[EtienneSM]

I initially wasn't going to respond to this thread, but after coming across it again, I figured why not? After all, this was practically the birth of my rhythm gaming career, so the least I can do is to provide an explanation lmao.

Lagrange Multiplier pretty much hit the nail on the head in terms of why I quit 4k specifically. As more and more players quit and the more and more the meta shifted towards a specific type of play, it became beyond frustrating to continue playing, streaming; the whole 9 yards really. Competition was a big driving force, and when you take that away after 15+ years of playing, you slowly run out of ways to stay engaged with the game at that level. It would be cool to return to top-level play someday to accomplish some lingering goals I never obtained, but finding time/energy is very difficult and these scores will likely never be published publicly (aside from Etterna's site maybe).

As for the general rhythm game community itself, I think to this day it's hard to articulate my emotions properly as to why I grew so vehemently apart from it. Whether it's how certain communities treated me, feeling socially isolated (via personality/lifestyle differences), running out of good content to make; it's a culmination of things that caught up with me pretty harshly as I got more and more into my 20's, and a mini-identity crisis eventually solidified my transition to making other content. I absolutely love what I do now, and it feels good to do something a lot closer to my true self instead of an actively waning hobby whose community I've grown terminally out of touch with lmfao.

That's more or less about it tbh. Hope y'all have been doing well.