How has PR2/JV shaped you as a person?
#1
Hi all,

I've just created an account because I forgot my old login but I went by the name SouthSideField on JV and Destroyer2050 in PR2. I was only 10 years old when I first started playing PR2 and joined JV back in 2008. It feels like a lifetime away. Although I moved onto other thing after a good 6 year run, I've often fondly reminisced back on my experiences over the years and thought about how they shaped me as a person.

Growing up in a relatively poor household, gaming in my childhood and early teens consisted of playing flash games on my family's shoddy old laptop. PR2/JV was a huge pillar in my life in these times and was my first real multiplayer experience online as well as my first time being part of any kind of community. I learned how to interact with other people, make friends and develop critical thinking skills as I eventually began conversing on the forums. JV really did feel like a community to me and over the years I basically recognized and got to know every regular user to an extent.

I can't remember every single experience I had, honestly it's mostly a haze, but I clearly remember how being part of this community made me feel and I still cherish all the time I spent back here in PR2's haydays. I was completely obsessed to the point of fantasizing about scenarios in PR2 and on the boards! I'd eagerly bike home from school each day, ready to hop online into what was essentially my second life.

How did these experiences further shape my life? Well I've always prioritized community and a sense of belonging moving forward in life, whether that be in other online games or my real life social circles.

I'm 22 now and know a lot of other people first got into PR2/JV as children or young teens. How have you personally been impacted growing up with this community?

Thank you all, once again, for the joyful memories and giving me something to look forward to every day of my childhood/early teens.

~SouthSideField/Destroyer2050
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#2
Hi! Welcome to JV2

I was also 9/10 when I first started playing PR2. I didn't join the original JV until years later, though. Maybe I was 13/14? I am also 22 now so I've been around for quite a while ^^

How has PR2/JV(2) shaped me as a person? I used to be super quiet. Though, I'm still a relatively shy person, but I've spread my wings out a bit Tongue I'm more confident in posting my opinions on certain topics. I remember when I was younger, I would never comment on JV because I was afraid of what other's might say or think.

This community has given me so many friendships and a place where I feel like I belong, so thank you to all who has helped me along the way (also to those who are no longer here). I'm very glad I've continued to stick around for so long and grow up with you guys.
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#3
Oh hey! I recognize your JV username! I think we were in good spirits back then...? I can't quite remember it's been an awfully long time.

I joined the PR2 bandwagon a little later than most...as my first account on there (lilflo13) was from early 2011...so I was 13 years old when I joined! And I believe I joined JV maybe a month after (nearly 10 years with this community! Insane tbh).

Overall, this community (PR2/JV/AF/JV2/etc) doesn't seem like it had shaped me a ton on first thought...but it truly did a lot of good for me. For one, it led me to a countless number of friends and people I absolutely adore. I wasn't exactly a shy kid growing up as I loved being the class clown (I like attention lmao) but this community allowed me to fully blossom creatively. I mean...I cultivated and transformed my love for photography from this community (with the help of hosting POTF (Photography of the Fortnight) on JV) as well as found my competitive and creative spirit on things like Big Brother, Survivor, and Roll To Doge. I also managed to...in part...find my space in the music sphere!

I remember fondly when i got to meet Speed from JV a few years back on a total whim! TBH It wasn't really awkward at all lol, and it was cool to hang out with him for a few hours!

There's a number of legends that I still remember very fondly, and I do genuinely miss them. But, I know they're doing well and living their life to the fullest. And as for everyone who still continues to come around each and every day...y'all are the damn best.
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#4
Platform Racing 2 and the community definitely lead me to a lot of things. I started playing PR2 in like 2010 and I became obsessed with the game and community for quite a long time. I also didn't have internet for very long before then either so in part I was also pretty much pretty new to using the internet at the time, and meeting people, and I met a lot of people who I have good memories with. I think the group that affected me the most personally is probably the Synergy group. I love those people even though a lot of people have pretty much moved on, including myself.

Pr2 did have a pretty big influence on me for a good while, and I miss a lot of the people, and the game.
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#5
I guess spending about twelve to thirteen years (however long it is from summer 2008) in PR2, JV, Acid, etc. leaves an impact. I cannot think of specific ways it has "shaped" me (I am not too big on the abstract concepts), but I have definitely sunk way more time into it than I probably should have.

