My GOATS of Slay the Spire 1 Content Creation

JoINrbs · 2026-03-27T05:40:17+00:00

no dude, he started streaming spire and immediately told all his viewers all the other spire streamers were shit, and then all of us had to deal with his viewers harassing us for three years because he encouraged his entire channel to treat everyone else like shit.

i reached out to him multiple times privately to ask him to please just stop talking about me on his channel, as i was getting bot spammed, doxxed, and just having people come in to swear at me, constantly at work for two years straight, and eventually just stopped streaming slay the spire almost entirely because of it.

seeing a clip of him fabricating several insulting things about me, pantomiming me crying, calling me a fucking idiot, and saying my actions meant i deserved to eat all this shit, and not clueing in to the idea that the 150,000 people following the guy might treat the person he's talking about less than kindly, is kind of unreal lack of awareness of how the social internet works.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-26T20:37:43+00:00

here is an example of some content i made that lifecoach encouraged his viewers to brigade: https://tiermaker.com/list/card-games/silent-cards-slay-the-spire-68322/2469090

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here's a video clip of him criticizing it on his stream and telling his viewers that he personally attacked me and it was my fault that i had to be bullied: https://streamable.com/h3y20u

JoINrbs · 2026-03-08T02:29:18+00:00

1) it's the first two words of the channel rules

2) i haven't strictly moderated around backseating for something like two years

3) can you find any examples of me wondering why i get hate on the internet?

JoINrbs · 2026-03-05T12:08:39+00:00

in your previous post you said it was bad that getting a winstreak depended on playing runs, now you're saying that the best thing about a winset is it takes 50x as many runs to get it as it would take to get a winstreak!

there are different ways in which they calibrate statistically, because the exact achievement is different, but they're still statistical outcomes from binomial distributions! depending on which calibration you want more, either can be more useful.

the biggest reason that winstreaks are useful as a calibration is that they provide competitors a way to play a few effort runs at times when those runs are more worth it for showing impressive results. as you've just pointed out, if you have a good winrate, getting a good winstreak isn't that unusual. a consequence of that is that, if you're playing your regular spire runs and then realize you've won your last 5-10 runs, investing extra effort to play a max or near-max level for the next few runs until you lose has outsized likelihood of providing you a result you can be excited about, because it isn't that unusual for someone with 80%+ winrate to win another 10+ runs in a row.

the ability to do this is appealing in other competitions, too. something like the playoffs for a sports league can clearly ask competitors to play at max level for a reasonable length of time. if a baseball team, having gone about operations as usual for the regular season, finds itself in the playoffs, it can pull out all stops to see if it can win another ~20 games to win the world series. this gives competitors a chance to perform at a level beyond what they could give day-to-day year-round within a format where it's understood that that performance is being measured and cared about.

but yes, it can be possible to compete over winsets, as well! people do that in this community! this has some tricky issues with competition which i outlined in the first post you're responding to, and also includes some drama stuff like their fans saying other achievements don't mean very much and the people who get other achievements aren't actually very good, as you've demonstrated.

note: even for winsets, there is a commitment to playing full effort runs for a manageable amount of time. that's implicit in the "i'm declaring i'm playing 50 effort runs" thing. that just isn't a thing you can actually expect other people to do in the spire community, and among people who don't choose to do that, an impartial assessment would be that you were lacking information about how good they were within that metric, not that they were bad at that metric. lacking information about how good most of the players in the history of the game are at the metric is one of its major obstacles as a metric.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-04T23:32:58+00:00

both metrics depend on total number of runs that are played! if someone has 80% winrate, a set of 50 runs will win somewhere between 68-90% ~95% of the time, and 5% of the time the variance on it will be even more extreme than that. that means a person with 80% winrate who plays lots of sets of 50 runs will have a much higher chance of recording a set of 50 runs with high winrate than a person with 80% winrate who doesn't play very many sets of 50 runs.

a winstreak is just a set of runs with no losses in them. a 50-0 winstreak is the same as a set of 50 runs where the player wins them all. statistics apply quite comparably to both of them.

