Discontinuing Holy Shoes

For the last 3 years or so I've had sort of lukewarm feelings toward this award. In the last month or so I've been thinking about it a lot more seriously, and I've decided to get rid of it completely. The playlist still exists (unlisted) but I won't be linking it in my signature, it won't be on my youtube channel, and I won't be giving out any more awards.

Here are some reasons:

1) It caused a ton of bickering. Nobody with a strong opinion about a holy shoe I gave out ever convinced me to change my decision, but that didn't stop the arguments, all of which were utterly petty and pointless and created a lot of hate.

2) It has never been clear what exactly you have to do to get a holy shoe. Influence over time? Not really. Impressiveness at the time? Not really. Amount of effort put into a track? Not really. Amount rabid liked the track? Not really. Executing a cool new idea? Not really. Popularity of the track overall? Not really. It was sort of a mix of all these things that nobody really knew the formula for.

3) I really, truly believe that the pressure to create something insanely epic has driven away dozens of excellent trackmakers from Line Rider permanently, when they fail to finish the track because it reaches a point where it's not worth it anymore... and then kept them from ever coming back, because there would be an army of people to ask about when the track they promised was coming out. I'm also sure it has driven a large number of potential sceners and trackmakers away from the game because they didn't feel like they would ever be able to make something "good enough" for it to be worth it.

4) It's tiring to give out an award that is against your own Line Rider philosophy. My philosophy of art has matured a lot since 2008 (I've been through college now, lol) And I really don't think this award is a good showcase of the best of Line Rider. It mostly showcases stuff that people who play Line Rider think is impressive, which is sort of a circlejerk.

5) I think this award has contributed to people "hoarding" new ideas and discoveries. I see a lot of people intentionally not streaming tracks, intentionally not sharing things they've discovered, intentionally not telling people anything about what they're planning to do, out of fear that someone else will take their idea and then their track won't make the biggest splash possible - the result is that everyone is working on projects silently for months and it doesn't look like anyone is actually doing anything, which makes for an overall lack of activity on the site, which means when the track is done there are less people who care. Which means the projects never get finished. It's a vicious cycle.

6) I don't like the kinds of tracks this award rewards anymore. It's moved from "tracks rabid thinks are really great" to "tracks rabid thinks other people probably think are really great" and that's just not as rewarding a title for me to give out. I'm much more of a fan of shorter tracks that experiment with things, take risks, and try out new ideas, than tracks that do something that's already been done. I'm much more of a fan of tracks that focus on presentation and clean execution than tracks that focus on being insane and epic. I'm much more of a fan of tracks that have something to say to everyone rather than something to prove to themselves.

I'm pretty sad I didn't move to correct this problem long ago when I first had doubts about this award, years ago. I think it would be nice to have a different kind of award, but I'm not sure what the best kind of award might be, and I feel that it's probably too late to start a new reward, since 90% of the Line Rider tracks that will ever be made have probably already been made. Plus, the only real reason that Holy Shoes are held in high esteem today is that they have been given out extremely sparingly and yet somewhat consistently over the last eight years. I don't think I could get something with that kind of gravitas going again.

I could say here that I'm sorry to everyone who was hoping to get a holy shoe in the future... but honestly I'm not sorry. I don't think this was a good award to aim for.

If you are still interested in what Line Rider videos I really do like, I've updated my Favorites on YouTube and I'm going to be curating it with more attention:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=FLqWUIhjy5fqh-XhsmbIfmUA

the part about 90% of tracks have been released already is something I really hope isn't true