One thing I know for a fact, though, is it threw me straight into learning about the concept of Atheism (good ol' "Does God Exist" thread and other stuff), since I mainly grew up in a theistic environment (not sheltered, but it was the first time I was actively exposed to Atheists).
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#6
I joined the community a little late, end of December 2012 I think ? 2008 me on PR2 barely used the chat, English was still some kind of obscure thing for me, despite the few classes I had. So when I got back around and first heard about the forums, I was already 17 but as a school nerd finishing high school back then I had a pretty bland personality. JV and actually being social on PR2 was the starting point of a new me.

I can't make a list of people and things I discovered throughout the years, there was so much stuff happening in the community, it would take a long while to exhaustively name every single nice aspect of it. Contests, games, groups, odd threads, you name it. I'm just glad I stumbled upon this online gem one day. Met a lot of cool people (and even 2 IRL wooooo). I also developped the uncanny ability to make @bls1999 have his vacation in Canada while I have mine in the US simultaneously.. like 3 years in a row, can you imagine ?

Definitely memories that will stick around until I'm no more ^^
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#7
I remember when one of my irl friends at school told me about a flash game on Kongregate called Platform Racing 2 in mid-2009, we were 9 at the time and in the summer holidays of 2009 we'd go on eachothers' levels (mostly hotels) or just chat a lot, sometimes we'd race but we weren't super good at it really lol

After the summer of 2009 and we went back to school most of my friends apart from one, who I'll get back to later, stopped playing the game and moved on so I'd race more but also start making levels and such. I was really bad at racing so didn't rank up very fast at all Tongue It took me apparently 20 months to get to rank 17 even tho I was playing for a few hours a day usually (since I apparently wrote down when I got the hats and what rank I was when I got them) so a lot of the time was probably used making levels and playing them

In 2011 I realised I could play PR2 on this other site called Jiggmin.com which unlike Kongregate didn't have adverts, I tried to make an acc but since I was 11 I got insta-COPPA'd so I decided I'd come back in 2 years when I was 13 (this is also why I never used just the name Camer999 without tildes or whatnot, cos the plain Camer999 name was locked in this COPPA'd acc)

When I was 13 I got quite ill and so had to be in bed all summer then I remembered about JV, 1 day before I had to go back to school Angry lol. I was 13 for the whole summer so I could've joined a bit earlier although given the V4V drama happened at the start of the summer maybe it was best that I didn't

I posted loads on JV maybe like 30 posts a day at points and I didn't get get overdrive it just got stuck at 99.9% on all of them for days even tho I did it for quite a bit on end somehow Ringstaart kept it I am still mildly annoyed at him and JV for that since idk why it didn't give it to me Confused and somehow my friend got it even tho he didn't post as much

My friend who still played PR2 was on JV as well you might know him as chma or "mango sundae" guy lol (he's told me it's not a mango sundae but that's what ppl know it as). We'd sometimes try to co-host contests on JV altho I don't think they were all that successful since PR2's popularity had deffo declined by that point and he too had mostly left by some time in 2014

Since I joined JV on 2nd Sept 2013 it was kinda late into its life so a lot of the well known names were only a bit around or had already left. Jiggmin wasn't active at all apart from the occasional barely finished project that'd get scrapped (PR4, Luna, Futurism).

There were some great moments I do remember from JV though, one of them was the peek user reviews thread where some people would go on this free "website user testing" site and then upload the review to the thread, since the reviews were free they were really bad and a good laugh. One of the reviewers even stumbled across the thread where we were laughing at the reviews and they were dead silent and then backed out of the thread, I wish I still had the recording of that one cos it was super funny, I think the peek site is dead now tho anyway.