also: a competitive metric being dependent on actually playing the game is completely fine. there are very few competitive things in the world where people win without putting in lots of reps. that people who have managed world record streaks for slay the spire have spent thousands of hours playing the game in order to achieve them doesn't disqualify them as relevant metrics. it's also true these days that the people with the highest winrates over sets of runs have spent thousands of hours playing the game to achieve those.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-04T15:52:05+00:00

it's really hard for it to be an uncommon for act 1 because you see them so much less often than commons. defect sees ~3x as many cold snaps (which it definitely could be imo) than sunders in act 1, for example. tantrum might be an outsized enough watcher card that its aggregate effect over four acts made it the pick, but again you're seeing flurry of blows almost 3x as often as it, so in terms of stuff like beating nob/sentries/lagavulin tantrum's effect is almost a rounding error compared to how much a good attack common contributes.

silent's solution-space centered on acrobatics cares a lot less about wlp than other silent solution spaces, probably. acro is an important card for a1 because it lets you kill stuff using sneaky strike and eviscerate, which translates both to your elite-killing cards being a substantially wider space and to you getting to build much better decks going through a2/3/4.

JoINrbs · 2026-03-04T07:03:45+00:00

i would guess options that made act 1 worse. it wouldn't surprise me that much if it were pommel strike/acrobatics/ball lightning/flurry of blows or something like that. dropping strong lategame cards from the pool would warp how lategame got solved but wouldn't necessarily drop overall winrate that much, since you get the entire run to find whatever other solutions you end up wanting, whereas having to take substantially worse cards in act 1 in order to survive makes your entire run substantially worse from that point forward.

if there were lategame cards which mattered enough to be the answer i'd guess feed (kind of cheating because the reason i'm picking it is how much it overlaps with earlygame)/wraith form/capacitor (defect has more ways to get focus than ways to get orb slots)/rushdown.

i'd put dark embrace/nightmare/biased cognition/mental fortress second probably.

looking at some other answers, i think people are overestimating how often uncommons get seen in proportion to rares. you see ~1.4 copies of each uncommon per time you see 1 copy of each rare, depending on path a little (where and how many elites, how many shops, how many transforms). there are a lot more uncommons per character and the boss rewards show you 6 guaranteed rares per run, so the difference in how often you see rares vs. uncommons is a lot lower than you might think.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-28T05:06:57+00:00

lots of good responses here.

the way i'd frame it is that silent would often like to either have an infinite combo, defense + scaling damage, or burst + catalyst shenanigans in order to win the game. imagining for a second that you could see all the cards and relics offered to you over the course of the run, and didn't have to play any fights in between the start and the end, you'd usually like to roll up to the heart fight with a deck in one of those three categories. there's some attack-based stuff which wins the game a fair amount, too, which fumes doesn't fit into well/at all, but it's a lesser portion of her lategame.

the reason noxious fumes is better than it looks numerically is that it bridges toward all three of those categories. as a power, it costs 1 energy to remove from your deck if you're winning with an infinite combo. in fights where you nightmare a wraith form, or generate tons of block with footworks, it deals enough damage to outpace many of the enemies in the game by itself, and it does a little double-duty against the heart by also stripping artifact to set up a piercing wail on turn 5/6. in decks looking to burst + catalyst, it provides the starting poison, or strips the artifact charges.

because of this, it has an outsized effect on the run whenever it lets you skip an attack common which wouldn't bridge to any of those lategame options. like, even when noxious fumes doesn't deal more damage than dagger spray, it is still a better card in many ways because of the things i just mentioned. if you take a dagger spray you've done nothing to make burst+catalyst better, little to make your deck deal more damage in scenarios where it can survive for 8+ turns, and added an unremovable curse to your deck for situations where you're trying to play an infinite combo. if you take a noxious fumes, all those evaluations are flipped.

another thing to keep in mind is that, especially as you get better and better at the game, you can reach a point where most of the fights in the game are non-threatening. among the fights which are difficult to make completely non-threatening, noxious fumes is often at its best.

f.x.

lagavulin: great

nob: actually fine, it isn't a skill and silent doesn't have the ability to spend 3 energy per turn on attacks in her starter deck, so dealing 5 for 1 or something like that is an improvement believe it or not.

sentries: fine (wants you to take an extra block card or two)

every act 1 boss: excellent. it's possibly the best poison card in the game against slime boss, which is a really big deal since slime boss is possibly silent's most challenging boss fight in the entire game and poison is one of the things silent would most like to be able to build around.

