on it here.

I have a ton of respect for d_tea, both when it comes to how well he plays Spelunky 2, and when it comes to how he behaves within the community and with other members. It's awesome that somebody so respectable is at the top of MossRanking, and I'm always happy to see Tea grow from his success. Our interactions are always a fun time for me, and I hope that he feels the same way. That being said, it's disheartening to regularly be the butt of the joke when I get a run that's slightly slower than his, or getting a completion after him -- even just talking about stuff in Twitch chats, I feel like it gets brought up more and more often than it used to. I play along with it all, don't get me wrong, but I play along because the only other option is uncomfortably shunning these jokes out of nowhere. I don't want to be a downer on people like that. But I'm also just starting to feel like the community punching bag, and that sucks. I put a lot of time and effort into my runs as well, and I know that Tea is dramatically better than I am, but it would be nice to be treated as the underdog a bit more, and the comic relief a bit less.

I know it's partly my fault because I bring these things up a lot -- I shouldn't mention comparisons as often as I do, though it's hard to ignore when they go on so frequently within the community. I don't think anybody does it with malicious intent, but that doesn't change the fact that it has a negative impact on my experience with this game. I've thought about just giving up on certain categories that Tea has started running just to save myself the trouble if he gets a better run, even though the two of us would both be happy with whatever our times looked like. I just don't want to be the punchline again if it happens. And I don't want to be told "just wait until Tea gets another PB..." if my run was any better.

I'm sorry again for any amount of this that I directly contributed to, I'm not without fault here either, but I didn't want to just sit around and not say anything until I get frustrated and say something unreasonable, especially since Tea has to deal with stuff like this too.

And just to give this a little positive backing, the vast majority of my experience in the Spelunky community is great, and I mean that sincerely! It's very rare that I feel like people are being uncooperative or inflammatory about the game and its community, so don't take this post as a warning sign or anything. This is just something that went a little further than I think it should have, and hope can be dialed down upon. I don't even mind the jokes themselves necessarily, but there's a time and place for them.