MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: From MAMEDev: Attention for all derivative builds

> Whenever a first post person
> comes in, you most of the time have the habit to treat it like shit.

Look, the majority of your reply is great, and I actually agree with it, but this is the core issue that me and a lot of developers take with your and other peoples' attitudes.

When a first-post person comes in, do we treat these people like shit? No, no we don't.

If some newbie comes along and wants to know how to get up and running with MAME, we're almost always quite happy to help that person and get them running. If someone comes along with questions, we're happy to answer that person's questions. If someone wants to know why something is done a given way, we will tell them.

Do you know what the real problem is? The real problem is that with a lot of posts, it doesn't go this way. More often than not, newbies roll in here full of attitude, full of hubris, and generally seem to act like they can treat MAME developers like garbage because of issues that are usually their own fault. This is the sort of unwarranted self-importance that I talked about in my earlier post: It seems to me like a lot of people would rather believe that MAME developers are complete idiots that have somehow YOLO'd their way into emulating tens of thousands of games. The attitude that these people cop is so much more often along the lines of "I can't get MAME working, MAME is trash" than it is "I can't get MAME working, what am I doing wrong". The fact that you can't see this just proves how blind you are to the sort of acrimony that MAME devs face on an almost weekly, if not daily, basis from users.

I urge you, go look back at R. Belmont's replies to Mamesick. Up until the point that Mamesick absolutely lost his mind and started abusing RB, RB was perfectly civil. He asked him what his use case was for needing DI7 support, and in a subsequent reply, he reiterated that we were genuinely interested in knowing what device he's using that isn't supported by later versions, because we don't want to kill support for older things if we can keep it around, we just honestly didn't think anyone would still be using a system so archaic. It was only when Mamesick started hurling abuse at all of the developers, myself included, that everything went to hell. Maybe I'm just an idealist here, but I would like to think that MAME developers should be able to participate in discussions on these forums without having insults about their sexuality thrown in their face, but I guess I'm not so lucky. Maybe it's just me, but Mamesick has said "I won't lick your ass" to me so many times that I'm beginning to think he has feelings for me that he's not prepared to deal with.

Don't get me wrong, this is hardly a new thing. These sorts of entitled people have been around just about as long as MAME has. The only difference is that back then, MAMEWorld was staffed by people like Twisty, who let these users-with-'tudes run roughshod over the forums, doing nothing but trash-talking developers over issues they couldn't possibly understand. Any MAME developer attempting to meet these users at their level, fighting fire with fire, was summarily banned, because it was so much easier to preserve the circle-jerk status quo than to actually moderate the forums.

Nowadays, Smit seems to have a much more hands-off approach, and lets us meet these people with exactly the same sort of vitriol that they lob in our direction. Yet, as always, you people try to make it out like we're the monsters, like we're supposed to just sit here for 10-15 years and cop no end of abuse from entitled users. Personally, I say fuck that. If someone wants to insult and abuse MAME team members, then that same person has absolutely no moral high horse to stand on and cry from when they get their trash thrown in their faces.

The only reason why you're even saying these things is because certain developers are finally standing up against the seemingly impenetrable wall of entitlement and attitude that so many people on these god-ridden forums throw in our direction. And quite frankly, I think it's been a long time in coming.

Long story short, we're more than happy to be civil to users who are interested in being civil to us. But speaking solely for myself, I have no intention of maintaining civility with someone who comes right out of the gate with an attitude. There's no reason why I should have to put up with that sort of shit over a project that I work on as a hobby, that I don't make any money out of.

Do you want me to be civil to people more abusive to MAME developers than a redneck with a jar of moonshine abuses his wife? Fuck you, pay me.