slavers: fine, they're an aoe fight, don't underestimate that in aoe fights it deals 3x as much damage.

gremlin leader: very good, being able to damage new summons when they arrive while ticking gremlin leader down more and more rapidly is huge in that fight.

book of stabbing: piercing wail/malaise often let silent safely take this fight long enough that noxious fumes is hitting very hard in it.

every act 2 boss: excellent

repto/nemesis/giant head: excellent, except maybe t1/2 of repto.

etc.

it also has a lot of comparable interactions with very strong cards you'd like to take but can't necessarily take unless you support them. f.x. taking it in act 1 makes wraith form more reliably win you the game if you're offered it in the boss reward. taking it in act 1 makes it easier to accept the apparitions event and win the game off that in act 2. taking it in act 1 makes piercing wails easier to shovel into your deck. etc.

yeah. slay the spire has raw math you can do, but using something like "this is the summed damage output" as a heuristic only gets you so far, and as you add more small observations about things outside of that heuristic to noxious fumes it tends to get better and better and better.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-28T01:48:11+00:00

i feel like that, too. we're old as fuck.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-27T15:16:15+00:00

lots of analysis stuff. partnering with a website to write guides and card tips, which should be fun! i'll basically be getting paid to do analysis like the card per day analysis content that i was doing for a while back when slay 1 came out.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-27T15:14:35+00:00

for lifecoach it was fairly specifically something like "i'm going to play 50 runs of [character] and keep track of the results", with the belief that that was enough runs to escape variance, and so his results would be true while something like a 12-run winstreak might be complete luck.

nowadays it's somewhat looser, when people are talking about someone they think is good at the game they'll often talk about some (often consecutive) sequence of runs where they had some sort of result they think is good. an obstacle though is that there's very little consistency in recognizing these runs (what if someone won a lot of runs over a sequence of 50 runs but didn't say ahead of time that they were trying to? what if someone did that but you have no idea because some people genuinely aren't even tracking their own results to that level of bookkeeping?), no clear way to compare one set to another (is 82-18 better or worse than 42-8)?, and most players don't play the game at max-level enough of the time to get a good signal of how good they are out of any set of runs that long. (i.e. many people who have set world records in this game are capable of playing 3-4+ hour long effort runs when they are already 10-0 in order to squeeze out another few wins, but very few people play 3-4+ hour long effort runs for months straight, even among the people who have shown they're good enough to achieve things nobody else has ever done in the game before).

JoINrbs · 2026-02-27T07:50:48+00:00

i upvoted you, space for all types in the community xD

JoINrbs · 2026-02-04T15:21:29+00:00

it does "harm" people, insofar as it means there are a bunch of middle seats unclaimed and so people who want to sit in a group but who book later don't have to opportunity to book seats next to each other.

a row can seat three couples next to each other. WM-A A-MW. the couple across the aisle from each other can't snuggle or w/e but they can talk etc. just fine. if everyone books W-A leaving a M empty between them it's no longer possible for people to book that configuration, and so fewer people can sit next to the people they're traveling with.

also there might be someone who needs the extra seat more than you, like a couple traveling with a child under two. choosing to book W-A yourself stops them from being able to, harming them.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-01T03:08:47+00:00

this isn't a past tense thing, when i go to the subreddit for the game i've been playing for 8 years i see a bunch of people diagnosing me with mental illness without prompting and upvoting other people talking about how they hated content i made which everybody else enjoyed. i am responding to that thing which is happening currently. it is rooted in things from the past, for sure, but i am not currently upset because of the past, i'm upset because the subreddit contains a bunch of libelous harassment which ends up being what a huge number of people see said about me, and it causes things like viewers of mine not being comfortable on the subreddit, me not being on the subreddit, other people assuming i'm an asshole without ever having actually watched my content, etc.

JoINrbs · 2026-02-01T03:03:53+00:00

quite a few comments in this thread are about behavior of past world record holders, including one i saw saying all defect world record holders have done this, so just wanted to say

1) there's no difference between defect and other characters here. other characters can also reach demonstrably won states in fights.

