And one more story, on a more personal note. This one is about me being a cocky idiot and Rol instantly seeing through my false game.
Ironically, the fact that Rol so perfectly spelled out my own thoughts most of the time when it came to Nintendo's success (or lack thereof) led to me taking a long break from this website - at least in terms of posting. I would always lurk and enjoy his posts and the conversations, but I would hardly post. Well, that was one of the reasons.
The other reason was that I was ashamed. Back in 2007 I was the one who wrote the press release for this website when the Wii overtook the Xbox360 in sales. It was a huge hit, even the New York Times quoted us! It really made VGChartz explode in popularity for quite some time and more press releases and articles would be the number one story on yahoo.com in the following years. This site was big back then, and I was one of the reasons behind it! I was proud of myself... and full of myself. I even got to write a monthly article in the biggest German Nintendo magazine (N-Zone) at the time, with VGChartz branding and all.
Unfortunately, I was only a cocky teenager and I didn't deserve that success at all. I neglected my responsibilities as a moderator for this site. I neglected my responsibilities as the "head of the PR team" (yeah, cocky title, huh?). And I was ashamed. So I stopped posting, but couldn't keep away from this site forever. Rol's posts were just as brilliant as ever and so I came back with an alt account and posted under that name.
Nobody noticed, except for Rol of course! He posted on my wall that I must either be a long-time lurker or an alt account and I'm pretty sure he knew who's alt account I was, even though he never said so. So Rol instantly saw through my false game.
But he never called me out. Instead, he supported me. When I wrote a post that gamers hadn't abandoned Nintendo, but Nintendo had abandoned its customers (back during the Wii U days) and thus Nintendo could make a comeback he quoted my post and wrote "I nominate this for post of the week". Was one of my proudest moments here!
And thus, Rol of course was the reason when the Switch was revealed I felt confident enough (despite my prior failings of character on this website) to predict that the Switch would be a huge success and sell over 100 million units (which, back then, nobody believed). And of course it was Rol who argued side by side with me and supported my arguments.
So yeah, without Rol, I wouldn't be posting this right now. I hope he's alright, wherever he is right now.