Lets be clear here when you pledge on a patreon there is a bullet pointed list of x, y, and z things your getting at your pledge tier every month that the patreon creator declared themselves. Lets also look at the definition of scam: " a dishonest scheme; a fraud". If i pay my patreon pledge to a creator but the creator does not provide me x, y, and z that most definitely can be a dishonest transaction, also would be fraud if they let it continue and could be fraud the first time depending on intent. For clearness fraud: “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain”. Not exchanging x, y, and z for the money paid to you is a wrongfull transaction that resulted in the creators financial gain. Point being ther is no miss use of the term.
At this point, I feel the question has been answered - if you feel there is a potential instance of the forum being misused to obtain money from people without delivering a product, report that thread to the moderators and list your grievances there. It’s the “Flag” button.
Use the “Something Else” option, as there is not a defined option coded - but the moderators here are not just ignoring reports, as evidenced by how quickly flagged things get pruned. It is simply not worth coding in a special button, per the person maintaining forum design.
Given this, I’m not certain what else there is to be obtained by continuing the thread. Developers are obviously going to get upset because you’re using incendiary language with vague direction, which people are going to be defensive about because pretty much EVERY developer has had SOMEBODY get mad that a game isn’t out instantly or doesn’t meet their particular interests or some other complaint and immediately jump to “this is a scam.” It doesn’t matter whether that is the case with you, because it’s unfortunately so commonplace that it’s an experience they’ve all had. So they respond by defending themselves as they’ve already had to do in the past - not because their game was vaporware (though that DOES happen), but because somebody thought it was too expensive or even just didn’t like it and so they simply declare it’s a “scam” because in THEIR mind they “wasted their money.”
If you have evidence, please use the reporting function.
Honestly I think the updates and support for projects when it comes to issues should be resolved at the core of the problem which is pretty much either patron or itch io especially the questions about updates it’s like trying to resolve any issue you have to solve it at it’s core to get the best solution.
Some creators might only have links to their projects and those types of creators should be protected the most in my opinion they’re basically just investing their time in a hobby and asking for nothing in return, it takes a lot of time and courage to show projects to the internet the safer of a place they can show off their talents and projects the better.
I thought this would have been a relaxing quick read, but there’s so much text…
Hospital waits suck…
I guess i came here a lil bit later but i think mods should close the game related threads 2 or 3 weeks later if you don’t know anything about the dev (Voca Labs, and probably Bobothesecondtwo) and leave one final message about the latest info you have about the game. And stop supporting them if they don’t drop any info after a while.
Closing threads like that will just cause the vast majority of projects here to die en masse. There’s plenty of projects that have either finished or stopped development for various reasons, but they still see new players whenever somebody bumps the thread saying how much they enjoyed it. I always leave the projects tab sorted by most recent post, and there’s a lot of older games I’d never have even heard about had someone not replied to the thread months or even years later.
I won’t harp on too much about the payment side of this since most of what I think has already been said. It’s up to you to decide where you want to spend your money, and if you can’t even check how long it’s been since the last Patreon post before subscribing then you haven’t got much ground to stand on when you complain about not getting anything out of it. Sure it sucks when people stop updating it but leave the Patreon open anyway, but that isn’t an issue for Weight Gaming to deal with.
Well in my case i checked about the game weeks before release (fill me up), i payed for the suscription, got the game and then i stop the suscription, so there’s no problem for me.
And bumping for me is meaningless because most of the time if you want to leave your feedback or your opinion it’s better if you do it in the dev’s patreon, and with abandoned projects it will keep them up for a few days and then it will go back to it’s place.
About closing the thread, i still think it’s necessary, it just brings drama and issues to the mods, that in this case are not related to this forum.
I appreciate what you’re saying. You’re not wrong in some of your assessments but one thing closing a thread does is stop all engagement with the thread and game period. No questions, no feedback, no game help, troubleshooting, general geeking out about something and sharing your love for a project. All these things and more immediately stop when you close a thread. Also, “closing a thread” in this case would not stop users from view or accessing the thread. Only out right changing/deletion of the posts or overall thread would stop people from accessing links.
Protecting users from malicious content or intent is something we do as is, by stopping bots, spam, bad links etc. Having a blanket generalized way of handling of threads that have “gone stale” will serve to hurt most users in the majority of cases and make it harder to interact with and find games. Rather than protecting them from the fringe malicious outliers.
For me personally it’s a tricky issue on this site. The reality is certain individuals have used this forum to scam people and were protected to an extent, Vocalabs being the main culprit from personal experience.
On the other hand there are some amazing devs on this site, bladerune and tiger being two that stand out who are upfront about their projects and keep people in the loop regardless of its good or bad news and it’s no surprise that their threads are drama free.
I’ve seen people post on here, create a patreon, make a few updates to attract interest then disappear for months taking peoples money under the guise of developing a game that they have no intention of actually working on. It’s predatory behaviour and when people have taken to this forum to warn others about these said creators the creators tend to be protected and there’s no level of accountability.
It’s all good and well saying its a patreon issue but patreon posts are locked until you pay the fee and warning others on this forum saves a lot of people from losing their cash. Yes it may be $5 dollars but that adds up with enough people.
I have to admit theres a fine line. Bobo for example i don’t put in the same category as Voca as the guy just seems to be poor at communication. Closing down threads could be damaging for the forum but it’d be nice to see some devs who are clearly taking the piss to be held accountable. That accountability might be having all patreon/itch links being taken off their threads or even a warning of some sort at the top of the thread to let users know the current situation.
On the other side from a personal suggestion this could work both ways seeing devs who are active and well trusted being rewarded on the forum (having a star next to the thread to highlight or even having the thread bumped to the top every now and then). Just ideas.
Isn’t that the same as being a curated project? Because we already have that.
This kills the forum in days
What I feel like would be nice thing in this day and age of monetizing everything is just that creators would think little more careful when it’s the right time to put on some sort of tip jar and in what form. Sometimes you see projects where it feels like the Patreon page is the first thing they have set up. There are lots of project that has died from natural causes pretty early and thus I would like that creators would wait some time before putting up that tip jar and see if the project they have takes some wind under it’s wings.
If closing threads that actively take money without providing any updates or feedback for more than 3 months (or in Voca’s case an entire year) “kills the forum in days” then this forum shouldn’t exist.
If you’re collecting money from people, it’s perfectly fair for them to expect at least a monthly update. It literally takes 2 minutes to log into a patreon and type out “hey guys, work is still on-going!”
It’s ridiculous how Voca’s thread is still open and doesn’t have any disclaimer that the project has been abandoned. At this point the site has literally helped him grift several thousand dollars this past year while not even typing 1 update, much less providing any content.
If a dev can’t handle 1 monthly update to their paying customers then they aren’t the type of person that’s ever going to finish a project anyway. Ridiculous to defend grifters like that. Unreal.