To see JAM’s developed sets on RA, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube.
Mirrored at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped. If you have any concerns with this mirror, please reach out to clymax directly.
Subheadings and formatting added during the editorial process.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32715
(Topic locked by RA moderators before anyone could reply.)
October 7, 2025
Part One: Make hide certain games feature
I’ll add my 2 cents to the current situation about removing certain games from the site.
There is a filter like that on a certain hentai sites. If something is straight illegal, you won’t find it there. First, you agree that you are 18+ or older to enter. Then, if manga has very sensitive content, it gives you a warning, which makes sense. 95% of people just came to see anime boobies and they don’t want to suddenly see guro or scat. And when you see this warning, you have 3 options.
- Go on the front page.
- Agree to proceed and watch this manga.
- Choose don’t warn me in future option to never get such a warning.
100% are happy and everyone could get what they want.
On RA now we have the opposite situation. 5% of users are forcing other 95% to do what these 5% want. Percents may vary but it’s clear that overwhelming majority don’t mind to have recently removed games to be on the site and don’t want RA to act like payment processors recently by forcing censoring and removal of certain stuff from Steam and other platforms. 100% are unhappy. Because you can waste your time mastering something that eventually could be wiped out from existence. Even not telling about deving sets that could be erased the same way. How could I say it’s 100% if this minority got what it wanted? They eventually may lose more than they gained now and get hatred and hate by the majority of players because they caused this.
What could be done on RA? Well, aside from “show mature content always” option there could be another warning about sensitive content. If you click to agree, then you can see the game set as it’s made for mature games now. Plus, an extra option in profile. Something like “Show games with sensitive content”. If that option is disabled, you will see games with sensitive content as “Unknown Game”. This is something about to be implemented and it’s not hard to do. But. These games should be on site as they were for years. And players should have right to play and master these games and earn points for them without worrying how sensitive vocal minorities will feel about it. Especially, after RA publically supported Stop Killing Games movement just 3 months ago. So, it found out these loud words worth nothing?
And I say it out loud. It’s not your business what other players are playing. Feel as you like to feel, judge them if you want but it’s totally up to them. If somebody plays something you don’t want to exist and you offended by it, it’s your problem.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/user/tele/comments?page=8
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 9, 2025
Part Two: Response to tele
In our country internet censorship also started very slowly. Let’s just block some sites with CP and drugs. To protect kids of course! Now fast forward several years. Thousands of innocent sites are blocked. Most famous are YouTube and Discord. A lot of messengers they can’t control are blocked too. If they catch you using VPN to bypass the restrictions, you’ll go to jail. If you call war as “war”, not as “just special operation”, you’ll go to jail. And murderers are rapists who previously were in jail but voluntered to go to the war and now national heroes, same as WWII heroes.
RA was a sanctuary of all shitstorm happening in gaming industry for years and for me personally from the offline issues but not anymore because of recent events. I’m sick and tired of other people normalizing and standardizing the stuff for me. What I could or could not interact with, especially if it’s the legal stuff or if nobody was really asked about it. I prefer to do my own research. If it’s something really really bad then a warning would be enough and I’ll make a decision to continue or quit.
So, if there are still golden tickets left, give me one please. I want to believe.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/game/31879
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 26, 2025
Part Three: Another Deleted Game
“It’s just 3 games illegal mostly everywhere”.
“Hm, this Pandora’s box looks so attractive. What if we open it?”
“It’s just 7 games illegal mostly everywhere plus the games with the hate speech and RApe but we promise to keep the list short”.
“OK, it became quiet, so we can proceed”.
“It’s just 10 games illegal mostly everywhere plus the games with the hate speech and RApe plus the hacks that were made by the users banned here”.
===WE ARE HERE===
“It’s just X games mentioned above plus games from “problematic creators” (Harry Potter series)”.
“It’s just Y games mentioned above plus games where you can assault women (GTA Vice City)”.
“It’s just Z games mentioned above plus games that are illegal in certain countries (Doom is banned in Germany, so it counts as an illegal game)”.