JV also was the 1st place I saw lots of diff types of ppl on and ppl who were fans of diff things, a lot of these groups of people who were fans of certain things I'd only heard about from the YT comments section and the YT comments generally called ppl from these groups of fans disgusting and evil and so I just believed them and that mindset kinda got embedded in my head, but then when I saw ppl from these groups of fans on JV they seemed nice and such and I was very confused because the YT comments told me these people would be evil and the worst but it turns out that they weren't and that the groups of fans overall weren't inherently evil so JV taught me that which is very good

On the 30th of July 2015 I got up like any other summer holiday day to go on JV, but on that day it wouldn't load since there was a problem with cloudflare. I decided I'd check back later when it was fixed. It was never fixed. JV was dead and with no warning whatsoever, everyone we had talked to everything we had done, talked about most of the records of the experiences were just lost in one night with no warning so no backup could be even cobbled together. It was at this point I stopped playing PR2 because I was sure it'd die with JV or not too long after

After a week I remembered something someone had once said in a thread, that there was a JV subreddit page, I decided to go there and await any possible news/revivals. After a couple of weeks another site called Acid Forums was put up to be the successor to JV. Since this thread is about PR2/JV I won't go into detail here but it essentially never could be the same as JV and many people moved on after a year or two. There was a site called Freegoose (Still waiting on that $6.50 bill to be minted) that confirmed Jiggmin didn't die or whatever but that he now had a wife and that's probably a reason why he was really inactive. I did meet someone from JV on AF though who will come into the story later

After being rather inactive on AF for a while since early 2018, sometimes I would go back on YouTube and watch Jiggmin's old videos or ones about his games. One day on the 11th of Feb 2019 I was watching this video called "Broken Jiggmin Games Gameplay" and I saw a comment by bls who I remembered from JV, I wondered if he had any videos so I went to his channel and saw "Motley Monday Revival 12" and I thought "Wait? Someone else (bls) is making Motley Mondays?" and I was surprised PR2 was about still and that there was another forum called "Jiggmin2" (this one). Even better, PR2 was getting updates even over 10 years after release. This made me come back to PR2.

I hadn't really been active in Discord before but joining here made me a lot more active in Discord overall. My friend I talked to through AF we'd talked through steam and then through discord, he showed me a game called Super Animal Royale and I still play that game loads now honestly a lot more than PR2 at this point, so technically the reason I play that game even is because of JV and because of PR2!

So even almost 12 years after 1st playing PR2 in July 2009 it's still impacting me as a person and the communities even outside of JV that I find and such and I do feel that JV has overall been a positive experience to be a part of and to continue to be a part of even until now and in future
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#8
(7th May 2021, 9:54 AM)Camer the Dragon Wrote: I posted loads on JV maybe like 30 posts a day at points and I didn't get get overdrive it just got stuck at 99.9% on all of them for days even tho I did it for quite a bit on end somehow Ringstaart kept it I am still mildly annoyed at him and JV for that since idk why it didn't give it to me Confused and somehow my friend got it even tho he didn't post as much

My friend who still played PR2 was on JV as well you might know him as chma or "mango sundae" guy lol (he's told me it's not a mango sundae but that's what ppl know it as). We'd sometimes try to co-host contests on JV altho I don't think they were all that successful since PR2's popularity had deffo declined by that point and he too had mostly left by some time in 2014

As always, whether you want it or not, I'm glad to help you with the visuals Tongue
(I thought I had the screenie of both you and Ringstaart at 99.9% but I can't find it lol)

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#9
(7th May 2021, 10:58 AM)TRUC Wrote:
(7th May 2021, 9:54 AM)Camer the Dragon Wrote: I posted loads on JV maybe like 30 posts a day at points and I didn't get get overdrive it just got stuck at 99.9% on all of them for days even tho I did it for quite a bit on end somehow Ringstaart kept it I am still mildly annoyed at him and JV for that since idk why it didn't give it to me Confused and somehow my friend got it even tho he didn't post as much

As always, whether you want it or not, I'm glad to help you with the visuals Tongue
(I thought I had the screenie of both you and Ringstaart at 99.9% but I can't find it lol)

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Hahaha I think I remember gunning for overdrive at some point as well! I'm pretty sure I even had it for at least like a few hours or a day or so...but yeah Ring got to me too. But I do believe if you look for my account on the archive board (wayback) you'd see the overdrive achievement!
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#10
I had 99.9% on everything (the day, 7 day and 30 day ones) for like at least 5 days lol
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