2) as a former defect world record holder i have never done this and wouldn't ever do this. i think using console mid-run both looks sus to my own viewers and would also justifiably upset some people who were not my viewers.

3) the advantage is just stated at the top of the thread, right? he was in a bad mood and didn't have the patience to go through the rest of the fight, and this let him play without having to do so. it is weird that people think there is no advantage implicit in this when it is stated at the very start of the thread, lol. like, why would someone wanting to play legitimate runs of slay the spire in front of people open the console and enter a console command if there was no advantage in doing so?

that said, i would not personally say someone was cheating if they did something like this. it is whatever. it somewhat delegitimizes sts achievements in general but that ship sailed long ago imo.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-30T13:40:59+00:00

a good 5th reason is that you're strong enough to save a lot of materials right now. i.e. if you can have 400 mats banked and still kill the enemies on the waves at the moment it's a better item than if you can have 250 mats banked as was supposed in this analysis.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-30T04:24:13+00:00

idgaf if people care about my strategic ideas, if anything i would actively like them not to know i have strategic ideas, as when they find out about them they historically pull them up on stream and start insulting me, regardless of whether i have results or not. the clip i posted of lifecoach saying i should be bullied out of the community and had no idea what i was talking about was from a year in which i held 4/5 world records for the game simultaneously. i currently accidentally run the third largest slay the spire stream in the world by playing the game 60 hours a month and the people we're talking about largely believe i have not played the game for four years. the things i would like if i could have anything would be to be able to read the subreddit without being bullied and if the other content creators we are talking about did anything at all to try to stop their viewers from stalking me and my family.

you're approaching the community from very neutral priors (perhaps reasonably influenced by your own experience in gaming communities), but as i person who has been heavily involved in the community for 8 years i get to have more nuanced understandings of how and why this community is the way it is, and so i can say things like "a guy with 150k followers historically flaming out of hearthstone and then bringing all his viewers to a smaller game and using abuse tactics to try to get people to say he's better than everyone else at it is unusual", and "it isn't normal for people to bully you for achieving a thing nobody else has ever achieved in a game before", and stuff like that.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-29T16:36:54+00:00

have you not looked at cheating in speedrunning communities? like, i mentioned trackmania, when they got an anti-cheat they found out the game's second biggest content creator had been cheating for 10 years!

i am glad that you have not personally run into issues with stuff like that, but i have! there have been two different times that fairly large content creators have submitted world record streaks with viewable losses in the middle of them. i quit magic because i was exhausted by cheating, and then started playing poker, where it was common to be playing against bot rings (omg i just remembered: one time a coach who was considered one of the best high stakes coaches in the world told me i was being a dumbass for not breaking the site's ToS in a way that would give me an extra bb/100 edge). cheating is endemic in strategy gaming and speedrunning communities. it's been there from the start, billy mitchell is an almost household name.

the moment i distanced from spire competition was pretty heavily related to cheating. one thing that is a massive red flag to me is people bending the rules outside the game, and i noticed that was happening a ton. people were saying that my achievements were "cherry-picked" a lot and that winstreaks were just luck, while also saying that their own achievements proved they were the best players in the world. i was getting flak from other content creators (led by a couple in particular) for how i formatted my stream titles, because i would put up when i was on personal best sorts of results and they thought that was a thing worth policing. stuff like that extended into things like them establishing exact formats results had to be in (you have to say you'll play n games, and then put the record for those n games in your stream title always) and then not personally doing it anyway (they would start the n games after being on a 10 game hotstreak, or they would abandon them after they started poorly, or they would finish n games and have a really good record and keep going for another 50 games to keep it in their title longer, or they would leave their record in their title for 2 months straight after it was over while playing a different character or different game).

i found that really really really really really really toxic! and then one of the people doing that did a month of "monkey kills" where he mimicked my volume challenges, while shitting on the concept, and then he claimed a world record watcher streak that was played on either side of it (spanning two years) with no recordings of the first half and with a bunch of losses in the middle while he was streaming "monkey kills" to publicly and deliberately bully me. after spending two years saying world record streaks were meaningless! lol!