“It’s just T games mentioned above plus games with an offensive context in them in any kind (Conker’s Bad Fur Day)”.
“It’s just R games mentioned above plus all games with blood, gore and violence. Kids are playing on this site, so we can’t host them”.
“It’s just H games mentioned above plus all games with mature content as we don’t want to have problems with payment processors”.
“It’s just N games mentioned above plus all games from Nintendo consoles as we don’t want to have problems with Nintendo”.
“Please read this 100-page guidebook of what games are allowed to have the page on our site”.
“We just will delete everything we want. If you don’t like our site, don’t play here”.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/user/DimensionIceDragon
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
Context:
October 27, 2025
Part Four: Response to DimensionIceDragon
Sad to see this… You are very wrong, Dragon. You will be remembered for your determination. As a player who mastered all but 1 Tetris sets. As a developer who make more people to know about the PS1 hidden gem. I was hoping to see you getting these last 2 achievements in Prince of Persia but it will not gonna happen. And I understand you too. What’s the point if eventually any challenge you completed will be nerfed, demoted or altered to fit some new standards? Or even just erased from existence as it happened with Clover, Perwinkle, 177, Custer’s Revenge and even 3 new games just a few days ago?
I’m very sorry from all of us for the treatment you got as junior developer. What once was a school to teach a new devs how to use achievement tools to a make sets became a bureacratic concentration camp where you will be eliminated for a slight disagree without a thought… We, as devs allowed this to happen, so I want to apologize from us all. I am doing this because the ones who is really guilty for that will never apologize as they happy now to control the people as they want.
May you find a peace in a better place. If there will be one, I’ll let you know.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/game/13440
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 27, 2025
Part Five: Response on Game Wall of Galerians (PSX), Aborted Junior Set of DimensionIceDragon
DimensionIceDragon: Someone renamed my achievements and didn’t even ask ME!!!!!
[Writing Team Member]: I worked with the Writing team to update them as unfortunately a lot of them did not meet the site’s Writing policy. If you’re an active dev, you are consulted, but at the time of updating you were no longer an active dev and hadn’t logged into the site for over 2 months.
You still have full credit for developing the set and none of your code or logic has been changed. The changes are all cosmetic, mostly in grammar & punctuation. However I did change some of the titles to add a little more flavour and I appreciate this is subjective. I apologise for causing any offence with these changes.
There is a changelog in the forum topic if you would like to see a ‘before and after’ and the reasoning behind it.
@[Writing Team Member]
You should have really asked. You have mastered this game which took a several hours. Writing a short message like “Hello, I want to fix the grammar in your set. There are some errors. Would you like to work together?” would take a few minutes or so? Is that too much? Grammar probably was a bit incorrect but why you started to alter the titles? To give some hints for the secret rooms? What if the set developer prefer to not give such hints and make players to explore the stuff for themselves?
Now a few cheevos has the wrong descriptions and tickets are open on them because of that. DimensionIce Dragon saw them and realized that everything was working well and even approved by a code reviewer back in time until someone came with “improvements” and now he’s being blamed for it. Not harassed, not bullied. Just asked “dude, why are your achievements not working?”. It became a final straw for him. Especially after what he got through as a junior developer. So, he have requested an account deletion that coming in a days… Was it worth it?
And I’d like to mention that I’m not attacking you, it’s nothing personal. But the approach in general. Posts like “hey, we came here and made this set better” without asking anyone really undermines efforts of the set developer, the time he spent doing these titles and for everyone it makes him look like he did a bad job. In reality English is not his first language but many people can think “he wasn’t even trying!”
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/2011?comment=328103#328103
Part Six: Response on Official Forum Topic for Writing Team’s Revised Banana Prince (NES)
Context: Post Leading to User Mute on June 22
So, when WritingTeam arrives and make some changes in public it’s basically saying to dev: “Your set sucks because the titles are generic and descriptions are vague and we are here to improve it” but when the original set dev complains about the changes made and have a vaild point, for some reason this is interpreted like “the angry dev is attacking the team, so please contact the team in private and make them still look like a heroes”. Am I wrong?
in the vast majority of cases inactive devs are also no longer active players on the site and haven’t logged in for years. Some are even banned or have deleted their accounts. That’s why it’s not required to contact inactive devs.
