me n dustforce

yo

before i begin: mad props to fishy for taking #1 overall from me earlier (read: 5 am) today, well deserved.  to him: sorry if i've been salty/dickish about ledgecancels or other things, taking ILs this seriously again has been some of the most frustrating shit to me and im sorry if i came off as bashing or discrediting you.  i'm probably over analyzing my salt, but either way you earned #1, gz and ggs.


so anyway, tldr i basically have no plans with continuing to play dustforce, nor do i think i'll return in the future.  theres still a COUPLE of ILs i care about getting a good run in; giga (want a cleaner man SS and then go for a really, really dumb any% with worth) yotta (sub 2 worth SS and ~1:06 any%) and maybe really clean up some other routes i really enjoy (taking cretekid back for sure, otherwise its up in the air).  this includes fullgame though; while i would really like a 34 i just cant push myself to do it.  maybe if xiamul or fresh (or someone else) pushes close/beats me i'll come back and try for it.  my current PB seems very improvable, but the category is so hard, and so, so patience testing lmao.  otherwise, i still will be a fairly active TASer (TASing is a super relaxing way to pass time between classes, honestly) and might play some random shit every month or so just to show im not washed up or something :^). i still plan on submitting any% all for SGDQ, but after that i will probably never submit the game again, regardless if it accepted or not.

but yeah, my thoughts that basically led up to this:

- i think i've had about all the fun i can have in this game. this is just the #1 thing.  i'm not sure how many hours i actually have playing this game (not TASing/idling) but it's got to be close to 4000, across 3 and a half years.  im pretty confident i have the most submitted replays on dustkid.com (83k) and i have well over 600-700 recorded runs on every map in the game.  every level has basically become a routine at this point, and good fucking god is it frustrating to lose runs to missing a dash by 1 frame.  especially in any%, the game has gotten optimized to the point you can hardly afford any time loss (i have 23 any% ILs that are less than 6 frames off WR) and bashing into this wall hoping for frames just isnt fun.  maybe i'd have had the drive like a year ago or so, but it just feels like doing the same shit over and over until it finally happens to be faster.  add to the fact i bleed time across levels due to shitty ledgecancels, and it straight up feels unfair sometimes.  it is a fixable problem though, but would require me to either double tap (just doesn't feel right to me :/) or to change keybinds (tried this for like a week; relearning the game after years of playing just wasnt happening, and dont have motivation to try again).
i definitely rambled here but i think i've proven my point; this doesnt feel like a fun hobby anymore.

- routing has always been the most fun thing in this game for me, and i've extensively looked at every level in the game at this point.  i'm not saying the game is solved, and i still have found fairly significant route improvements very recently (over a second on library, and a few frames on forgotten, dahlia ss, and security), but with this aspect of the game vanishing over time, i dont have the drive to perfect a route i've created myself.  some of my favorite memories and moments in this game came from routing shit, like finding the new combat any% route at 5 am with wayward, rerouting cliffside any% as dustman with fresh and realizing it saves like 2 seconds (lmao), and TAS shit like the absurd dome slope boost and the mega "clip" (being vague to not spoil this for people, but you know what im talking about if you've seen it).  TASing basically perfectly captures this though, and theres tons of tiny routing changes for micro-optimizations and dumb shit you can try out without an execution barrier.  once i really got in to TASing, i realized i could basically do all the fun routing shit without having to deal with frustration from execution errors or slamming my face into the same shit over and over again as i described above.

- i have other games i wanna focus on.  i still have goal for nuclear throne, but otherwise i really just wanna find another game to run and have fun with.  celeste, shovel knight, dark souls, and a bunch of other games are all in my backlog along with a bunch of other games i want to seriously grind out (devil daggers, botw, maybe some other games).  i am also looking for a game to start TASing other than dustforce, but i'd probably want people i know to help out with it.

- i dont really have time to be seriously active at ILing anymore.  college is super busy and admittedly i've been slacking a bit recently to play games, and need to not make that a habit lol.  also i've been dealing with some personal stuff (considering changing majors, among other things) and need a break to get some stuff sorted out.  treating dustforce like a job or something im committed to doing isnt productive, and it doesnt feel like a fun hobby anymore.

- other people that i really hung out with that played the game have moved on.  even fresh isnt that active anymore.  i dont really feel that much friendly competition which was literally all of my motivation back in the day; racing with deaf, lotus, and eventually xiamul back in the day is what got me good at any% all, and by extension made me good at the game.  of course, i have competition with fishy but if im not in discord hearing them moan as i bop them, whats the point :^).  i still have love for the community but my super close friends have moved on.

- things havent been the same since the dustworth feed twitter died tbh.  why live


thats it pretty much.  i think retirement pastebins are kinda silly and im notoriously flake-y on shit like this but i feel really confident about this decision and have felt this way for months, and felt like letting people know.  shoutouts to fresh, xiamul, wayward, bob, JM, deaf, simon, lotus, blue, luffy, sivade (rip), and metal for being big motivators to me over time for different reasons. also to msg for being literally the most important person to this community.  in over 3 years of playing, nobody has even done 10% of what msg has done in terms of moving the game forward and keeping the community alive.  otherwise, time to move on.  thanks for readin.

- ya boi fishmcmuffins

ps: fuck fresh