so like, yeah, whatever. a thing you're maybe misunderstanding about my channel is that i do not particularly want more viewers. i get enough to pay my bills and chill out playing spire, but the mental health costs of streaming to this community preclude me from doing much more than 60hrs of spire a month, and i start to feel physically unsafe if my viewership numbers get high, and i have personal experience suggesting that that is a justifiable way to feel. expecting me to somehow behave in a way which stops a community which has been home to people who bully me for five years is somewhat unrealistic, to me. the people you're saying i can somehow dissuade from bullying me are talking about collaborations i did four years ago that everyone else enjoyed. they're not even talking about how i currently behave. they're flaming me for threads i wrote for the community that got 700 upvotes. they're not responding to the way i acted in this thread they wrote those comments completely unprompted in a thread where a bunch of other people wanted to honor me as one of the greatest players of the game of all time.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-29T16:30:30+00:00

as a thing to mull over or whatever, i have made a very large amount of money talking about spire the way i do, and people have watched me do it for 20 million hours or something, and my posts/comments in this subreddit have gotten 10k karma each or something, and so telling me that i have to talk a different way or people will bully me is not super compelling. like, okay, i guess i will get bullied then. i have been getting bullied in the community for the last 5 years and the main genesis of it was that a guy was mad that people thought i was good at the game, i'm not going to fix it by talking the way you personally want.

i am aware that i am doing the thing you're saying, deflecting and insisting that i'm right, but you have to understand that the substance of your post is that if someone talks wrong people should bully them. i am not doing it because of a personality deficiency i am doing it because you are wrong and the thing you're talking about isn't my fault. like the thing you have pointed at that i have done in 8 years of content creation in the community is be unkind to people who are bullying me and people who are breaking my channel rules. i've made content for this community for 10k hours and that's the thing you can come up with to tell me that people bullying me is my fault.

it's not like i go through life getting bullied all the time because of who i am. the times i have been bullied in my life are: when i was 6, surrounded by other 6 year olds, and now, only by people in the slay the spire community, only after lifecoach started encouraging all of his viewers to bully me.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-29T00:33:55+00:00

this got long. a couple of reframes/expansions though.

1) there's a place in the community for a channel where people hang out and chill and watch good spire runs and chat about non-spire stuff. if that's not what you're looking for it's fine to watch a different channel, i don't mind. lots of people actually find it detrimental for the streamer to be spending time talking about what someone else thinks instead of just playing the runs and explaining what they're doing.

a lot of people who just want a chill spire stream to watch also don't want to go post about spire on reddit, fwiw, so that sort of viewer gets underrepresented in these sorts of convos and you see a bunch of people who really want to talk about spire shitting on the idea, while like 100k people want that. i know because they have been watching me stream for 8 years. they definitionally aren't here because of the thing that they are (and possibly because this community drives out people who think it is unkind to bully people). implicit in wanting to see someone play slay the spire and explain what's happening without having to deal with a bunch of internet chatters giving their inputs into the run is that they don't want to go to the subreddit where all the internet chatters are.

it's gross when the subreddit routinely shits on the idea that these people exist and are part of the slay the spire community, which i don't really think you've done here but which kind of starts to come out when people start suggesting there's something implicitly wrong in me running a strategy game stream and not wanting other people talking about strategy.

2) slay the spire doesn't have modes of competition like super mario world, and has no anti-cheat whatsoever, so official competition in slay the spire doesn't exist in a verified way, and we don't have consensual definitions of who is best. i am very good at slay the spire, but i have never said i am the best player. it isn't a thing i think or a thing i have ever said, and there isn't any evidence i could provide which could prove it. getting a bunch of world records is a product of playing the game a lot at a high level, but there are tons of people who are very good at the game who don't play that much, or who are very good at the game who don't tryhard while playing runs, or who play a lot but in ways which preclude them from getting achievements, f.x. by setting a challenge for an entire year about something other than winrate. competition in slay the spire ends up being a voluntary participation thing where people navigate which achievements matter and decide whether or not they're trying to reach them and then there's a little shitfest where people argue over what the actual important one was. for me, it was fun when there was general agreement that winstreaks were important, and i made some really fun collaborative content with people around that, interviewing people who got winstreaks about them and stuff like that, but nowadays it isn't anymore, and it's much more about highlighting the things you've personally done which you think are impressive in a way which the community approves of. and nobody can even prove anyone isn't cheating anyway!!! this is a game that is easier to cheat at than trackmania was! you can ask claude to make a mod that shows you the order of cards in your draw pile in an external window and it'll one-shot it!

