The cult of the angry red face

Although I agree people judging extreme demons solely on difficulty is one prevalent issue, I feel that it branches off from a larger problem. I believe the problem lies in the fact that people seem to have this tunnel vision of a good level. They focus down on one single aspect and then use that one strength as justification for showering the level in praise.

Level looks ugly? "WELL AT LEAST THE GAMEPLAY IS GOOD"
Bad gameplay? "WELL AT LEAST THE DECO IS GOOD"
Everything fucking terrible? Well doesn't matter because "CREATOR" made it, or like it was mentioned, difficulty.
ITS GOOD BECAUSE ITS LONG
ITS GOOD BECAUSE ITS HARD

And you can fill in the blanks.

A portion of the community fails to recognize that one aspect of a level cannot carry itself on its own, and it's the combination of all aspect of gameplay, sync, deco, difficulty, etc. In conjunction with each other, that is what makes a level good.

I've always found it ridiculous how seemingly brainwashed people have become when it comes to not just extreme demons, but levels in general. It really seems like Robtop, the mods, most creators, and their "fanbases" are just in a constant circlejerk of complimenting each other and awarding themselves CP. You could have replaced the "you deserve a seizure for your posts" GIF with one of the daily levels I played recently, and it probably would have still given Kurt Eichenwald a seizure ten times over. Yet in the comments, all of the mods are just spamming their ""s and "LOVE IT"s along with the other hundreds of comments identical to them. One of the fundamental values of my channel was based off of this circlejerking in the community; I chose to criticize harshly without being overly hateful and not following the steady stream of "AMAZING LEVEL" in all caps in every single fucking video title of that level, because I believed that public criticism was something that completely lacked.

And honestly I believe throughout the years my experience with a lot of the community proved a lot of my theories right. For criticizing levels I've been called immature, a retard, dumbass, and just about every other name in the book by people who seem to be into the "cult" as mentioned, who seems to follow these people blindly. Some creators just were so offended by the fact that I thought their levels were to be frank, shit in some aspect or another. To them, unless I ceased to stop "being mean" and only saying good thing about the level, I was simply just a hater. A childish, immature "retard".

But that wasn't all that happened.

More people who were willing to go against the flow also emerged. Maybe that's just the crowd I gathered, but as a matter of fact, the people who had criticism against the levels seemed to outweigh the typical number two word "good level" comment (although of course they still existed). I saw creators willing to take criticism and not only that, but to thank the people giving it. They certainly weren't the most revolutionary creators in terms of style, but in terms of their outlook and attitude I can say for sure that they are the future of this game. The circlejerking still went on in the background, but out came (no pun intended) a bunch of creators who valued the process of making levels good.

And of course there's the people of the GDForums. Sure there are one or two of those people who were in the party of the "one thing is good so the whole thing is and it deserves a rating" party, but for the most part people here are willing to call out flaws when they exist, and pay respects to things done right. We do after all have a team of (dead) level judges that do (or used to before life happened) judge levels for quality, and many members do the same. So I don't really believe the issue is that there are too little people who appreciate levels as a whole rather than its individual components, but rather that the major figures in the community and their masses of followers overshadow those people. Dissension against this trend of blind praise and circlejerking does exist. The issue is that those voices are not as prevalent as the others.

So the solution to this whole dilemma will not be to try and change the minds of masses of people who have their brains already on autopilot on who is a good creator, or what makes a good level. That is simply not going to happen. Rather than do something futile like that, we simply need to make our voices heard. People like Elisione and Wherwin have made names for themselves for criticizing the systems put in place and the tactics employed by the creator community, as well as the reception from their fanbases through Youtube. If you we want something to change, then we're going to have to do something about it.