In my opinion what has happened to the community is a spinnoff version of a more general trend happening these last years. I'm talking about the
huge amount of information there is in conjunction with the fact that you can
instantly access it. This comes with both positives and negatives.
For the positive part, anyone who is truly interested in learning will find its way and achieve what he wants. But for the negative part, people feel overwhelmed by that huge amount of information there is out there. And especially in the beginning, oh boy, everything's like a jungle. You want to learn something and you realize you need to know something else, you try to learn that else but you find out you need to know that other. And things go on. And in the end of the day you end up feeling depressed, since you ended up not doing what you initially wanted, dumb because you couldn't learn how to do it and enraged as you
wasted your time. So why getting into all that trouble if I can so easily ask for someone else to give me what I want, since I can't do it and he can? I mean isn't this the reason it's called a 'community'? There's nothing wrong with what I'm doing.
We want to see fast results, but also hate to be proven wrong.
"Why the heck didn't my routine work? I did everything correctly, what kind of trash is this assembly.".
"Hey, I did all of the steps in the tutorial, how did my rom get screwed up? Stupid tutorials...". So I end up not learning assembly, or the deeper methodology and knowledge the tutorial strived to convey.
We see things other people do and we think that we are also able to do them, right now of course.
"Hey this Blessed guy made Mega Evolutions with ASM. Great! Let me check a tutorial on assembly and then try and read how he did it. And again I end up depressed and angry as neither I understood how he did it and neither could I find use for the knowledge I got from that stupid tutorial.
To come to a conclusion,imo the biggest steps to be done, in order to eliminate this as much as we can, start from within ourselves. And specifically those three things that I always forget and alway try to remember. 1) YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING. Yes, from the simplest things like what a pointer to the most advanced ones, like megas. The only thing that you need is persistence and determination. 2) SLOW DOWN. Take things one step at the time, play around with what you already know, make sure of what you know. 3) DONT FORGET TO HAVE FUN. Yes, all of us are here because we love pokemon and remember the days we were younger and playing
that Fire Red or
that Diamond, thats the biggest thing we all have in common here. So make sure that if you do something, do it because you really want it.
FBI said:
My biggest failure as a member of this community is creating that detrimental thread...and it's still around despite the fact that me, it's main contributor, has completely stopped. I wish someone would just one day delete that garbage thread.
Personally I think that this thread, alongside with you ASM Workshop are the best places where someone who is interested could really learn ASM from. I find them extremely helpful as for me this is the next step after learning the basics. They are simple nice things, which help getting generally more comfortable with assembly. And I want to say a big THANK YOU for both of these little treasure nests.
As for your question what could you do. I think that the biggest gap (at least with assembly) is that most people(myself included) don't know what to do or how to use the knowledge the obtained from the basic tutorials. As I said before, those two threads I think can help minimize that gap as there is even commentary on the routines. So imo something like a Step 2, a more like gentle exposure to asm after the tutorials would be pretty nice :)