You are confusing the cause and the effect. “I am longer a developer, so screw this site. Nobody will contact me if anything anyways” is also happening very often but there are the cases when people are tired, lose interest and quit. And there are people who still here. That “inactive developer” term itself is very hypocritical thing IMO as both cases fell under it.
October 27, 2025
Since I had no time to answer to this earlier, I’d like to sum up things from my side…
- The incorrect descriptions will be fixed (they may already have been fixed?).
- WritingTeam will consider feedback about contacting active former devs and potentially make a process change/improvement.
- If you notice issues with title/description rewrites, please contact WritingTeam directly rather than creating a public callout. The whole team sees your messages to that account, so it’s more likely for the issue to be addressed ASAP.
My answer to this proposition is “no”. It’s rule to the one side and just a suggestion to the another one. I already saw how the descriptions were changed from a bit vague (but only to players who didn’t actually played the game) to some nonsence and when the team have been contacted, they fixed the mistakes but did not do what set dev wanted and all that was before the closed doors. And I already see situations like this continue to happening, so nothing is changed. As being said, it’s not a single case. 2 cases for only Xanders. He made only 4 sets and 2 of them (that’s 50%!!!) had the wrong descriptions after changing them. I’m glad that it’s fixed now but I personally know more than 5 of such cases, including my own achievement where “5-2” somehow became “5-1”:
Another time it caused achievement with wrong description got demoted because it looked like it’s something completely RNG while it wasn’t. Who will fix that?
Nobody asked for these improvements in the first place. The last case happened just recently and it was the last straw for developer who decided to delete his account after he found out about it. Of course, everyone is making mistakes, but imagine some dev will go to fix problematic set but only make things worse as a result. He will get instant punishment and probably demotion to jr. if he won’t fix this stuff fast enough because “we have too many devs right now”.
What I’d like to see here is a responsibility and accountability for all teams. At least, make tickets for the former/inactive devs be addressed to the ones who made the last change, even if it’s just a description or a badge that could had some hint. At most, get rid of this blatant “inactive dev” term and learn new grossary:
a. dev who is around and cares about his stuff;
b. dev who is around but don’t care about his stuff anymore;
c. dev who is not around but cares about his stuff and can come if anything;
d. dev who is not around and don’t care about his stuff anymore.
You are smart guys with native English skills. I’m sure you can figure out how to name stuff.
All of us want accurate & well-written achievements that make a better experience for the players! Let’s stay respectful and focus on ways we can constructively improve the site.
Please don’t speak for everyone. Sometimes people prefer to have a vague stuff in description like “find a secret room in chapter 3” rather than “in chapter 3, having item X in inventory, come to site Y and do Z to open a secret room” or a short, clear, eye-catchy and compact descriptions like “Beat the game without dying [Hard, 3 continues]” rather than “Beat the game without dying at least once playing on hard mode blah-blah-blah”. And I prefer to write numbers as I like. Something like “1,424.5” makes my mind boil every time I see it. Because in many countries including my own the decimal point is not the point but comma instead and there are no thousands separators, though blank is used for a large numbers. Besides, in the retro games (sorry, but I refuse to call PS2, GameCube and Wii as retro) we usually just had 6 or 7 figures without any commas and people knew how many points they do have. What’s the point to write “50,000 points in description” while it’s displayed as “50000” in game? People became blind since 1980’s and not being able to see how many figures are there?
We could discuss these things beforehand but unfortunately there were no discussion and this Writing Policy was just implemented without asking the community or even developers while things like implementing the “beat the game” feature has a wide discussion. I don’t remember how majority of the community was asking for that writing policy guidebook.