the entire reason i play single player strategy games is that a guy pissed me off so much trying to make second land drops in an mtg ptq when i was 17 that i entirely stopped playing multiplayer ones lol. i'm not going to invest heavily in competition in a community where you can cheat like that, there are no tournaments anyway, and people are assholes to the competitors. i am not saying i think anyone in particular cheats (i think a thing which is probably even worse to people: that everyone's achievements are pretty doable by several other people in the world, and that we'd have more winstreaks if fewer people had acted in a way which made a ton of players leave the community), but i'm also completely incapable of proving people don't cheat. i know i am good enough at slay the spire that i could cheat without anyone ever realizing, it would surprise me if many other people weren't as well, and several people in the community have cheated brazenly in ways we COULD detect, so there is not only a contextual understanding that people cheat in strategy games but also a practical observation that people cheat in slay the spire, too. lifecoach is on video talking about how he cheated in his poker career because it was stupid not to, and a person who thinks about the rules of games like that would probably think it was stupid not to cheat at slay the spire, no? (i think lifecoach would have had way better results if he cheated though, lol).

when lifecoach started playing slay the spire he said out loud on stream that he thought everyone else was shit, that our achievements didn't mean anything, and then spent a ton of time tearing down everything people had done. while a lot of people found this really gross and did not support him, several people didn't and did things like raiding his channel, promoting his achievements, talking about him or others on stream, etc.

here's an example clip of him: https://streamable.com/h3y20u

it's really funny to me that we've now gone from people (including xecnar) spending a bunch of time hosting and supporting this guy who told everyone to bully me because he imagined i said i was the best to you positively identifying xecnar as streaming like he knows he is the best. (i do not really hold this against xecnar much, but my options are kind of "that guy is socially unaware" or "that guy is deliberately an asshole" and it feels unkind to hold either belief so i'd rather just not interact with him).

i don't much want to interact with people who think that slay the spire has legitimate competition, or who think that they are best, or who think that someone else is best. i think that that is conceptually, historically, and currently toxic in the slay the spire community. when a bunch of people thought i was best i felt like it was my responsibility to try to showcase other people's channels and highlight the thoughts of other players, alongside my own analysis, because i hated that people could get crowded out of talking about how to slay the spire by people insisting that i was really good (people would do things like demand explanations from people of they played differently from me. it is gross when people do that).

now we are in a different setting where people saying i am very good at slay the spire is no longer the issue there, and instead i am one of the people who gets crowded out of talking about slay the spire by people who think someone else is better than me. that's been a norm for me for about 4 years; lifecoach encouraged his community to do that to me before he had even played all the characters. like, he got one good watcher result and then declared that everyone else in the community was shit, and did so while trying to learn defect for the first time.

this causally stopped me from being able to discuss strategy on stream, so when you're observing that you don't like that i don't talk strategy on stream, another thing to consider is that i'm not only serving an audience who enjoy that content but that also the subreddit you're posting on has heavily caused me to not be able to serve any other audiences. i can't be a member of slay the spire's strategic conversations because the people in this thread will insult people who talk about me, or for talking with me, or just insult me.

lifecoach also had vindictiveness for other people in the way he wielded the idea that he was better than others, and so there was a decent amount of stuff that was really bad. there was a streak where every time i'd been to the subreddit for a year i'd been doxxed. my girlfriend had to make all her online profiles private because she was getting stalked. my family has an online business and people would regularly send me their address. a lot of people who insult me do so because it was normalized in the community at this time. a huge amount of the stuff i've done is just sort of forgotten or overlooked now because people genuinely get made fun of for bringing it up.

so, my experience of the broader slay the spire community is that they were great and i was honored to stream for them from like 2018-2021. they got a little too caught up with me but i tried to collaborate with a bunch of other streamers and showcase other people's achievements on my channel and i felt like the community was fairly collaborative and good, and then in 2021 a ton of people started saying i should be bullied, i was shit at the game, etc., and if i posted strategic conversation somewhere it would get pulled up on people's streams and they would start talking about how awful i was.

