LocusMods.ru Monthly Newsletter for August 2022

Howdy, locusts! It's ya girl TheSharkQueen with all the news that's fit to type and send to your email inbox, which is a significantly lower standard than "fit to print." Before you ask, I am aware it's still July, but I'm gonna be flying to New Zealand on the 1st to get married to my best bud and fiancee MorrowindLoather666 on the rock formation they CGI'd the horse palace in Lord of the Rings onto. She proposed to me after we beat the final boss together in Lord of the Rings Gaiden: Brego's Quest co-op, so it seemed fitting. If you wanna watch the ceremony tune in to her Twitch channel on the 4th!

Anyway, newsletter stuff. To celebrate the new forum software coming out of beta on the 1st, I tracked down the subjects of a few notable disappearances/departures from the community and did a little mini "where are they now" deal. You know, like if this was a documentary about the sort of people who upload mods for open world games that enable breast jiggle physics on every pedestrian.

TrendsetterFromHell aka AscendedTrendsetter

Most Well-Known Work: Fashion Police for Cyberpunk 2077, a set of incredibly detailed original quests based out of an original hub building, plus several really bold new unlockable outfits.
What Happened? Self-banned using the old forum software's infamous API exploit for doing so, returned as AscendedTrendsetter and started posting really boring evangelical christian flavored trolling until regular-banned.
Where Are They Now? Apparently this was some sort of weird viral marketing for their original non-mod game Angels & Ligatures, which came out a few months later on itch.io and is actually kind of great. It's a nonviolent first person detective RPG in the GZDoom engine, where you play a cult deprogramming specialist who follows the trail from a murdered client into the mega fucked up depths of a conspiracy that involves three rival megachurches in the American midwest. I have gotten two of the five endings and I highly recommend it, it's kind of like if Disco Elysium was a janky as hell one-person project and went to a place in the final act I would describe as "Videodrome meets Jesus Camp in the same town as Eraserhead but in color and more literal/unambiguous."

RPGMakerFan97

Most Well-Known Work: Just generally being an incredibly friendly and caring person who everyone loved having around. Never submitted any mods himself, but who cares.
What Happened? Abruptly stopped posting in 2018 both on LocusMods and his linked social media accounts. Last few posts were normal low-key stuff like being excited to try someone's WIP they posted a screenshot of when it was done.
Where Are They Now? Messaged a handful of close friends in private at the end of April, apologizing for falling off and catching up but asking not to tell anyone. One of his friends asked him to message me, and we talked about how everyone thought he was the greatest and was really worried, and how he just kinda got busy with work and moving apartments and the longer he went without talking to people the more he felt like they deserved an explanation that didn't really exist. I convinced him to post in the chat thread and now it's like he never left. A real feel-good outcome that no one dared imagine, and I'm very pleased.

Sven7 aka Svenners aka SvenTheSequel aka SvenCantAndWontStop aka StopBanningMe aka IWillKillYouAll aka HeartfeltApologyThrowaway aka IWillKillYouAllIRL

Most Well-Known Work: de_cubeception, a CounterStrike: Global Offensive map that was just a cube inside another cube, and the spectacular three-month forums meltdown that followed.
What Happened? Dude uploaded a bad and lazy map, then got increasingly verbally abusive in unrelated forum threads, then ManChavsterCityFC linked his bad/lazy map during a flame war and said "lmao this you bruv?" and he just fucking snapped. One of the site administrators had to hard-code a thing that prevented him from sending private messages, because the software didn't support that and he was sending such a volume of death threats to everyone (literally everyone, every user from the online list at the time he'd send them) it was making the servers chug. Then when he kept ban evading the admin had to rewrite that code first to just forbid anyone with a username starting with "Sven" from using the PM system, and then to check a list of user IDs he could update quickly/easily!
Where Are They Now? He's one of those "supermoderators" on Reddit that moderates like a dozen subreddits. I'm not even kidding. Different username and he begged me not to reveal it was him, because these subreddits are uh... they would not approve of some of the various slurs he used and would oust him. I made him send me $417 via paypal for my silence and made very clear I might ask for more in the future, so that's fun, and also lucrative. I know people can change, but 2019 is recent enough I am comfortable with my choice to do the cool crime of blackmail.

And that's all for now except, of course,

The August 2022 Upload of the Month!!!

It's gonna be the 4k60fps upload of my wedding ceremony, bitchhhhhhhhhhhhh