Also, I don’t like the mentality of “if WritingTeam has not fixed the achievement titles, then dev made a bad job” by default. Not sure when came from, but it should go away. So, I’m asking for WritingTeam to Stop Killing Sets. You think that you’re helping when in reality you’re killing RA lore with your improvements when nobody asking you for doing so. If somebody does that then I see a problem right here. And I wish before touching anyone else’s work the people were reading Hippocratic Oath each single time.
I appreciate the improvement when it’s actually improvement and replacing of something generic like titles like “Stage 1”, “Stage 2” etc. or if there are real typos in descriptions. But what if it’s not improvement? The question “what if I don’t like the some new achievement titles?” still remains open and unaddressed. If people behind the scenes are often talking like “another set was ruined by WritingTeam” or “another piece of RA lore was destroyed” and even for some of them it’s the last straw and they are deleting their accounts then something is definitely off.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/15728?comment=328104#328104
October 27, 2025
Part Seven: Response on Official Forum Topic for Deplatformed Game, Hokuto no Ken (Master System)
So, seems like, I was right after all and you are targeting “the problematic devs” and their content for any tiny far-fetched pretext.
Here’s a little sum up:
- August. Rockman 5 set was demoted because suddenly not all cores are supporting it. A set from UnsolidSnake, a person you certainly hate. Though the partial memory exposure or instabilities in some cores was never was a problem for this site and Rockman 5 isn’t the only set with recently exposed ScratchPad memory. At least 2 more Rockman sets are using it in cheevos but for some reason only this one was demoted.
- September. The “Can I play Daddy?” subset by me which was nothing but April joke based on crazy subset hype at that point and the joke the game developers themselves did about newbie players. Again from all such events only mine don’t follow some standards and should be erased.
- October. Hokuto no Ken by
Anic. Another problematic dev. Though 2 versions of the game that are different enough to have their own sets. it was OK to have 2 versions for years but suddenly this one needs to be removed?
Don’t know about you but I clearly see the pattern here.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
— Ian Fleming
Do this witch hunt several times and then “just clarify the rules how we are already handling stuff”.
And speaking about this specific game. The Japanese version IS being the original and the English looks like bootleg. Official though. I know Hokuto no Ken or Fist of the North Star series and it’s based on anime and manga but what is this Black Belt thing? I see no consistency here, especially after continuously and forcefully trying to separate Pokemon regional sets which IMO have even less difference than here. Also, using your power to undo the community poll for devs to separate these 2 versions which was publicly announced at the Black Belt topic really makes your team looks in a bad light on public. And if it was your decision to allow regional set 3 years ago then it’s even worse for you.
Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/user/televandalist
(Now deleted because all wall comments by JAM have been deleted.)
October 27, 2025
Part Eight: Second Response to tele
I appreciate what you’re trying to do, tele. I mean, to return the status quo.
But it’s way too late for that. As if apply a makeup to a corpse to make it look better. But nobody is talking about it.
The corpse is just dressed in a military uniform with more and more awards to be added even after its death, where every new supported system or every major event being such an award.
This place is FUBAR and at this point a fork is inevitable.
Even the founder resign and the total wipeout of all existing teams with major power shift to free style with total transparency would not help.
November 10, 2025
Part Nine: Site Mute
I was muted for 2 months on Oct 27.
I made a few posts after I noticed 3 more games were removed from the site.
A formal reason they gave me is threatening the other person in private messages while there was no real threat and they usually don’t send any message at all when they mute you.
You just realize you can’t post any message by yourself.
What I actually did is asked for some respect when reporting others, explained that putting your feelings over community interests by reporting active developers for insignificant violations is probably not a good idea.
The user was pretty hostile over me, mentioned me in negative light, so I also told him about 10% of things I actually did for the site as I prefer to do actually things, not to yell on every crossroad how cool I am that I fixed a single ticket or added a leaderboard or two to the set.
The real reason was my reaction to removal of 3 more games (while they promised to keep the list low) while things gone quiet and discovered and exposed a pattern of targeting the content of the developers they don’t like, which you can read here.
https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/15728?comment=328104#328104
What lead to ban I’ll write next.
Part Ten Coming Soon?
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