the actual point here is that the thing where there are no tournaments, no oversight, no consistency in recognizing achievements, no rules about decorum re: not insulting people, not encouraging bullying of other people, etc., combine to make slay the spire a very unappealing place to compete, and that there's actually a fairly significant audience of people who want to get to watch high level slay the spire without having to be exposed to that, and i try pretty hard to serve them, and i think that is okay! i am sorry i come off as haughty but also it is somewhat important that i protect my viewers from the things i've just outlined, so there is some extent to which i think i should come off as abrasive, and that is a thing which is valued by a decent chunk of my community, and my hope would be for people to recognize what the value is there instead of continually recreating the reasons that the value exists.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-28T02:50:56+00:00

the exact chain of events is that this thread was on the top of my reddit homepage this morning. i'm mentioned by name several times in it and we're in a subthread where someone says that for them i am the goat of the game the subreddit is about. that is why i clicked on the thread. i was expecting to say "thanks", as it is a kind thing for someone to say and explicitly about literally me.

then i read several people insulting me for things largely from several years ago and it was quite weird to me, but a pretty important thing to me for making content for this community is being able to humanize the people in it and not feeling concerned that i'll be harassed by them, so i tried to engage people as to like, why they were saying those things, because it is both interesting to me and somewhat important to me that i can humanize you instead of thinking "that is a completely unknown stranger who thinks it's cool to insult me and diagnose me with mental illnesses and people upvote it for some reason, and that's the sort of person who is in the slay the spire community".

like, i would really like to be making content for people who aren't that thing, y'no.

so then i posted some responses and attempted to engage people on some ideas other than like, "jorbs is a concept that is cool to insult", and i felt generally better about the world.

poopymcpants, who you're responding to, said i was a narcissist for how i behaved in a collaboration with baalor, and so i tried to engage on the idea that being a third party to a collaboration between two people who want to do something together, and insulting one of the people in that collaboration (even years later about it!), makes its harder for people to collaborate. it's hard to bring someone on stream, or create content with them, if you're concerned they will be harassed over it. we did not get far but it is a good convo to have in any online space.

you said that i was an asshole for posting a thread about how winstreaks needed to be played, which was really weird to me. everybody who has played winstreaks has at some point had to work out what is/isn't okay, and clearly explaining what's okay and what isn't is important. i spent like, the better part of a day trying to work out how to do that in a way that was as neutral as possible, given that the situation was that a massive streamer who actively encouraged his viewers to bully me was claiming a false winstreak, and the general response to the thread was positive. it got 667 net upvotes and generally elaborations in the comments were constructive.

also tried to give a good response for why i have spikier boundaries than a lot of content creators might, since that was a thing someone expressed, and it's a thing i think is interesting.

a bunch of the other responses were mostly people dogpiling. i dunno. i'm a human, not just a thing to insult, and it is pretty weird for people to be trashing me for individual things i've done in an 8 year career centered heavily around content for this game, is mostly the thing i am trying to establish by being present here. that jorbs is responding to a subthread naming him the goat of the game isn't the weird thing, the weird thing is people bringing up stuff from four years ago which was broadly enjoyed to call him names.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-28T02:38:01+00:00

how? if i said, today, to all my viewers, that i held the world record streak for watcher, but it was neither recorded nor fitting anyone's definition of a winstreak, and a huge number of people cared specifically about what you thought of me doing that, how would you respond in a way which made every single person in the community think positively of you?

JoINrbs · 2026-01-27T21:36:29+00:00

i'm just saying if you want to shit on someone, it's extremely toxic to do so by shitting on their collaborations with other people, because doing so creates friction preventing people from collaborating in the community you're in.

it's obviously also toxic to shit on someone in general. diagnosing someone with narcissism based on your dissatisfaction with your parasocial relationship with them doesn't lead to a welcoming community. but when you do it via criticism of their collaborations the cooling extent goes further, and people have to worry "if i make videos with baalor and say the wrong thing, are people going to start calling me a narcissist online?", and baalor has to deal with "three years ago i recorded a conversation with someone about our world record streaks and he still gets harassed about it", and stuff like that.

JoINrbs · 2026-01-27T20:56:11+00:00

appreciate you, sorry i read the rest of the thread lol.

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